July 2020 — End of Month Update
Hi everyone 👋
Fortunately, July has been another strong month.
We expanded the community tester group and opened the platform to them to get in there and break as much as possible so as to provide a much smoother experience for the public launch.
We nearly made a full July launch, but it looks like we’ll have things ready for the public come mid to late August.
So let’s get into it a bit.
Progress Report
A look at what’s been going on during the month of July in Management, Content, Community and Development at NativShark.
Management
This month we’ve brought in Canny, which is a reporting and feedback forum for us to use in our development. It allows students to post feature requests, lesson requests, and bug reports easily.
We’ve integrated it with our internal systems as well. So when we’re working on something you’ve suggested or reported, you’ll be notified of the progress made in development on that feature or lesson.
Additionally, we’ve begun using it for our own internal feature and lesson planning. For example, if you take a look at “lesson requests” now, there’s a good many of them and we’re updating their status as they move along the publishing timeline.
We implemented Canny just before we brought on the community testers and I must say, it’s worked quite well. We’re very happy to have it and it’s made the reports received from testing much easier to work with and track, especially because it links to our internal backlogs so easily. When we update the status of the task internally, it is automatically reflected in the Canny post status.
It’s really nice to have what’s being worked on out there. If you’d like to, you can take a look at it here: https://feedback.nativshark.com/
We’ve three public boards:
Our discord community has an integration set up as well that posts the feature request and lesson request reports directly to the feedback channel. After public launch, we’ll be handling our changelogs through Canny as well.
We really are working to build a platform that people will love, use and learn from. I believe that requires direct feedback from those paying to use the platform and being responsive to said feedback as much as is reasonable.
The response and helpfulness of the testing community already has shown this to be true. Thank you to all who are a part of that group!
Just yesterday, Niko and I filmed a video with the media team where they interviewed us about why we’ve made NativShark, our plans for it, and how it fits into language learning.
It was pretty fun to make and I’m looking forward to when Chengaiz has the edit of the video done. We uhh... Ended up talking for nearly an hour :P He’d ask us one question and we’d have a 20 minute answer. I suppose we just have a lot to say. I imagine he’ll have fun editing it.
If it goes well and if the community would like it, we’re open to starting a series of videos about NativShark, Japanese and language learning.
Due to COVID, we did it all remote as well. Chengaiz acted as a remote director and interviewer, and so as to avoid as much contact with anyone as we could, we filmed it out of our studio apartment.
Here’s some photos —
Good times.
Content
The content team has accomplished all their “what’s left” tasks as per the June monthly letter, which is great news.
All Phase One core content is in.
They finished this past week, and have since been working on helping make things more clear based on tester feedback while also writing “Lesson Cards,” which are short pieces of info that show up during a Unit to help explain and give context to certain aspects of learning.
Additionally, they’re working on Using NativShark articles, which help explain parts of the NativShark platform, whether that be about our Tools, Process, Logistics of learning, or the team itself.
With the time that’s left from now until launch in August, they intend to work on potentially a couple of Extra Credit lessons for Phase One, and perhaps more importantly, the first few units of Phase Two. Niko has said he’d like to have 5–10 units of Phase Two ready just after launch.
We’re working to get a consistent publishing schedule in place for Phase Two units. Such that if one were to start Phase One at launch at the standard pace, they would never be ahead of the content team as far as new content goes.
Really exciting stuff this month from the Content team, and I know they can’t wait for all of you to get in and start using it. They’re craving feedback, I can tell 😃
Community
We’ve made a couple changes to the layout and organization of the Discord server.
We intend to have your Discord account be able to be linked with your NativShark account. This will give NativShark subscribers access to special channels, as well as the ability to easily share things like your stats and streaks in the future.
We’d also like to bring in the ability to use chat commands in Discord to bring up lesson summaries and things like that to make it easier to share and discuss your learning journey with fellow students.
So certainly stay tuned as we improve that Discord integration with NativShark.
Development & Design
As I’ve mentioned above, we grew the tester community to around 20 members this month and have had them in the platform and using it for just over a week.
