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Choosing what to display on the study page

Foo Choo Choon   August 13th, 2011 4:41a.m.

As I understand it, there is certain resistance against additional "clutter" on the study page.

However, demand and requirements differ from person to person. I'd personally benefit from different information shown, and much of it is already available, albeit only after clicking on the magnifying glass.

Most importantly, I'd like two bits of information to be moved directly to the study page: the character frequency and in particular the words containing the characters -- the latter feature has become indispensable to me.

I can imagine that only a minority of users would be interested in having this on their study page, so an option to change/augment the information shown on the study page would be appreciated.

Antimacassar   August 13th, 2011 6:38a.m.

What to a beginner would look like clutter may be very useful to an advanced user. I def agree that the demand of less cluter becomes less and less useful as you progress. I would love to see more cluter (of couse cluter of the useful kind!). character frequencywould be v. useful as would more advanced definitions and common colocations etc. lots of work no doubt but still...

Byzanti   August 13th, 2011 7:40a.m.

Antimacassar: I am, I suppose, an "advanced user", and your useful clutter is my non-useful clutter!

As you say, clutter isn't really a problem, it's just clutter we don't want. I do have clutter, but it's stuff I explicitly want to see (my own detailed custom definitions) and not stuff of borderline use that gets in the way (forced example sentences, forced other people's mnemonics, list of words using that character, frequency etc). So I think extra clutter should either be made optional, or make it appear after the word is written where it is less bothersome.

west316   August 13th, 2011 11:25a.m.

We asked for this ages ago. They are adamant against doing it. I also want the option to turn off and on the features and where they go.

I want to remove example sentences and mnemonics from the study page. I want to move up sample words with the given character to the front practice page.

They said it isn't going to happen. If you can raise enough of a storm to get them to add the feature, you will be my Skritter hero.

nick   August 13th, 2011 4:08p.m.

If you want to get rid of stuff on the study page, you should use custom CSS to hide it. If you don't know CSS and need help coming up with rules that hide what you want, let me know.

It becomes a huge problem for us to support many different configurations, not just in terms of supporting features, but also for interactions between features, loading times (those containing words are expensive to look up), options controlling them, and support on different platforms.

We are open to changing what elements are in the study page; in particular, we're thinking about adding the alternate character version (traditional or simplified) and the containing words. But that's not going to be possible until we do a bigger redesign session on the prompt, since the layout would have to change to accomodate things. We are working on other things instead, so those changes are simply pending.

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