Okay, major new feature! You can now study a single list on its own, or a single section on its own, as opposed to studying everything at once as before. If you go to the vocab pages, you’ll see shiny new green buttons you can click which will take you to a practice page for a list or section and it will let you use the same exact scheduling system for the given subset of words. This also comes with a new practice navigation page, where you can view recently studied lists and sections. You can check it out at http://www.skritter.com/practice. Here you can, at a glance, see what you’ve been studying recently and quickly choose what you want to work on.
This is the first of many steps being taken to streamline the way you choose what to study. As we’ve mentioned many times, users often trip over the existing vocabulary choosing system, so we’re moving away from it. By and large, you will be able to do the same things as before, and more. We’re going to be doing this step by step, so for the now consider the site in a transition phase as existing pieces will be phased out and replaced.
One thing in particular we’re replacing is cram mode. There is no more ‘cram mode’ that you switch to and from. We still have cram lists, but those are going to be removed later, in about a month or so. We’ll migrate all those lists to custom lists, so no one will lose any data. This will reduce complexity, so we only have one kind of vocab list. Until they’re migrated over, you can choose to use cram lists with the new system from the cramlists page: http://www.skritter.com/cramlists.
But before we move on to the next phase of the vocabulary system overhaul, we’re going to focus on polishing and improving list and section study and the practice navigation page. First we’ll make sure all the bugs are ironed out; it is not as tested as we would have liked, but since I’ll be on vacation next week, we wanted there to be enough time to fix any major bugs before I left.
The practice navigation page in particular is going to get a lot more work done on it. Nick and George are going to work on improving the design, but the layout should remain largely the same. And when I get back, I’m going to add more features to it, including the ability to remove lists from study, seeing at a glance when words are coming up in the future, and adding the ability to page through all the lists and sections you have studied (right now you can just see the first few).
So let us know what you think of the new organization of things. We’ve still got lots to do, but we’re hoping just this much will go a long way toward making just choosing a list to study a lot more intuitive, and make it clearer what is being studied. Let us know what you think!