Decks vs presets is something that confuses a lot of users. Some users don’t even realize that there is a difference, some users think you need to make one preset for every deck, some users apply presets to the wrong decks that they didn’t want them to be applied to, etc.
While I can’t think of a way to completely solve this problem, I do have an idea (well, David has) that could help: colored backgrounds based on decks that share a preset.
This looks better, except for yellow.
The colors would be adjustable. There would be some pre-defined number of colors, like 15-20, and if the user doesn’t like the color that Anki chose, he would be able to change it in deck options.
If anyone has any other idea, feel free to share it. The goals are:
Making it clear that deck and preset are different things
Making it easy to identify which presets are applied to which decks
Making it hard to accidentally apply a preset to the deck that you don’t want it to be applied to
I don’t think having it always on is a great idea. I do agree that deck vs. preset could be made more obvious, though.
Maybe this could be toggle-able, e.g. in view → show preset colors or something along the way.
Or: The options screen could be made into a split view. The left site shows the options, the right side shows the decks (background-colored like in your picture). Then the drop-down preset selection would have to be changed as well, to reflect the appropriate color (so that the preset drop-down and the right view would match).
I think I’d prefer #2.
Please ignore my bad image editing skills, but #2 would be something along the lines of this:
For context: I was asked for ideas and came up with it in a few seconds.
I love @Anon_0000’s idea (as I understand it: a visual preview/editor for the deck => preset mapping). As a longer term extension, I think that view would also be a great way to expose the calculation which results in the current limits
I think the colour idea starts to break down for users that genuinely need many presets. Once you have more than a few colours it starts to be difficult to discriminate them.
You could do something like @Anon_0000’s idea with only a single colour highlighting the current/hovered preset without any issues with too many colours.
Another simple way to surface presets would be to add a “Preset” column to the deck view.
As a person with a decent amount of decks and a decent amount of presets I realised one extra deck had the wrong preset but I didn’t know which because the presets don’t say that, only how many decks have that preset. I had to go over all of my decks one by one checking whether they had the right preset.
The add-on Enhance main window by developer Arthur Milchior has similar functions, this add-on can display presets directly, like this. (This image is my customized version.)
The color of the text in the deck changes to red or blue when the deck is empty, this indicates to the user that new cards need to be added to the deck.
The user can rearrange or hide columns and change colors.
Progress bars visualize the state of the deck.
Optionally you can display the desired retention rate and maximum interval. (my customized ver) Like this:
An idea could be to show the name of the preset in brackets next to the deck name when a button like shift is held?
| - Deck (ParentPreset)
| - - Subdeck (Default)
Maybe add text like “hold shift to see which deck has which preset” in the deck preset menu so people who don’t read the manual wouldn’t be unaware of the feature?
This would avoid adding extra visual clutter to the deck menu.
As a column its a little noisy for my taste, especially as its lacking indents.
I don’t think the preset of a deck is info you really need often enough to justify it.
I agree with this statement. Adding more columns that aren’t really relevant for that screen would ultimately increase cognitive load – and thus potentially make things worse for the average user.
