I think it would be even better if after writing the characters, the prompt changes to indicate the time it would take for the characters to appear again. What do you think?

I think this might clutter the screen too much. It might be useful to see Now may items you have due in the next day/ week/ month instead of just "right now".

We're thinking of putting the next intervals inside the Flash window, after you finish a prompt, corresponding to the 1-4 levels of grading. Those would appear after you'd finished a prompt, with the level Skritter has determined for you selected by default.

Those would probably be off by default, though. We can play around with them.

For the "how many items you have due in the next ", where would you want that information to go? I don't think it would go on the practice page--maybe the home page or the progress page?

The how many items would be interesting to have on a sort of "planning progress"-page. A way to set a goal for future studuy time, future prgress etc. This will of course be a good source for letting the user know which day not to put in 100 extra characters...

I think putting the next intervals inside the Flash window is a great idea. Maybe an option to display that instead of the "Good job!" etc comments?

I personally don't see any particular advantage in knowing when the character will appear again. I recognise I need to be too concentrated in the characters and the tones themselves to be able to pay attention to more things.

What I would really appreciate is having the information about "how many items to study next". I would prefer to have it on the home page, for instance on the top right side, where there is still a blank, next to where you say "you have ... items ready to review".

Besides that, it could also be useful to have the option of changing the goals for the future study, by fixing more or fewer characters (sometimes we may have more time for the study, or may prefer to relax). Now there is the option "Add Word Frequency" in the Preferences, but it is not clear how many words "from time tom time" mean (if you add the above information, the it is OK: we will be able to observe it).

I haven't used Skritter for one day and I already have almost 200 items to review! Would it be possible that the system detects that it has not been used for a certain period of time and postpones all the reviews till we are back to study? (once the first day with no use passes)
I don't know if this goes against the success of SRS...

@fmarin: Sadly, I think it does a bit...

We're currently hashing over the whole prompt interface, and whether to have time values in the 1-4 scheduling system, among many, many other things. This will probably be one of many things we'll tweak and try both ways as we move toward a new practice page.

I've put on my list of things to do some way for people to easily see at a glance what's coming up, scheduling wise. Right now the next best thing is check out the viewer.

Pushing things back just changes perception... those things will still be overdue (according to our fallible calculations) whether we schedule them further back or not. One thing that we could do that might make it better though is to try and get the scheduling to more evenly spread out items to study, so that mountains of things to review don't pile up overnight. I'll try fiddling with the settings for that.

Also, bear in mind that the system tries to find the most overdue items and gives you those first, and that items age at different rates. So those new words should show up first since they age very quickly, while the ones you have been working on for a while come up later. So it's actually more important to get the age (see the percentages in the prompt) closer to 100% than to get the number of items to review down to zero.

Well, while we're on the "number of items to review" topic, I'll have to say that our experience (my wife and I are both Skritterers (?)) is that the number seems to bounce all over the map even during a given session. I've tried to get a sense for it, but I'm really pretty baffled. It makes sense to me that the number might go up if I miss something (or at least not go down), but I don't understand why it seems to take sudden large leaps of 10 or 20 characters. I guess these leaps are usually downward after having seemed to have been stuck for a while. Do other people see this?

@skdbhunt I find the same thing. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the frequency of server-client interactions. When my crappy internet connection dies l often find that the client has not contacted the server for several minutes (and I get to repractice many words). Might be nice to get a warning a la Google docs that the connection is down.

@fmarin/scott I tell myself that practice is really the point. I can easily learn a character without Skritter but unless I practice I won't remember what I learned. Thus it is more useful to review than to learn (and forget) new words. This means, for me, I would prefer to study the overdue words that I have "learned" (according to Skritter) rather than words I have not "learned" (which is not how the system currently works - right now if I have 250 words, 100 of them quite new and 150 of them that I have learned - in both the conventional & skritter sense - the system will keep giving me the 100 I don't know meaning that if I only practice for a whileI don't get to the words I am likely to forget and I forget them). This is also likely the reason that after 20 minutes the system says I've learned +20 words, at 1 hour it's -20 words and at 2 hours it is +30 words.

