I just got on skritter to practice. It says I have over 3000 items learned and that is absolutely not my data.

The progress page doesn't include tones too. I am clearly on chinese version.

Is something wrong with the databases? I am very worried as I would not want to lose all of my progress and current sections etc...

Help me out!

Wait... Nevermind, please delete.
I didn't notice the skritter team updated the page.

Not trying to be annoying here but it would definitely reduce panic among users if there would be a small message introducing the new page.

I do have a question though, why is my graph declining? is it due to lack of practice?

If your graph is declining, it's because you're missing items that were marked as 'learned'. The same happened to me a couple weeks ago when I missed 3-4 days, my 'characters learned' went negative for about three days because characters that had just made it into the 'learned' pile came back and tripped me up.

No, they really are screwed up. It claims I have learned more than 1000 characters in the "total" span and I have never even seen that many yet...

@Bosmon - that's counting each character's writing, reading, definition, and tone as one item each, depending on which of those you study, and which ones you've pushed into the 'learned' category. So if you've studied and mastered 250 characters in writing, reading, definition, and tone, the total page will tell you that you've learned 1000 character items.

FatDragon, I couldn't have answered those questions better myself!

Hmm, I can see why those total numbers could be confusing though. Generally you want to know how many words and characters you know, not that number x3 or x4. It would be weird if it started off showing the numbers for one of the individual parts, though, especially since you don't have to study an particular part.

This setup was the simplest way to modify the old setup so that you could see numbers for all parts (you couldn't see readings and definitions before), but perhaps the whole page needs a bit of a redesign to better display all this new information. And that stats table with total/range has confused many a new user...

And yeah, you're right helixness. It would have been good to include a message or something that explained things had been shuffled around a bit. Ah well, live and learn!

Scott:

Everything becomes clear when checking the MORE PROGRESS STATS page.

Very valuable information,

Thanks again for your great work.

what and where is the MORE PROGRESS STATS page?

I think the point lennier61 is making is that instead of using some hard to notice tabs, a link to a "More Progress Stats" page is a much more obvious prompt, like the everpresent "Click for more" on other sites...

Argh.

You guys switched to a "tabbed" style presentation but added no visual clues that there were tabs involved. The All/Writing/Reading/Definition/Tones tabs are set off in their own box disconnected from the tab contents. The tabs have no borders so it is very subtle. And the tab bar is buried inside the page below the timeframe selector so it looks like random boilerplate.

Switching between timeframes also resets the tab to All items, as does trying to change to a different week or month in the past.

As for new users being confused by the progress page's timeframe selector, I think you guys tried to be too innovative and too minimalist. Either there should be some text that prompts the user to select week/month/year, or you should explode that dropdown into a combobox so users can actually tell they have a choice. It took me about 4 months before I realized there was a dropdown there.

If a 1990's web designer made this page, they would just have the timeframe selector as 3 radio buttons for week/month/year plus a calendar dropdown to specify start date of period. Not pretty, but function is obvious.

Lastly, as mentioned above, is there really any value in presenting all the numbers added together? It seems about as useful as a dating site showing you the sum of ages of all your dates. I'd rather see an average of their ages.

"is there really any value in presenting all the numbers added together?"

I agree, the sum of all the numbers doesn't really mean anything. If you can read 10 words and write those same 10 words, In my mind you havent really learnt 20 things.

If you can read 12 words and write 8 words, you really only know 8 words.

I absolutely agree with the past two posts. The tab menu was very hard to notice and does reset when time periods are changed.

As for the numbers added together, I couldn't find the use for it besides fooling myself into thinking I know a lot, which I don't, haha.

Valid points all! Well it's clear the progress page needs more work so I've set our intern to brainstorm and implement some changes to see if we can address these issues. To summarize:

* summed up numbers are confusing/not very useful
* items tabs could be styled better
* selected tab should remain consistent when navigating about
* week/month/year drop down isn't obvious

Summed numbers ... just no. :)

The "all" category should be replaced with something that indicates the number of words/characters for which you know all of the categories for which you're studying them. That is, If you're studying writing, tones, and definitions, then you should have a count of all of the words for which you know all three of these things. That gives the most definitive indication of how much you really know.

Unfortunately those numbers are not available, not without going through your whole body of words studied and summing them up, and that would only give you present data, not what it was previously in a graph.

We've settled on a new design. Basically we're going to only have one view and it's going to have these components:

1) One big bar graph that will look something like this:

http://www.panopticon.com/assets/img/s_bargraph_grouped.png

Where each color will represent an item type (writing, reading, definition, and for Chinese, tone), showing you how many you've learned during that time period.

2) A table of retention rates, one row for each item type again, as well as a row for overall retention rate.

3) Time spent graph, same as it is now.

4) Overall stats (time spent, days studied, minutes per day) same as before.

5) Stats table breakdown, which will be like the current table (numbers for added, learned, and reviews) but for all parts (not summed; having a two rows for each part, one for the words and one for the characters).

So in this version, no summed up numbers are shown. All numbers shown are for the range being viewed. There are no item tabs; everything is shown together instead. We're still working on improving the week/month/year selector.

@scott I'm a little unclear on where calendar time is going to go, as that example graph is not a time series. That type of graph is really intended for use when you primarily want to compare the different items in each group with one another. In your example graph, that would be the regions of the world, which are easy to compare with one another visually. What is difficult visually is comparing the value in each region to the value in another group (Industrials vs. Consumer Goods, for example); you need to look left and right, ignoring the other regions, which is visually taxing.

Mostly what I use the graphs for is viewing my progress over time, and comparing the different item types to each other is not as important, although it's nice to have. That's not a problem if you're planning on continuing to support displaying item-type-specific graphs, but it looks from the rest of your comment like you aren't because you say "there will be no item tabs". What if you put a selector that allowed us to select the item types to be shown in that big graph?

Another issue is that currently we have a way to get a graph of "all items learned over time", not just "learned in this time period" - the totals rather than just the deltas. This is very important for me psychologically because it represents absolute progress. Is this going to be taken away?

James

Scott: one of the most useful graphs is the character/words over time line graph (to see rate of progress over a month, year etc). It would be a shame to see that go.

Hmm, well we tried it out but decided we didn't like that big graph with the relative values. We're going to try something else! But in all likelihood we'll have those absolute numbers much like they're displayed now. But it's pretty much in a state of flux right now, so you'll have to wait and see; who knows what the end result will be?