Trial and Error

Tracie Davis — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 11:00:31 +0000

This weeks blog post is mostly about editing and/or deleting a word or word list. First off let me start by saying yes you can delete a word or a word list by simply swiping left to right on the word or wordlist you want to edit or delete. You should then see a delete button appear on the right hand side of the row, tap that and you should get a confirmation that it has been deleted. We chose this approach because in my head I thought it to be an obvious universal since that is how you delete an e-mail on your phone. Boy was I wrong, I guess in hind sight of coarse it made sense in my head but that doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination was it as obvious as I thought. There are so many reasons now why I realize how naive I was in this approach. Not that it is not an acceptable way to handle the action but I needed to have added a tutorial letting my users know how to use all features of Spelling Monster. Not just assume that they would just know. This will be something that will be addressed in the not too distant future. I would say the only benefit to this was being able to interact with some our parents out there when they e-mailed to ask how to edit and/or delete. This being the case because not only would they ask how to edit or delete. More times than not they have made suggestions which we try our best to include in our app. One example being a choice between upper and lower case letters. For our parents that go to www.spellingmonster.com I have added this to our FAQ page until we come up with our solution.

Second part of this blog post is… So we got the ever dreaded 1 star rating from one well two of our parents. The issue for me is I wish there was a way I could contact them directly, not to argue why with them but to get more info so we can make our app better. The issues? The couple concerns I read was in our free version. We had a full ad at initial launch. We did research found an ad company that had COPPA compliant ads tested didn’t have any issues on our couple devices and no problems, but a parent noticed that one of the ads loaded was for a non age appropriate game and gave us 1 star, I understand being upset I would be as well. I just wish they contacted us and gave us a chance to rectify the situation. We have since removed the ads completely in our free version. So I hope this parent gives us another chance but I know this is unlikely. Our other issue that needs to be fixed. To one parent it appeared that the free version had no actual games and was just a plug for our paid version. They downloaded our app passed our ad at initial launch. Added there words to choose the first game the text balloon comes up saying that game is a premium game, ok so I have to assume now annoyed mildly that go to the next game and… another premium game. They don’t make it any further, by now their as I would be, annoyed, enough to say forget it and assume that all the games are like that… So as a result we are working on a new way to display our games so it is more obvious as to which games are, um active we will say.

At the end of the day we want Spelling Monster to be the best we can make it. The best way to do that is listen to our user base. So please feel free to contact us directly at info@spellingmonster.com with any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns. We love to hear from you.

New games and Updates.

Tracie Davis — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 18:23:10 +0000

I really don’t have much to write about this week. Though that doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work. Well what have you been doing you may ask? We have been working on a few different things lately, two new games, having a uppercase and lowercase option, and a difficulty option by request of several users. We have had a few inquiries about our teachers version. So we have also worked that back into things after putting the teachers version on hold for a while. We have also been discussing adding some type of tutorial for first time users and after updates with new features.
When I’m not obsessing over black out bingo, one of the two games we are working on is a baseball type game. Simple game play just like the others making the main focus the letters and words. Pretty much a ball with a letter in it, swing if its the correct letter to spell your word get a home run if not you get a strike and loose a star. An just like the rest loose three stars and you will have to start again. The second game, we are still toying with a few ideas so I will keep you posted. A friend of mine that uses Spelling Monster for her son likes to use the list to call out his words to him as a mock practice test and requested making list view font smaller so more words would fit on a page. Instead of this we are also working on practice test per say. The list would randomize so the words would not always be in the same order and have a check box so you would be able to check the ones you done.
By multiple user request we added a choice between uppercase and lowercase letters. We also have had a few teachers request a difficulty setting for game play. You can access these features in settings.
For our teachers version we are still working with teachers to get everything just right. We had put things on hold waiting to see how things went with the Spelling Monster app itself.

Well this what we are working on these days. Check back with us periodically to see our progress and what we are going to next.

Spelling Monster » education

Trial and Error

New games and Updates.