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Series: Concept

Objectives
  • Learn about series - a PuzzleMe™ feature to assist your puzzle management flow.
  • Learn about the picker - the series embed component.
  • Explore how other PuzzleMe partners use and implement series creatively.

Demo​

Demo of a series. The series embed component is called the picker.

What is a series?​

A series is a versatile tool to assist you with the content that you create on the PuzzleMe platform.

In their simplest form, they are analogous to folders on your computer. However, they become much more powerful when seen in conjunction with the series embed component, known as the picker.

What is the picker?​

The picker is what we call the series embed. This is a component that you can place on your website for users to interact with and access all the puzzles and games inside of a series.

The series picker contains a list of all the puzzles that exist inside a given series. You can see an example of it at the top of this page itself.

Highlights​

Paired with the picker, a series is enormously powerful.

  1. Enable users to access & track progress for multiple puzzles from a single page.
  2. Implement a consistent design across puzzles — no need to customize each puzzle.
  3. Schedule puzzle publication to a series directly from the dashboard: Just set a publish time for your puzzle, and it will appear inside the series picker at that moment.
  4. Organize your puzzles into different series: You can create a series to organize puzzles by theme, frequency, target audience, target publication, date of publication, stage of content editing - whatever you find suitable. Whether or not you use the series picker, as you go on creating puzzles, you will want to keep them organized surely - series allow you to do that.
  5. Advanced Customizations: Get fine-tuned control over the game interface - cherry-pick features, or implement a custom vocabulary based on your brand identity or popular themes.

Refer to Use Cases for examples of how others use and implement the series feature.

Use cases​

PuzzleMe users have found some exciting ways to use series. We've listed out some of these uses below to serve as inspiration as you figure out the right workflow for yourself.

  1. Organizing Games by Puzzle Type: Use series to curate puzzles of different types. Here is one such implementation by the LA Times, which offers multiple puzzle types as well as variations of the same puzzle type.

  2. Organizing Games on Variations of Same Type: You can have a variety of puzzles, based on size, difficulty, frequency of publication, etc. Here is one such implementation by the Washington Post, which offers a variety of crosswords.

  3. Organizing Games by Theme: A history-themed puzzle? Or perhaps one about the Harry Potter universe? Curate a series around specific themes that cater to a niche audience.

  4. Organizing Games by Publication: If your organization manages multiple publications that cater to different audiences (across different geographical areas, or perhaps different languages), you can use series to organize puzzles for them separately.

  5. Organizing Games Internally: You can maintain a separate series for draft puzzles and published puzzles. This can be useful for streamlining the content management flow internally.