Given many people try to review their cards while media sync is going on in the background, and they don’t realise the media is yet to sync fully, there is probably an underlying UX issue here.
I suggest Anki show a (non-intrusive) pop-up near the sync button when the user opens the review screen and a media sync is ongoing.
Or, is there a better solution anyone else like to propose? Pop-up sounds a bit no-brainer to even me. Opinions welcome.
Any reason not to stick with the non-intrusive indicator we already have?
Up until now, I did not know that that symbol represented the media being synced, I thought it was just the general sync just being processed in the background.
I started the post with this:
Sure, FAQ doesn’t automatically mean there’s an issue but as Suhas said, it’s not an obvious indicator.
It is directly next to the sync button, it is in motion when active, and it continues after the collection sync completes (the only thing that syncs in the background is media). If you click on it, it tells you the current status of the media sync process.
If you’re a user who’s never been in the situation to need it, it’s not too surprising that you’ve never noticed it. But when you’re looking for the reason why something hasn’t synced, it’s a natural and hard-to-miss indicator.
I don’t argue current indicator is bad, but can it be better? Also, there’s no poll data that shows people understand this and that it’s just a tiny minority of people asking the FAQ.
If media sync is ongoing, show a different placeholder image for non-existing media. The alt text can be changed too.
Maybe we could show a message instead of only the missing image icon whenever media is missing (maybe with a link to the docs where steps to solve “missing media” are explained).
The current missing media icon regularily causes issues – users don’t always understand why it’s there and what it means. So by always showing a message regardless of sync status (and having a link to the docs explaining that syncing needs to finish) we could potentially improve the situation.
I’m thinking about something like this:
This is achieved by adding an alt tag:
<img src="anki.png" alt="Image not found. See https://docs.ankiweb.net/some_page' to learn common ways to fix this issue.">
I described something similar:
Alt text for placeholder image regardless of sync status doesn’t sound too bad. It’s an easy improvement and we feed more birds with one scone. The text just needs to be short enough.
AnkiMobile embeds an info box that links to Cloud Sync - AnkiMobile Manual when a missing image is found on a card, and I think AnkiDroid does something similar. We could do something similar on the computer version too.
Sadly, AnkiDroid doesn’t do anything like that. It only shows a placeholder image.