USA TODAY Crossword 4+

I generally like these quick and enjoyable puzzles, thanks to Erik and Amanda. The clues are modern and sometimes humorous (without leaning heavily on celebrity pop culture). Unfortunately, I’m considering stopping my subscription if I can’t play PAST puzzles easily from the archive; that’s my primary reason for subscribing and paying. I’m even willing to spend $40 at one time on an annual subscription for “unlimited puzzle access”, but can’t justify it until the Puzzle Archive is better. I’m BEGGING developers to improve the archive by adding a simple filter to show only puzzles I haven’t done or started yet. There’s a filter option for Incomplete Puzzles, but it only includes ones I’ve actually started (not useful for me, since I do a puzzle in about 6 minutes and don’t abandon them). The current, yucky alternative: right now I have to continuously scroll down (and down…and down…) to get to puzzles I haven’t done yet. It’s January 2022 and I have to go back to May 2021; only reason I haven’t gone back further is that I’m exhausted by the scrolling. It loads 26 puzzle titles in the list, then there’s a few second lag / loading icon before I can scroll again. I set a stopwatch just to see, and right now it takes me 1 minute and 2 seconds to get back to May 2022. Even worse, once I do ONE PUZZLE, my place in the list isn’t saved and I have to do the whole scroll again. When I have to scroll for more than a minute to get to one puzzle, it completely kills any pleasure I have in doing the USA Today crosswords. Other improvements might include the ability to filter by a certain month / year, but for me, just having the list of puzzles I haven’t done yet and not having to scroll to them would help. Right now my only use for this app is doing today’s puzzle (maybe a day or two at a time, if I miss one or intentionally let them build up). So I might as well go back to free version. I think this app is worth paying for if I actually have access to the full USA Today crossword archive, and I’ll happily keep giving you my money if you make those improvements. 🙏

Ever in a quest to see if they can outdo themselves to make subsequent programs even worse than the previous, USA today’s current crossword puzzle app takes the cake. Recently downloaded it from the App Store and solved a couple of puzzles. Very limited solving options. For example, if you have a couple of letters in a word and later you add subsequent letters it doesn’t take you back to the beginning of the word for any remaining blank spaces. It takes you to the next word. When you finish the puzzle there is no button to press to check for errors so you can try and learn from any mistakes. It will show you a solved puzzle, but then you have to figure out any mistakes you made. App still requires you to be online to use. Does not retain the puzzle for off-line use. They need to look at the app for the New York Times crossword puzzles and develop something similar. Most people would be happy to pay for a reliable app that they can use off-line! It also needs more robust features such as solving for a letter, word or the entire puzzle. Unreal these guys can’t figure this out and get it right!

The app’s new solving interface is so bad, the first time I saw it I thought it was a bug. Here is an abbreviated list of its crimes against usability:

- The puzzle grid has been squished and pushed to the side to make room for an awkward column of clues to its left, which makes the grid harder to read, makes its tap targets smaller, and introduces wasted space above and below.

- Worse, this new clue column is redundant given that both the current down and across clue ALREADY APPEAR above the keyboard.

- Speaking of the keyboard, all the keys have been squished to the left in order to fit some teeny tiny navigation buttons that move you from clue to clue and letter to letter. So not only is it harder to type accurately, the user is also prone to accidentally moving the cursor while typing. Cool!

- Then, there’s an always-visible set of hint buttons immediately below the last row of letters on the keyboard. These are also very easy to tap by accident and, if you can believe it, the “reveal letter” and “reveal clue” buttons don’t even ask for confirmation before filling in the answer!!

This app breaks virtually every UI design rule in the book! It’s especially a shame because the USA Today crossword is otherwise so good these days, but the app is so terrible I stopped solving them. Would give this zero stars if I could. So disappointed.