Audio Feedback for *Write the Word You Hear*?

[mircealungu]

I've just done this following exercise:

All I could think about was siger as an answer. The feedback was "almost there" (or similar...) but it did not help; because I kept thinking that the word is right, but the spelling is a bit different... however, I couldn't think of any other spelling that would fit.

I was wondering whether for this particular exercise, the feedback could be more informative or specific? e.g.

1. pronouncing the word that I've written so I get the chance to hear the distinction between the two
2. alternatively, detecting that siger is also a word, but the word we're looking for is different and saying so
3. the thing we've discussed before: the hangman-style placeholder for the answer

What do you think @merleschoen ? @tfnribeiro

[merleschoen]

1. I don't know a lot about TTS, but I'm not sure that will be helpful in case the user writes a word that is very close to the answer. It might only make things more confusing.
2. Detecting that the user provided an actual word, but it wasn't the one we are looking for, would also be very nice, but I'm not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze. What do you think @tfnribeiro ?
3. Big fan of the hangman-style 🙋

[tfnribeiro]

I generally agree with Merle.

2. Yes, we currently don't really have a vocabulary check up for any of the languages, the only way to do it would be to ask the DB if it has seen this word, but I don't know if that would help much more than just saying that it's not correct?
3. Hangman style could be the hint, or we could just say the total number of characters.

The idea of the almost there is to get users to remove / add characters until they get a more relevant feedback (change / add / remove) or just wrong because they got too far. So maybe we could just say the expected number of characters of the final word, and that's the hint.

E.g. "The word you looking for has 3 characters".

[mircealungu]

This might be the most direct and effective hint? "The word you looking for has 3 characters".

[merleschoen]

I've implemented the hint with the character count.
It works nicely for short words:

However, for long words we will have situations like this:

I doubt that users will start counting the characters in long words to figure out how far away they are from the answer and the hint isn't very helpful anymore.
If we implement something like the hangman style, we could have consistent hints that also work nicely for long words and compounds. What do you think?

[tfnribeiro]

Yeah, I didn't think about that counter-example but I think it's a good one. I think the Hangman hints then might be the best way to go, though we have to consider how to handle the user input.

• Should we stop them from writing a longer word if the hangman is 5 max length?
• Should it be an input field or more a keypress interaction that either fills the bar or shakes it if the character doesn't exist?

[merleschoen]

I've implemented a very basic version of hangman, just to get a feel for it.

I like how neatly this helps to spot typos. Here, the answer is groupe, but I wrote groube:

I think we need to think about both usability and how much of a hint we want to provide. I like the idea of shaking the input field when the character doesn't exist in the word, but aren't we risking of turning this into a guessing game then?
Then again, providing the number of characters already gives away a lot.

[tfnribeiro]

Well, my guess is more that if they see the hangman they have used one hint, so it's kinda like either they get it, or they don't and they would have a wrong outcome anyway, so we might as well help them all the way?