[Parley-devel] practice feedback

[matthias sweertvaegher]

hello,

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Frederik Gladhorn <gladhorn at kde.org> wrote:

>> 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 understand why you put it, but I think it's confusing because it's
inconsistent.
for example: I just pressed the "Practice" button. After that, you see
this "Start practice" button with the exact same icon. wait, didn't I
just click that? Is it different from the one at the bottom? or will
it just do nothing (because I already am in the screen now after
pressing that button (assuming it's the same one)). But if it's not
the same, why is there a second one, there must be a difference, no?

I think the main problem is that there are two of them. But your
following comment indicates you acknowledge the general problem, so
let's move on :)

> 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.

good point!

> 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.

indeed, using the qtcreator example, I would expect a Welcome tab, an
Edit tab and a Practice tab (and maybe an Evaluation tab if you like
to keep track of your grades during the practice.

Opening/creating a voc in the Welcome tab enables the Edit tab. The
Practice tab gets enabled as soon as nbwords in editor > 0. Starting a
practice, disables the Edit tab. When the practice results are shown
it would be nice if the table could be edited to correct
unnatural/less optimal translations, or at least be able to go to the
Edit tab without closing the practice result in the Practice tab, so
you can look up the word you'd like to edit and then switch back to
the practice result to further evaluate.

just my 2c :)

>> 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?

oh, okay, I really had no idea! A tooltip would not have helped me as
it did not occur to me to try to do something with those (to me, just)
images. At first, I just thought it was reflecting the correctness of
the up to 2 answers you can provide per question.
I would have said it doesn't make sense to override your answer for a
typo, since you get 2 chances anyway, but that was before I realized,
even if you correct the answer rightly, you still get no points for it
:) So I understand the problem now. You need to be able to override
the grade of the answer if you care about your statistics :) (in my
case, I do not care that much)

== what follows is a braindump so excuse me for the lack of structure ==
I am not sure how to make it more clear to the user while keeping it
esthetically pleasing. In its current state, it certainly looks cool,
but still a bit confusing imho. Besides its size, there is no clear
distinction which one is foreground and which background (they both
are black which hints background to me, that's why I didn't try to
press any button or hover). I now understand that's why there is a
(flat) border.

The only thing I can think of (while still deeming suboptimal), is
that in case of error and the text "you did not answer correctly" is
shown, is to show a button near that text with a label indicating
something along the lines of "hey, I know I typed it wrong but count
it as right nevertheless". Of course, this creates an asymmetrical
situation again since you don't want to show a button in case you
answered right (but were actually wrong) and you want to override. The
current solution is very good in that, since it stays in the
background. But it is confusing since, depending on the current grade,
it shows a different icon for the same action: override the current
result. (And how many times do you need to override the result? I
think far too less to let it clutter the interface/draw attention
during normal operation.)

That's why I would propose to put an "override" button in the result
panel and move out the "hint" and "answer later" button into the
question panel which makes it clear one panel is about the question
and one panel about the result (showing a question mark when there is
no result yet).

To rephrase my original remark: the most confusing thing to me is: you
always see the right AND wrong icon, no matter what the result is. You
need more time to process what you see on screen because it is more
than just seeing an icon, you must check its position/size to know if
you were right or wrong.

A minimal effort to improve the current situation would be to
additionally color the active result (naturally green/red). That could
reduce processing time :)

>> 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 like your idea with the qtcreator analogy..


>> 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.

I have to confess I've only used written and flashcard practice, so
I'm not a good judge :)


>> 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).

As Juergen's answer suggests, it seems to be a subjective matter.


>> 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 meant: the Lesson column size calculation does not take the sizes of
its children into account. In my case I can't read any of the
sublessons' titles.

>> 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!

cool :)

greets
matthias