What is Bleppi?

My girlfriend and her friends have been spending the past few months reviewing for the Board Licensure Examination for Psychologists and Psychometricians (BLEPP). Curious, I decided to look into how they and other reviewees typically review for the exam.

As someone who's dabbled in building personal self-learning tools, I figured that taking practice quizzes was a solid way of preparing because it requires active recall, which solidifies learning more than passive activities like reading/highlighting. I noticed that many reviewees felt the same too, with many turning drills from their review centers or online reviewers into practice quizzes that they can retake.

A tool used quite often is Google Forms, since it allowed reviewees to:

• Share quizzes with other reviewees
• Retake as many times as they want
• Automatic grading

However, I noticed quite a few issues with the flow:

• Encoding takes a while because of all the point-and-click
• There's no option to encode rationalizations when viewing the correct answers, so reviewees have to sift through their notes to recall the explanation

With these issues in mind, I decided to build a simple web application to address them, which I call Bleppi.

How does Bleppi address these issues?

When looking at how my girlfriend would encode her review drills into Google Forms, I noticed that she'd constantly be alternating between typing out the questions on the keyboard and performing the other actions via mouse (e.g. adding a question, adding an option)

Encoding Questions via Google Forms

This was the main bottleneck of the flow, as Google Forms would:

• Only allow encoding of one question at a time
• Require you to constantly switch between mouse and keyboard to encode a question

How did I address this with Bleppi? I took a page from Vim and made the encoding flow more keyboard-centric! Instead of providing a single input per question, Bleppi provides a single text area where you type out all the questions.

Bleppi provides one input for all questions

Once you're done, you click on a button to have them parsed and the application converts each of them into a card which you can use to practice later. You're then prompted to select the correct answers for each item.

Bleppi prompting you to mark the correct answers

Additionally, Bleppi allows you to add in rationalizations to each card, so the explanations are encoded alongside each question. This is completely optional though, as it may be tedious for users to provide a rationalization to every item.

Bleppi allows you to encode rationalizations

Once this is setup, you can start a practice quiz with the newly encoded cards! Just select the deck you want to practice, specify the number of cards to take and the type of feedback, and you're off to the races.

Selecting a deck to practice with

Selecting quiz preferences

As an example, under the "Immediate Feedback" mode, upon checking an answer, you're provided the correct answer and the rationalization, if encoded.

Bleppi Quiz (Immediate Feedback Mode)

What did I learn from building Bleppi?

Building is no longer the bottleneck

With the rise of AI tools, building software has become a lot cheaper. I'm now able to get to a working prototype in a much shorter period of time. AI has also allowed me to iterate more quickly.

However, just because the app is built doesn't mean the app is successful. You need to get it into the hands of the people you're building for. Personally, I'm still growing accustomed to distribution as it involves a lot of outreach and interacting with people.

My current working approach is:

1. Identify the target user - In my case, BLEPP reviewers
2. Find out where they usually hang out - I found online communities on Reddit, Facebook, and X and would post about it there

Thanks to this simple approach, I was able to get over 200 users over the course of 2-3 weeks since I initially started sharing about it. Even after the initial post, planning follow-up posts on things like feature updates or how-to's are helpful in providing context and keeping your momentum. Consistency is crucial here, but avoid spamming. This is something I'm still figuring out how to balance myself.

Keep a tight feedback loop

Posting online is a good way to place eyes on your application, but posting is a one-way street. To ensure your app is actually solving the problems of the people you're building for, you need feedback!

In my case, I would openly ask for feedback on my posts and respond to comments or messages from users of the application. I would also periodically ask my girlfriend and her friends for the same. Based on this data, I would identify new features to build or what bugs need patching.

It is essential that the feedback loop is tight. That is, the process through which a customer can reach you should involve as little steps as possible. What I currently do is I provide a contact button on the bottom right of each screen that allows users to send me an email.

Bleppi Contact Button

However, I think this could be improved further. For example, an in-app contact form would be much easier on the user's end as they can send an email to me without leaving the app itself.

Alternatively, creating a dedicated community online (e.g. Discord server, Facebook group) for the app users would be great in my opinion. Not only does it make asking for feedback easier, but it can also be used as a channel to disseminate information. I did not set this up for Bleppi at the moment as I'm currently unfamiliar with the process of setting these up and maintaining them, although I'm actively doing research on them so that I can implement these in the future.

Thank you for reading!