by mrngm | 2025-04-09 21:27:15+00:00
A few thoughts, I tried this on mobile but got a bit confused by the initial "How to play" dialog (besides that it was too large to fit on screen). The dialog says:

How to play. String together factors to answer the question.

... but the dialog doesn't pose a question! It just shows two factors with sliders, and the calculated answer, but no reason why we're sliding these two elements from left to right. I would skip the initial dialog for now, and perhaps make the "How to play" dialog very easy to reach to give a general description of the game, what is asked of the player, and how they could think about answering the question, instead of trying to explain the interface.

For the question I got ("How many people are flying in airplanes right now?"), the influencing four factors were nicely chosen, although I would refrain from guiding the player too much with (too) narrow "x - y" bands. We're looking for orders of magnitude, so you could think about sliders that also suggest thinking in orders of magnitude, say "1, 10, 100, 1000" (e.g. number of passengers on a plane), and "10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hours, 2 hours, 8 hours" (e.g. flight duration).

(Another angle here could be: how many flights and/or passengers does the nearest airport handle during a year, or how many flights/passengers do the global top 10 airports handle during a year, and how does that account for the total amount of flights in a year?). In other words: I don't think you want your players to do exact guesses using these rather precise sliders and narrow bandwidth, but hint them into also thinking in orders of magnitude.

I would skip the clicking on factors (I saw in another comment that you thought about arbitrarily mixing addition and multiplication, and their order in an earlier version, but that seems too difficult), and just give the player a few sliders and their proposed answer directly. Perhaps you can show the proposed answer directly beneath the question, start with 0, and have all sliders set to 0 (instead of the current random values) as well.

Another idea, perhaps even more intuitive, could be to give the player one (easy), two (intermediate) or three sliders (expert), without giving them hints for individual contributing factors:

- (slider 1) 1, 10, 100, 1000, ... for the rough orders of magnitude (e.g. "100")

- (slider 2) 1-9 multiplier for the chosen order of magnitude to give the player a way to say "it's more in the order of 500 than 100"

- (slider 3) 0-9 multiplier for one order of magnitude lower, to give the player a way to say "it's more 550 than 500"

Then the answer is calulated as (1) * (2) + (3). You can then tell the player if their chosen orders of magnitude were correct ("within the chosen order of magnitude"), slightly off (one order of magnitude too high or low), or too far off. Let the player decide if they want to be rather precise (with three sliders), or not.

Or even combine these ideas! Let the player choose a strategy ("guided" as you've already implemented with a couple of factors already given, or "non-guided", for lack of a better term, for those looking for an extra challenge).

Closing nit: "Share results" contains a non-existing domain.

If you need inspiration for future questions, have a look at this recent discussion [0] and linked website [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43389455

[1] https://taylor.town/napkin-math