As expected, initially there were some pretty intense bugs with the system. Once spotted by multiple people, though, we could reproduce them locally and get them fixed.
Over time, the initial bumps were smoothed out and things are coming along well now. At first, Jacob was coding like crazy and fixing things up while the rest of the dev team was still working on final touches to a couple crucial UX features. Things like a guided tour that shows when first viewing something new that we’ve nicknamed “Overlay-chan” in the company.
After about a week and a half of testing with the community, we’ve put a pause on it so the dev team can catch up. About a week before public launch, we’ll have them back in again to help us with final checks.
What remains development-wise is working through the bug report backlog, enhancing site performance, and finalizing some more robust devOps solutions.
Before I end off this section, I’d like to share some pictures of one of the experience improvements made by having the testers with us.
Here’s a screenshot of what the Today’s Studies unit progression system looked like:
Above you’ll see something that really doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you’re totally confused, don’t worry, I am too and I designed it.
Honestly, I find it humorous that this design made it all the way into the testing stage of the site, but! It’s a great example of how getting feedback from users can immensely help the design process.
Naturally, they were confused when they hit this. It’s unclear what’s going on.
What it’s supposed to be showing is that you’ve completed everything in the unit for the day. But there’s so many colors, and the completion states throughout the day don’t make sense.
After reading the feedback reported in Canny and talking with some testers in discord, I worked out a new design which is a lot more clear:
Above you can see that today, you’ll be studying Unit 23. You haven’t started it yet, so you’ve got 36 review cards to complete to “Maintain” your study progress and get your study streak badge for the day.
1 kana set to learn, 1 lesson, 12 new cards and 1 dialogue in order to make “Progress” for the day towards improving your abilities and continuing through your learning journey.
If you were to click on each of these circles, they’d give you a preview of what’s coming up.
Clicking “Study Now” would start you off straight away with your reviews.
In the view above, we’ve made progress and have 3 of 12 new cards, and 1 dialogue remaining.
In the view above, you’ve completed all your core activities for today. All your circles have filled up green, and you’ve gotten your “Progress” badge for the day. Nice!
Looking at the original and then the re-work, I think, “how did I let that original design live for so long?!” but alas, at least it was caught.
In some ways, I’m glad the testing group got to interact with the really bad design. Because by hearing their feedback, I was able to much more quickly work out an improvement.
Needless to say, I’m really looking forward to everyone being in the platform soon.
In summary / tl;dr
What’s done:
- Final checks on content✅
Ordering the units in the phase and proofreading everything.
All 725 Phase One kanji added to the platform, all 1,035 Phase One vocabulary cards added to the platform, 165 Phase One dialogues entered into the platform - Finalized the student-facing experience✅
Front end of system flashcards, front end of the Study Now experience, attach frontend of progression system and pace slider to the working backend code, updated student dashboard, improvements to the payments system, stability improvements, content update to shadow loops. - Finished server / backend code of main student experience systems ✅
System flashcards, dialogues, study now experience, progression system / pace slider, student account settings, using NativShark articles, lessons renderable. - Launched to testers and gathered initial feedback✅
Fixed initial issues discovered with the flashcard scheduler, made design and UX improvements.
What’s left:
- Last few student experience implementations ⏳
Implementing re-design to the Today’s Studies section and the My Lesson Plan section of the student dashboard. - DevOps ⏳
Testing our deployment flow. - Final tests! ⏳
Bring in the community testers again, make sure billing is working, free trials, refunds, upgrading, downgrading, etc. - Launch NativShark 1.0 in mid to later August 🚀🚀🚀
In some ways, it feels like we’ve been here before… But by far, we’re the closest we’ve ever been.
The fact that real students have been in the system and able to use it, and that most of the issues now revolve around styling and display, centering around iOS and Safari (forever the developers bane)… It bodes well for us.
We’ve really opened up our development process and feedback channels as well. We’re doing things right this time around and, as they say, third time’s the charm 🌟
See you on the inside soon! Looking forward to another great month and for all of you to join us.
Stay safe out there friends,
~ Caleb
