List system upgrades! They’re finally done and out the door. These changes have been my main focus for the last three months, and they have been well worth the time and effort. Our aims for this overhaul were three: consolidation, improvement, and simplification.
In terms of consolidation, we finally have once again just one way to add words to your studies and that’s through lists. Before we had cram lists, and up until now, we had the queue. Both of these were created to fill in gaps in the main list system, but now the lists are so very powerful that they cover all your needs, from lists for long, static textbooks down to impromptu additions to your studies. They really do have it all now. A lot of the changes made to lists were aimed at allowing them to take over for the now gone queue. As for words that you added to your queue before now, you will soon be getting an auto-generated list added to your custom lists, so you can have control over those words. Keep an eye on your email inbox for more information.
For improvements, a lot of little things and some big things have been addressed. The biggest improvement is the word popup. The old design was made some time ago, and was not fit to contain all the information we’ve added in the meantime. It’s been completely reorganized to be more pleasing to the eye and user friendly, and makes much better use of its space. We’ve also improved how you remove words from your studies; instead of deleting them, you now ban them. Banned words are removed from studies and prevented from being added from other lists as well. If you change your mind, it’s easy to “unban” these words, which you can peruse at any time from the new banned words page. Also look out for emails concerning the migration of deleted words to banned words.
And finally, simplification. The removal of the queue is part of this. But more important than that, what you study is much more directly affected by what is in the lists you study. If you remove a word from a list you are studying, that word gets removed from your studies. If you set a list to skip a certain section, any words from that section automatically get removed. And if you add a word to a list, it will get added in time without you having to change any settings. This even applies to shared lists, so if we make a correction a textbook, your studies automatically get updated.
This is just a broad overview of the changes we have made; I will be going over everything in more detail in future blog posts. In the meantime, please let us know what you think, and be on the lookout for bugs which invariably surface when so many things get shuffled around like this. Let us know what works, and what doesn’t work. Work with us to make Skritter better and better!
P.S.: The Skritter August newsletter went out a few days ago with more info about this.