Lists in the old system did not handle change well. Our original vision was for lists to be for the longer term things. Textbooks that were printed were the main use case, or lists for classes that would not change. But for quickly adding a couple words to a constantly expanding list of technical terms, or just words you pick up day by day serendipitously, it just did not work well. Editing a section involved finding the list, choosing a section, loading up the entire section for editing and going to the bottom to add the one or two new words. And then, when you were done editing the list, you still had to edit the list settings to make sure those words found their way into your studies! This required understanding how exactly Skritter takes words from lists and adds them to My Words. All in all it added up to a lot of inconvenience if you were trying to edit a list frequently.
This is where the queue came in to fill the void. We made it super easy to add to the queue, either with the built in list editor or through any number of services and tools such as MDBG or the bookmarklet. And there were no settings to change; you simply added the word to the queue and it would get studied eventually no matter what.
But it lacked all the good things about the list system; in fact the queue and the old lists were polar opposites in terms of abilities. Queues were easy to add to, lists were not. Lists could be controlled and organized, queues could not. Words added to the queue eventually got studied, but words added to lists only got added sometimes if you weren’t careful. And you could have multiple lists divided up into sections for organizing your words, but you could only have one massive unlabeled queue.
So the new lists were built to combine all the good things about the queue and old lists and banish the bad. When you add a word to a list, it will get added as long as you are studying the list, just as it would have if you added it to the queue. With the new Quick Add feature, you have the choice to either quickly tack on a word or two to an existing list or take the time to edit the entire thing, moving and removing words as well. And you now have the choice to categorize and sort the words you add into multiple lists, or simply leave the defaults as they are if you prefer. It works for you no matter how much or how little you want to organize.
The list settings are also now much more powerful. Previously when you chose to skip a section, it would only prevent additional words from being added. Now, it also removes the words from those sections. This way whatever your list settings are, you can be assured that those are the only words that you will end up studying. But even if you do end up removing words through this feature, they can just as easily be added back.
Because the new lists are aiming to be the best of both worlds, there is no longer a separate queue, which many people once relied on heavily. Our goal was for lists to be just as quick to add to and easy to use as the queue of old, but since the release of this new list system we have been called upon to make quick adding, well, quicker. We’re currently formulating some ambitious plans to settle the concerns that have been raised recently, and I’ll be getting to work very soon implementing these changes. If you’d like to join the discussion, please feel free to jump into the forum or contact us with your thoughts. Your feedback as always is valuable to us!
By the way, we’ve just sent out the Skritter September newsletter. Check it out for some details about the man behind the legend, Chris Clark.