Slide Timing, Points removal, & other suggestions

Quick background: We are a career center at a small private college, and present to a variety of students at various stages of learning - including adult continuing education learners, fast-track nurses, traditional undergrads, and students with learning differences.

We're very new to Kahoot, and so far it's a lot of fun! It's a hell of a lot more interesting than powerpoint-spewing information at people and expecting them to care, and we hope to continue using it for our office's presentations. We are testing the 14 day trial currently to see what features we would want to continue using, and so far the result is that we are going to go back to free and only use it occasionally to mix things up. That could easily change as the software develops and grows of course - the price is right, and I like supporting good companies, we just need a reason to at this point. :)

Suggestions/Requests:

Question-read Timing: Some questions are a little more complicated than others, and might take longer than 5 seconds to read before it transitions to the possible answers. I know it still shows up at the top of the screen, but it certainly interrupts your reading of it when it jumps around.
Correct Answer Screen Editing: We would really, REALLY love the ability to edit what shows up on the answer screen for each question, so that we could skip the need for extra clicks/slides/etc entirely. It's nice to ask a question like, 'Which service does the CCD NOT provide?' and then in the answer screen we can have an image of our 'about us' card that lists all our services so we can talk about them in turn. Would be 100% fine if it was a pro feature.
Slide intro: The Slides are the main reason we are trying pro, and the 5 second transition period in front of them is surprisingly frustrating. We are using the slides to talk more about the answer to the previous question, and the transition wait makes it kinda awkward if you're waiting for a photo to reference.
Back-to-Back Slides: It's fine and all to assume how your audience is going to be using a feature, but it's frankly a little insulting to literally be told we are not allowed to use more than one slide in a row. Little warning flags or suggestions on how to improve your product experience (like how Qualtrics analyzes your surveys for you) are how you go about doing this. NOT telling your users how to create their presentations in a demeaning manner.
If someone likes your product enough to want to pay you money to use it as a powerpoint replacement, that should not be a problem you worry about addressing haha.
Answer Selection: Ability for players to select more than one answer if a question asks for it, and/or the ability for players to go back and select something different if they selected the wrong thing or change their mind.
Points: We will 100% not always want to involve points in presentations, particularly when working with students who have learning differences. The ability to turn points off for whole kahoots or specific slides would be appreciated. Also, not a big fan of the point streak feature, it feels really unbalanced and unfair, particularly given that most of our presentations are informational and thus pretty easy.
These are less important, and more 'light suggestions' than requests:
Music Options: At the very least, the ability to turn off music at all. Better yet, the ability to turn music on or off for certain sections of the presentation, or for each slide. Best yet, the ability for pro users to upload or link to their own music tracks or voice recordings for use in certain slides.
Obviously, anything uploaded would need to be limited in size, but perhaps since you already allow for YouTube embedding people could link to that for music?
Different themes/branding/animations/etc: Obviously, this is the sort of work that comes later down the road, but I would definitely love to see more different types of questions and ways for new screens to animate in, etc. I might be able to think of more later, but for now one different type of question to add might be the ability to pick a picture instead of a button as an answer (What building is the CCD housed in?), or the ability to correctly match a set of answers to each other (which I think you have as a separate quiz type? So hopefully they'll merge at some point!), or perhaps simple typed answers would be cool too! That could open up doors for things like creating word clouds based on a poll.

If I think of more things, or can elaborate with better examples, I'll pop back later. For now, thanks for reading, and for creating a very fun and open product. :)

Official comment

Bryan

January 29, 2020 18:34
Edited

Hi CurryCCD!

Thanks for this. I need to ask a favor though. Our teams regularly look over our forums to inform future development. It's difficult for us to track and update our forums when posts contain multiple ideas in them. We would prefer if different suggestions were contained in their own posts. Also, if you could search for your ideas to see if it's already been suggested, it would help us to gauge demand for something if you add your vote and commentary to existing posts, only creating new posts if you can't find an existing post. We realize that improvements could be made to make this easier on your end, and we hope to make improvements in the future. But any help as described that you can provide would help us in making these things a reality sooner.

Below, I'll try to update you on any ongoings around the ideas you suggested:

Question-read Timing: There's now a post strictly about this. At the moment, we don't have any internal movement on this. We've experimented in the past with automatically adjusting display time based on question length. So we are interested in addressing the root concern about this. But there are no definite plans to add a toggle for this yet. We're continuing to monitor demand while other things with a proven higher demand are prioritized.
Correct Answer Screen Editing: You can already upload an image to the answer screen. Can you specify what other things you would like to edit on this screen?
Slide intro: I've not located another post about this. So please create one if you'd like. I believe we've made some improvements around this. But if it's still an issue for you, please add a standalone post about this.
Back-to-Back Slides: We definitely hear you loud and clear. Demeaning you via warnings is not what we want or intended to do. Kahoot!'s success has almost entirely been grassroots. So it's important to us that our services are used in a way that optimizes the play experience. Otherwise, players don't want to become creators. Offering rules and structure that encourages you to create an excellent experience is part of our offering. We don't always get it right and are receptive to feedback on this. There is already a standalone post about this that could use your input.
Answer Selection: This has been suggested already. We have no formal plan around this yet. But there is definite interest in doing something about this. We've already added an "open-ended" question type that might be useful in some similar situations. But ultimately, a "check all that apply" sort of question type is something we hope to explore in the near future.
Points: There's already been some good progress on this. You can now toggle points to be off or double on each question. You can also use "poll" question types instead of "quiz" question types. There had long been a toggle to disable answer streak. But it was removed recently due to a lack of use. There is currently a popular post asking to reinstate that toggle. Our teams are aware of the feedback there and hope to look into this soon. We have some pedagogical concerns with reinstating that toggle. But we definitely hope to understand and address the core issues presented in that post.
Music Options: We recently added a mute toggle in the top-right of the screen during gameplay. We've also recently added an option to choose between one of our several branded soundtracks. This was a premium offering. But as of today, it's now a free feature. We will also be adding a way for creators to set a default soundtrack to each game within the creator very soon.
Different themes/branding/animations/etc: In the last few months, we transitioned from different game types to just one game type with different question types. We've added puzzle, wordcloud, and open-ended question types. Images for answers is something we're seriously looking at (no definite plan yet). Custom branding/theming is a feature. But if you have any specific suggestions on what to add or improve, please check if such ideas have been suggested already and add a new post if they haven't (vote on them if they have).

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