Thank you Jake for making the awesome video and post on auto-advance, and for openly asking for discussion and feedback. Very cool.
The good news is that my understanding of auto-advance in the beta matched what you have explained.
Here are my thoughts on the pros and cons of the current setup:
Pros
- Consistency: there is consistency in always auto-advancing after seeing the answer / answering the prompt
- Flow: as stated in the video, if you do nothing, it keeps moving forward. I’m not used to the current behavior, but I understand intellectually how that could feel right. I found the current iOS behavior to be extremely fast and flow-inducing, so the good news is that there are multiple ways of achieving this.
Cons
- Inconsistency: currently, after choosing a grade, the app always advances to the next card (regardless of whether auto-advance is on or not) unless auto-advance happens to have not completed yet. If auto-advance is ticking down, however, tapping the grade keeps you on the card. Tapping it again advances. I find this confusing, and I also find it to be the opposite of what I want — entering a grade to me means I am done with the card and want to move on. It always works this way in the app, except in this one case.
- Auto-grading self-graded prompts: let me explain why I believe this is a con. I believe that, using Olle’s words from https://www.hackingchinese.com/about-cheating-spaced-repetition-and-learning-chinese/, by default we tend to have “an almost subconscious process that biases your self-grading in a positive direction”. By needing to choose your grade, we’ll be more likely to give ourselves an honest grade. I also agree with “you should assess your answers as accurately as you can. This is individual to a certain degree and requires a bit of practice.” (https://www.hackingchinese.com/answer-buttons-and-how-to-use-srs/)
Contributing issues
- At least to me and on my device, the auto-advance indicator is so subtle I don’t really notice it while studying, partially because it is thin and partially because it is away from the answer and grading buttons. This causes me to be unaware of the current state of auto-advance and not realize, for example, that a tap on an answer button just canceled it.
Here’s a potential proposal that could reconcile these two approaches:
- Leave the auto-advance as-is, but introduce a feature to auto-grade self-graded prompts, if we feel that is important to support. I’d turn it off by default, but that can be discussed. If auto-grading is off, then auto-advance happens after you grade self-graded prompts, otherwise it behaves as it does now.
- Always advance after hitting a grade, even if auto-advance is counting down. Tap elsewhere to clear the auto-advance timer.
- Change the auto-advance indicator to be more visible and be in the vicinity of the stuff you are looking at on-screen. I don’t have an awesome concrete proposal, but to throw one out, have it be a background progress bar behind the answer buttons. That would be highly visible and also near where you are looking.
Lastly, apologies for suggesting to add another setting — I know how costly adding settings is. Alternatively just leave out auto-grading for now and consider adding it as a feature if needed.
Bonus thought experiment: when advancing after hitting a grade, the current iOS app uses the auto-advance timer rather than immediately changing cards. Right now in the beta, tapping a grade switches to the next card too quickly for me, at least compared to what I am used to. Of course in the current iOS app, tapping a grade does not advance at all if you aren’t using auto-advance, so the experiences aren’t quite comparable. At any rate, I’d probably make the other changes above first and then re-evaluate this. Simply adding an animated transition to the next card (and sound if sounds are enabled) may resolve any concern here.
I’m sure I’ve missed something here, so I’d love feedback on what doesn’t make sense or breaks other workflows.