timer is disturbing

[mircealungu]

On the words review page, timer paragraph is moving all the time because the width of the number of seconds varies, and then it moves "seconds" with it too. Sometimes when seconds are 00 the seconds component disappears completely.

Also, it should not be at the top maybe? And also, it might make sense to pause it maybe on this page. IIRC, Sandro found it confusing and we had to explain it to him.

So:

• move it at the bottom and pause it?
• rephrase to be more concise: "Exercise session duration: 3:17"?
• or merge it with the "you reviewed 13 words in 3:25min"?

also, at the same time, it's an opportunity to clarify the top message which now says:

• You still have 26 words left to revise today.

I guess it is an opportunity to introduce the spaced repetition concept? Maybe something like:

• You still have 26 words left to revise today conforming to our spaced repetition algorithm.

Also, if the button says "keep exercising" then maybe the message should say "words to exercise" instead of "words to revise"?

[tfnribeiro]

Timer

I always thought having the timer continue at the checkpoint could be a little strange, but I left it so we could see how it is. Let's make it static. I will try to put in the message and see how it looks. Maybe it can be two paragraphs one with the reviewed and the other one with how much is left.

Message

I think one of the main points that came out of the discussion yesterday is that maybe users aren't that interested in the fine-grained details of how / why words are scheduled, and rather just they are practicing their words. I think we could think about having a little Why explanation that curious users can dig deeper into. I think this design pattern would be more sustainable and could link into the idea of having a little blog where we also share the research we are doing, which also adds more credibility to the project.

It's just becomes a rather long sentence which is only "new" once. If that makes sense? If we had different algorithms maybe it would be more beneficial - but currently we are sticking to spaced repetition - so I don't think it would be a good addition.

[tfnribeiro]

Here is a preview of how it looks. I think stopping the time and keeping the message is OK. Though there is the issue of that the counter only counts the words that you have just exercised, while the timer is for the session as a whole. So say you review 7 in 30 seconds, and then you review 4 more in 20 seconds the message will read: "You have reviewed 4 words in 50 seconds."

So I guess we have two options, I either track the total reviewed words in the exercises, or we say something like you have been exercising for the total time.

[mircealungu]

True it's a long sentence. At the same time, spaced repetition is a concept everybody is impressed by. You remember even S. explained to us that his extension uses it... And he's not the first that I hear is very impressed by the concept :) But I also see how a long message is not great!

[tfnribeiro]

I didn't say we shouldn't say it anywhere. I am just saying that I feel like this is an opportunity to have some sort of get more information for users, without having to have a message that will then be ignored after the first few times a user uses it. This could also be part of the images in the onboarding. Where we can have exercises with spaced repetition!

Still a little Zeeguu blog would really go a nice way to put these little snippets of findings we have been uncovering with the development so far. Including the progress bar etc.

[tfnribeiro]

I made the change to count all the practiced bookmarks in the session - maybe that would feel nice for a user, even if they are struggling they get a sense they did practice a lot?