Made a few changes to the vocabulary and study pages recently. Who doesn’t love shiny new features?
On the vocabulary options page, I added the ability to choose whether or not you want to move on to the next section manually or automatically. What does that mean? Well, it’s been working automatically thus far; every time you finish adding words from one section, it starts giving you new ones from the next one. Now if you switch to manual mode, when you finish a section, the list will be paused until you unpause it. I figure this will be useful for those who want to stay pace with their classes, and keep reviewing what you’ve already added until it’s time to move on to the next lesson.
But how do you unpause a list? Well that’s where the other new feature comes in. On the study page, you will find a new bar below the flash window displaying each of your lists you currently have chosen from the vocabulary options page, and it shows how far you’ve gotten in each of the sections. You can also toggle the mode of each of the lists by clicking the mode. And when a list gets paused, the mode displays paused, and you can just click it to unpause it, no need to go back to the vocabulary page in order to continue to the next section! Convenience, that’s the aim.
But going back to the vocabulary page, we’ve been having some issues making a good interface to demonstrate how our system works to new users. In particular, many users (including George when I first showed it to him!) automatically start adding one line for each section, which would be pretty tedious if that’s what we intended. But the idea is you have one line for each list, not each section, and you can only choose one section at a time, and it will automatically (or possibly manually now) move forward, so really you’re choosing what section to start study from, not what section to study exclusively.
To fix this problem, I’ve made it now impossible for a user to choose the same list twice, and it shows a message explaining how the system works if they try. We’re also eventually going to make a javascript based drop down menu that will show an arrow downward or highlight the lines, in such a way to show that you’re choosing a section and every section after it, not just one section. But do you have an idea of how we could make this interface even better? It’s a tricky problem, but we really want it to be clear when a new user comes in how it all works.