I must say I have been looking to this new feature to target the practice session so easily.

Just a small point, when you are practicing one list, is it supposed to show words from another list, see the picture, when I picked radicals it still shows new words from other lists, seemed a bit odd:

http://jacobrhoden.com/new-word.png

I agree this is a major advance in user friendliness. I can not answer your question about the queue, but I would hope that we could have that as an option, e.g. study this list exclusively or include it in a previously established program of study. Of course more choices sometimes means more confusion . . .

Although it's a work in progress, you might want to clarify the lists page a bit.

You have:
a "Study this list" button
a "Start adding words" button
and a "Study" button.

All which do slightly different things. I get it, but I very much doubt newcomers will.

I know it's long winded, but maybe something like this would be slightly clearer (although still confusing).
"Just practice me"
"Add me to your main practice"
"Just practice this section"

Also, I'd suggest changing the order:

"Add me to your main practice"
"Just practice me"
"Just practice this section"

It's still difficult if you're not clued up on Skritter, but it's definitely easier to understand and more intuitive this way.

Also from an aesthetic viewpoint, I'm not keen on the two strong lines on the practice page. At best they're ugly and pointless, at worst a fair bit distracting.

Others feel free to disagree :p.

(But well done on getting this new stuff going!)

@Byzanti: While it doesn't distract me from studying I do agree that the lines do seem out of place. I also sent some feedback about that awhile back, but thought perhaps it was just my own perception.

@xkfowboa: Yeah, that's definitely possible. The list shown on the right side is always the first list you added that word from, so I imagine you just added that word from both of those lists. That's a bit confusing though, so I'll tweak it so that it only shows the list info for the list you're currently studying.

@podster: Could you go into more detail about what you're asking for? I'm afraid I don't quite follow you. As for more options being more confusing, the theory here is actually that by choosing what you want to study, you know that much better what is going on, because you're doing what you actively said you want to do. We do need to make sure that the options available are clearly presented, though.

@Byzanti: Yeah, the list page needs some retooling now. I mainly just added those buttons so they would be there, but the existing start/stop button is cause for confusion. We're going to replace that, though, with the ability to remove lists entirely, but without disrupting words you've added from other lists. I haven't built that yet, so the list page is pretty transitory right now. We'll see if we can make it clearer until we do the next step when I get back.

Hmm, as for the lines, it's nice to have some delineation between the breadcrumbs and the rest of the practice page... We could toy with background colors and the lines themselves, though. Nick and George will be working on improving design in general, so I'm sure they'll work on that.

"so I imagine you just added that word from both of those lists.... "

Not that I mind, but I am fairly sure that word is not on the list I was supposed to be studing, I picked the radical list, so there shouldn't be two word radicals yes?

I also saw a stray word - I was studying "Body Parts" and "大" showed up:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jww1066/4461771619/

As the right-hand pane shows, this was originally added from the "Clothes" list, and is an old character which was due for review.

James

P.S. 大 is not in "Body Parts" as an individual word, but it is part of a two-character word, 大腿. I imagined that "study this section" would only show me words in that section, not component characters of those words. I have "Also Add Characters When Adding Words" turned off.

James

In targeted practice, if you select a new list, do the words also get added to the main queue or not? What if you click "start adding words" then click targeted practice?

Another problem, which seems to be related to the reading problem I had recently: I have studied everything in "Body Parts" except the pinyin for 腕. If I study "Body Parts", it gets to the end and complains that I need to add more vocab, but never adds the pinyin for that character. In the list viewer, the "P" cell stays white.

I'm trying an experiment now where I delete 腕 from study and then try studying that list.

James

Looks like deleting it didn't help, I had to manually add that character to my queue to get the pinyin.

Byzanti, it's currently set up such that targeted practice on a list activates it for adding when practicing all, yes. Clicking "start adding words" activates it but without immediately taking you to practice it. The way these work probably needs some rethinking while we're designing on them.

James, you're probably right about how the component characters thing should work in section study mode. I will think about how we can set that up. It may be more complicated than is feasible, though.

I'll add that last-pinyin-not-adding bug to my tracker; shouldn't be hard to reproduce and fix. Thanks!

I have a question about the new practice modes and the "characters learned" number on the progress page. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Skritter marks characters as "learned" when you get them right after some threshold (maybe 12 hours as I recall), and doesn't mark them as "unlearned" until you get review them and get them wrong. If you never review the character, it will never get marked wrong and so will still be considered "learned".

Now, let's say you study a series of lists, one list at a time, where the lists all have different characters in them. When you finish each list you stop studying it and move on to the next list. I would guess that by doing this you would avoid reviewing old words and so your "learned" number would be much higher than it should be.

I ask because I did something like that today and my "learned" counts jumped way up.

James

Yes, that would happen. We really want to encourage people to study everything most of the time, which is why we'll be adding an enhanced view of items that are currently ready (and a graph to show when items will become ready) on the practice selection page, next to the big button. So you'd always be able to see that those characters were due.

If you did remove the list entirely from your study, then those characters wouldn't be due any more, but would probably still count as learned. Or maybe not; Scott hasn't finished the total list removal system yet, so I'm not sure if it will decrease your stats like that.

Hi Scott,
Sorry I was not clear. What I wanted to say was well addressed by Byzanti in the subsequent post. What I meant by confusion was confusion about the interface, not confusion in learning the characters. There are probably lots of permutations that a user might in theory want to try, but a newbie would have the feeling of walking into the cockpit of a jumbo jet after just having learned to fly an ultralight plane -- too many buttons. As Byzanti said, things that we more experienced users "get" would probably baffle a new user who is not familiar with the Skritter methods available. What I meant by "have that as an option" was in reply to the original post, where an unwelcome word crept in from another list. I think maybe this is what is meant by the "start adding words" button (or "add me to your main practice," if you will). I haven't actually tried using these buttons yet, so please forgive me if I have misunderstood what they are actually supposed to do.