Every once in a while there are users that think Anki is bugged because the content of their field in the Add dialog stays after adding the card. They don’t realize that they turned on the Sticky Field option.
If the button alone isn’t obvious enough, then we need to add an additional cue for the user. I am thinking of adding a string saying “sticky” next to the sticky icon, if sticky is active (nothing otherwise).
In that case something like a bottom bar could be used. It could show something like “Sticky: One or more fields are sticky.” and maybe have a clickable link to the in-app / online manual for an explaination.
IMO “sticky” is still within the realm of technical jargon and isn’t intuitively linked to “this field isn’t cleared after a note is added”
Maybe after a note is added, have it temporarily show a popover over the (first) sticky pin that says something along the lines of “sticky field was retained”. This lets users know what happened (sticky) and what caused it to happen (the sticky pin)
I like that idea, but I fear that regular users of the feature would grow weary of seeing that every time they added a note.
I have to agree with you that there just isn’t very much difference in a great big “Add note” window between pinned and unpinned. [It’s a pin, so I can’t help but think of it as pinning, even as I acknowledge that’s not what we call the feature. I’m not wedded to any particular wording. But if “sticky” is jargon-y, as has been mentioned … we could change the name too. ]
It’s essentially “lit up”/“unlit” (in dark theme, at least), and I’ve always loved how minimalist it is!
But if it needs to change – is there a still-minimalist solution that could draw the eye better?
What about an outlined space around it that inverts the color so it stands out more? Possibly even rendering that in an actual color – like the blue we use for some important buttons?
Obviously the wrong icon ...
– and it shouldn’t necessarily even be a circle, but pictures make more sense than my description. Sort of like:
Or is the issue not the visibility of the icon (which might be the right change for a user that deliberately turned it on, and then forgot) – and more that users accidentally click it and don’t notice? Perhaps the process could be made more visible, like with a “field pinned/unpinned” popup when it is clicked.
I mean the lower-left corner type of popup ...
(or is that called a popover?) that doesn’t interfere with anything. We already use that to inform users that something important just happened invisibly, like:
Any kind of a constant reminder is going to be distracting/annoying to regular users.
I think a better option is to detect if the user is confused about a pinned field and display an appropriate hint. One way to do this is to check if the user has deleted most/all of the contents of a pinned field (after it was prefilled) 3 times in a row.
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