There was a post on Reddit of a user misusing Hard. In this case the user was using a remote and it seems the buttons were set incorrectly. (They thought they pressed Easy, but it was set to Hard).
Interestingly even though the user looked into the card information and deck options themselves they could not find the cause of the problem. I think this is because Rating is shown as a number and beginners do not know the number of the buttons.
So if the Rating of the card info is text instead of number such mistakes might be reduced. like this:
Could be; Iâm not 100% sold that itâs the best possible solution.
But if numbers are confusing (as Shigeyuki points out), and I wonder about the inverse possibility if ratings are similarly divorced from the keystroke that defines them, it might could be that itâs the lesser of (most) evils.
I put it as âword (number)â, but I suppose thatâs fairly arbitrary. It could just as easily be:
â2 (hard)â
Or some other magical orientation that Iâm not thinking of atm.
Iâm not married to any eventual outcome; just spitballinâ here
Well, I donât use desktop Anki so for me the numbers are kind of arbitrary because Iâm just using gestures on my phone. The only thing I worry of is whether some translations would make long text overflow on narrow screens.
There is no way to horizontally scroll, meaning a lot of data already is clipped. Adding a string instead of a number might make this worse for some languages, of course.
Itâs an interesting idea. I join those who are concerned about anything that takes up more horizontal space. Itâs already a struggle to get useful Card Info out of users on small screens.
I donât know if this change really would have helped the user in question though â Reddit - Dive into anything . The 1-2-3-4 are linked to the grading buttons throughout Anki, as the default shortcuts and hover text, even for folks who donât read the manual. And the userâs own screenshot showed other grades (1 and 4) which could have flagged the issue for them. When told directly thatâs what the problem was, they still didnât understand. I wonder if itâs not so much a case of âthey looked at the Card Info for 2 weeks and couldnât see the issueâ â and more âthey werenât looking.â
But I think your advice over there was what would have interrupted this cycle MUCH sooner for that user â visual answer feedback.
Alternatively or additionally, the number and/or text could be colored in the color of the button â whether that mean red/orange/green/blue as it is now, or red/light green/medium green/dark green as has been proposed recently to solve hard misuse.
I got this idea from Advanced Review Bottom Bar, which basically shows the same review history as Card Info does but with the ratings colored.
I found the problem myself: Perhaps older Anki can have 3 or 2 buttons (V1 Scheduler) so if the user has older cards the numbers may not match the text.
Yep, that was one of the reasons numbers were used, but conserving screen real estate was the other. I like the idea of coloured numbers, as it wonât take up any more space.
I think color will have the same problem as text, where the grade and color do not match. But such cards should already be more than a few years old so it is probably unlikely that users will read the card info.
In the case of text the âRatingâ string already consumes the width, so it does not seem to me to have much effect.
If the text of the answer buttons in some languages is much longer than âRatingâ I think there will be a problem. (The translation of the buttons should be as short as possible for the UI, are there such long texts?)
This might be confirmed if all translations could be output at once. (Rating, Again, Hard, Good, Easy)
Edit: The Anki buttons on the desktop have no color, so Anki for Desktop users may not understand what the colors of the numbers mean.