@2shanghai I fully agree with you when you say that "it is more useful to review than to learn (and forget) new words". I have just found it out after these last days. When I had so many items on my queue, after just one day without using Skritter, I first was worried that I wouldn't learn new words for a while. However, then I noticed that, while reviewing, I realized I was learning them much better, going the retention rate up (a few days ago, less than 93%, today at 94.5%). Now I am not so much worried when my number of words doesn't increase, because the retention rate is going up and proving I am having some progress in the learning.

@skdbhunt I also like to be a Skritterer!!

I think the numbers jumping around might just be the flash trying to keep track of how many items are up for review locally and its calculations start to trend away from the actual numbers. Nick has been squashing bug after bug regarding the calculations, so that it happens less frequently, but I think it's still happening a bit.

What I like about the new items jumping ahead of the old items is that, during a review session, you see the new ones frequently so that while you're learning these new ones, you don't have to leave and come back in short intervals to get the most efficient studies. At first you're supposed to study items at short intervals, in a matter of minutes often times, so having them push ahead scatters them nicely across the whole review period.

To give an example, say you've got one brand new word and 15 minutes worth of old reviews. You study the new word, and then it's scheduled two minutes in the future. You do two minutes of the older stuff, then the new one appears and you've study it again, and it's scheduled two minutes later. Repeat two more times and you review the new item at 1, 3, 7, and 15 minutes, and now it is well on its way to being learned.

Now say you schedule items strictly based on when they're scheduled, rather than on age. In the above scenario, you study it at the beginning of the study session, and then again at the end. Since it wasn't seen for so much longer, there's a much lower chance you'll remember it; SRS works when you hit in the general area of the scheduled time, but for new words the window is much smaller than for longer scheduled items. Missing a new item's scheduled time by 15 minutes will make a big difference in how well you learn it (it does for me anyway) while for older items, hours or even days don't make too much of a difference, because the window is so much wider. If an item is scheduled two weeks in advance, not getting to it for a few days won't change much. The nice thing about reviewing based on age is it nicely prioritizes so that the faster something ages, the more priority it has, so you tend to get to the ones due in minutes first, then the ones due in hours, then the ones due in days, etc. You don't lose much by delaying ones due in weeks or months, but you do lose much quickly by delaying the ones that have shorter study intervals.

This works nicely in normal scenarios, but it sounds like for at least you 2shanghai, there are a ton of words being learned. I typically don't do more than 30 or so at a time, and that provides for me a nice balance between old and new. I can imagine you can get into a scenario where since you're always reviewing overdue items, you never learn anything... maybe the save me feature could work? Then you can push it all back and get to the due items over a longer period of time, during which I'd suggest not adding new words.

What do you guys think? We used to give items strictly in order of when they're scheduled without giving priority to quickly aging items, but I like the new system because of how cleanly it spreads learning new items across a single review session. It's tempting to say 'we could add an option for that' but we're also trying to push against unnecessary complications for the user interface.

@2shanghai/scott I would say that 98% of the time I really like the current scheduling method. Back in the old days when the minimum interval for a character was 10 mins I found it much harder to pick up new characters.

However, when I'm traveling or busy and I know that I'll only have limited time to spend on Skritter, I'd much prefer to review the characters I know rather than being forced to learn new characters first. I think ideally I'd stop adding new characters enough ahead of time to avoid this problem, but I never seem to quite manage that correctly.

I think there was talk of re-enabling the "Ignore" button or something like that? Basically just some way to tell skritter I don't want to worry about learning this character for a week without using the skip button (and implying that I already know the character...). In my mind it would essentially undo the addition of the character and it would be put back in the queue with all the other thousands of unknown characters...

I'm thinking of changing the kitten to prioritize overdue items before really overdue (new) items. So maybe you'd see those 500% - 150% items at the start of your session before the kitten decides it's profitable for you to take a crack at those 999%+ ones.

If you'd been reviewing regularly, there would be few "regularly" overdue items, and so you'd then see the new ones pretty quick. But if you were behind, you'd see a lot more of those that you had a better chance of getting than those that you had just started learning before.

Nick, I like that idea. If I can't practice all the new words (I don't know anyways very well) I at least want to make sure I'm not loosing old words. I know it is a bit odd to add so many words but I'm studying full time and they throw a lot of words at us and it seems that given my practice habits I end up adding once a week or so and then reviewing for quite a while until I actually learn all the new characters and then repeat.

I second that, that sounds like a clever way to do just what I was hoping for. It'll get the reviews out of the way before focusing on the essentially new characters.