Comment by smallerfish
10 months ago
I gave up on the puzzle because it was too hard for my end of the week brain.
But, a couple of UX suggestions:
a) It shouldn't be possible to drop tiles on the grid outside of the word boundaries
b) Dropping one tile on another should swap their positions.
With both of these implemented, it'd make it easier to move all of the letters onto the grid and then try different options, without too much fiddling.
I agree with B but disagree with A. Allowing dropping tiles outside of the word boundaries lets you arrange your "workspace" for thinking, like placing multiple candidate letters next to the spot where they might appear in the word. It could be useful to have tiles that are dropped within the word boundaries highlighted in some way to distinguish them, though.
My UX feedback: it isn't clear that the icon on the top-right opens up some instructions. Perhaps replace with the more standard question-mark in a circle?
I liked being able to reorder them outside boundaries, but I'd suggest some additional visual cues that might address the same issue:
1. Place an outline around the tile when it's on a word square.
2. Make the quadrant backgrounds a different color, shade, or texture. That will make it easier to see which tiles belong to which quadrant.
Agree on B.
The QU have to mesh, and there is only one pair of them in the upper half. PIQUED fits.
The rest of the upper left only makes sense as SHIN, which gives SHINGLED going down on the left side.
From there, I got ELIXIR on the bottom cross-piece. ELECTION fit going down on the right.
I noticed on mobile (Chrome on Android) when I tried to drag one of the tiles on the left boundary, my browser executed the page back action instead. You should be able to override this behavior with JavaScript by intercepting the default. I think this is one of the rare cases where that would be appropriate!
Agreed with this comment and the one above it - I think the difficulty is spot on but the UI was a bit frustrating on chrome/android and I may have given up sooner but for my love of solving puzzles.
Ah, I am on iOS, which doesn't seem to have this (or I've turned it off). I'll see if I can replicate it on a friend's phone. Thanks!
Along these lines, I suggest throwing the letters in random order on the word boundaries for the player instead of forcing us to do it.
Dragging the letters to the word spots was the first thing I did to start visualizing, which was busy work I found no value in doing.
Otherwise, interesting and challenging!
> Dropping one tile on another should swap their positions.
This seems to be a common sentiment, so I plan to implement it. Thanks!
> It shouldn't be possible to drop tiles on the grid outside of the word boundaries
I've heard mixed opinions on this one. About 2/3 of people who have commented on it say that they like that the tiles can be dropped in the outside space, so they can rearrange and sort. About 1/3 dislike it (among those who say anything about it). But it's not a very large sample size, so I'll need to seek further feedback.