[Parley-devel] practice feedback

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hi Matthias,

thank you very much for your feedback :)
This is what we were hoping for. I think you have good points and still the 
general direction we're headed seems ok, great.

Am Sonntag 09 Mai 2010, 16:47:22 schrieb matthias sweertvaegher:
> Hi all
> 
> it's this time of the year again, exams are coming up, feverishly
> starting to rush and study..
> so today I checked in to try out parley trunk and see if those nasty
> insert bugs were sorted out :) I got a compile error which dani_l
> kindly helped me out with so I felt obliged to give some feed back to
> him when asked about the new practice module ;)
> 
> I am absolutely no expert or language trainer power user, but since my
> feedback got longer than expected I decided to mail it, so why not the
> mailing list. These are actually just my notes while trying it out. So
> here it comes:
> 
> =====================================================================
> generally: i love it :)
yay :) that is what we were hoping for, being in love with the new stuff 
ourselves ;)

> 
> when starting the practice, there are 2 buttons to effectively start
> (on the bottom left and on the top).
Yes, I put the bottom one there, because it seemed to better fit my workflow 
(choose options, get to the bottom, hit start there).
The top one is part of the menu bar. Should it go?

I think this is a general problem: we don't have a very good way to let the 
user know which state he is in and what other options he would have.
This is also the confusing "close file" etc.

I'm thinking about qt creator for example, there you have a bar on the left of 
the application, with different modes, such as edit/design/debug etc...

For the latest Parley, top of my head those states are:
- welcome screen (selection of recent files etc)
- editor
- start/configure practice screen (select lessons and practice mode)
- practice
- summary of practice with the number of words you got right in a bar and a 
table containing your answers, so you can recapitulate your answers.

So the question is really how to make it clearer where we are and how to 
change to other places.
In all of these you can close the file to return to the welcome screen, which 
is the only part that does not need a file to be opened.

> 
> flash cards:
> - initial focus on continue button is missing.
added to todo

> - I like how you can use different keys for progressing to next word
> (enter) and choosing if you knew it or not (space). but you can also
> choose to always use space.
> 
> written:
> confusing image when showing answer, should be checkbox OR cross, but not
> both. I understand you would use that when you have tried more than once
> and the second answer is right.
The idea is to let you overrule the program - if it thinks you were wrong, but 
you only had a typo that you normally wouldn't do, you can change it to accept 
your answer as wrong. Maybe we should add a tooltip to make it clearer? Other 
ideas?


> 
> love the practice result!
> 
> the buttons on top are a bit confusing though: with edit, I would
> expect to edit the list I see as part of the practice result so I
> could adjust certain words which I had wrong simply because I did not
> get it literally correct because the stored translation was less
> intuitive for example.
> 
> With close, I would expect to close the practice, not the vocabulary.
> But that's probably because I am not that accustomed to the toolbar
> buttons ;) (don't use them, I guess, but in that situation, you seem
> forced)
This is the general flow again... in this case edit goes to the editor... close 
closes the document... hmm...
I think you have a good point there. Now we need an idea to either make the 
buttons clearer, or have a different way of changing the "states" Parley is in.

> 
> I also tried the "gender of nouns" practice, for fun, since I don't
> enter that info (for now). In that case, however, you kinda get stuck
> (you can't go back to edit mode, or at least not in an obvious way).
> Same goes for other modes that require extra info.
Ouch, yes, I should really look into that. I noticed before but kept pushing 
that back.

> 
> The default of 5 for number of choices in multiple choice, seems a bit
> much to me, but it doesn't matter since you can reconfigure.
I personally find even with 5 choices it's often too easy to guess the right 
answer, but that probably depends on what you're learning. I tend to use 
written because of that anyway.

> 
> the mixed letters is really cool but I probably won't ever use it
> except to show off at friends :)
hehe :)

> 
> the stop practice button does not have an image.
Yes, I should contact Lee about it. (done just now)

> 
> i see it repeats words you did not know the first time. but it comes
> quite fast. There should be more other words in between.
A very good question - the balancing - right now it is pretty much random, 
maybe it would indeed be a good idea to care about that words are not repeated 
too fast. I'll note that down in the todo, but it's not that urgent right now 
(we have worse rough edges).

> 
> improve column positioning when starting practice
I'll have to check that. You mean the lesson selection before starting?
We were wondering if it would make sense to only show the statistics for the 
language combination that is currently selected instead of all the possible 
combinations.

> 
> I also found a bug, when deselecting the main lesson, it resets the
> title to "0". When clicking it again (to select all sublessons), it
> renames itself to "2".
I've seen that before. Good thing that you found out when it happens exactly. 
Should be fixable :)

> =====================================================================
> 
> These are of course my personal opinions. I hope you can receive them
> as positive and constructive :)

Awesome, I think that will help us improve Parley. Plus it motivates me to get 
good feedback!

Cheers
Frederik

> 
> 
> thanks for your time!
> 
> greets
> matthias
> _______________________________________________
> Parley-devel mailing list
> Parley-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/parley-devel

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