So I know you guys are always hard at work on the backend and practice page, and have plans for the website as well, but one thing that continually frustrates me is this:

The thing I do most often besides practice (okay, and maybe read the forums), is edit my custom lists, usually just adding a quick word or two, and sometimes more substantial adding.

It's possible I'm missing a better way to do this, but usually I have to enter skritter.com/vocabulary through the "awesome" bar, then custom lists, then "your lists", then find the list name and click, then advanced, then not edit but the explanation next to "edit"..... *phew*

I thought a while back where you had "lists currently being studied" directly listed in the vocabulary page was much faster/nicer, though i remember that the page was too crowded as it had the textbook lists on the same page, etc. (i think, it's been quite a while)...

basically, please make it easier for me to get to my lists and edit them. compared to adding a new list or browsing other people's lists, this is much more commonly accessed, and edit even appears 2 entries under "delete".. I mean how often am I going to want to "delete" the list from the advanced tab?! :)

sorry for the rant, just because this is probably my current #1 problem with what I will readily recommend as an awesome service!

peace.

sorry one more thing about adding... yes i am a terrible person, etc..

every time i save a list, the page with: "Do you want to activate/publish" with the two checkboxes...

my problem with this is that often I already have it activated, which is confusing with the unchecked activation box, and I would really just rather not be asked anything at all (especially if already activated), if I want to publish later i can clearly see the option with its explanation on the advanced tab i had to find to edit it :)

maybe it just seems like it is designed with the idea that a user will only add a long list once, then choosing to use and possibly publish it from then on, whereas I use some of my lists almost like queues that I can keep better track of. so maybe it's just me and misuse of the system :)

thoughts?

Hobbes isn't the terrible one, Calvin is. For active lists you can click the Active Lists tab and then click on the list directly. You still need to hit Advanced then Edit but it does take one or two less steps.

Yeah, I think the publish page could use some work. From some of the published custom lists I don't think people understand the difference between a published an unpublished list (maybe rename it to "Share this list with other Skritter users" or some such).

These problems are actually pretty high on our list of things to do :) A month or two ago we all sat down and thought about and talked about the whole vocabulary system in general, and now we have a bunch of changes that are coming up.

For one thing, we're going to have a practice navigation page, so when you click practice you'll be given options on what you want to study, and shown all the lists that you are currently studying. You'll be able to choose things like, study everything (how it works by default now), study one list, study one section, or just some words pasted into a textbox right on that page. Since this will show you the lists you've worked on, this will probably be a faster way to get to your list than navigating through the vocabulary tab.

As for the list editor, that will come a bit later, but the plan for that is to make the list editable from the list page itself, rather than having a separate tool for doing so. So you'll be able to browse to the section you want to tweak, click a button to edit it, and the table of words will become editable. And we'll be replacing the current add word widget with a list editor widget which will have adding words become a one step, rather than two step process (no validating words and adding them separately).

So in the end, you should be able to tweak your lists like this:

Go to practice navigation page
Choose list
Choose section (or add section and choose that)
Edit words

Which would replace the current process of:

Go to vocabulary navigation page
Choose custom lists
Choose my lists
Choose list
Choose advanced tab
Click edit
Wait for list editor to load (can be so long I know)
Edit words
Save changes

So all in all, a much shorter process!

As for the page shown after editing, yeah, that would probably be best shown only when the list is brand new, rather than being edited. That shouldn't be hard to tweak. Will do so!

cool well thanks for the response and I look forward to faster list-editing in the future :)

@2shanghai: yeah, I knew about the active lists thing but it seems counterintuitive to click on the practice page to edit my lists when there is a vocabulary page I can click on first :) I usually edit the lists when I'm NOT practicing because I'm doing something else, encounter words, or just want to add a bunch that I have saved on my phone or whatever.... but you are right it is a bit faster right now.

Hobbes, excellent points, agreed.

I have a usability request. I think it *might* be fairly straight forward for you guys to implement too.

I would like to see character / word frequencies listed when I practice. It probably shouldnt be visible right there on the practice page, but I would love to see it in that little popout help page where you can lookup words on nciku etc..

I would love to see both character frequency and word frequency. Word frequency might be more difficult to find though I am not sure.

Looking around on the web there seem to be a lot of sources for such information, although they probably all slightly disagree depending on what sources they compiled the statistics from.

I would love if this was on skritter if only for the most common characters.

One page I found is this one just as an example:
http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

The information should be pretty static so not require much computing power.

okay i'll throw another one in that i may just be missing on the new page...

if I mouseover the word it tells me some stats about when I forgot it or whatever but I don't see where this is available for each character (it just says 'character details' as an unhelpful tooltip)

I liked looking to see if I had studied the character in another word and how ready it was for me to practice, especially on characters i got wrong or wasn't sure about.. any chance this will make it back in?

I've put those features on the list; they are good ideas. We already have frequency lists for words and characters assembled. It's not at the top of the priority list yet though.