Oh, I am so glad to hear that
A lot could be accomplished simply by renovating the manual. Right now it relies far too much on text. Exported as a PDF it constitutes about 200 pages, 99% of which contains pure text descriptions of Anki’s functionality. More images, diagrams, etc. clarifying Anki’s various windows, tools, and options would likely relieve at least some of the friction. I would be willing to collaborate with others on something like this, if anyone is interested.
I’ve used Anki in a teaching context, and I can say from my experience that most casual or “normal” users, i.e. those not obsessed with maximizing learning efficiency, only care about the options “New cards/day” and “Maximum reviews/day”. Some sort of contextual pop-up window that allows you to change these two values quickly, on the fly, would help with some of the overwhelm that I’ve witnessed in the faces of new users when they open the options. The rest of Anki could remain the same, so it would be a relatively small change.
One more thought: Since casual and new users generally find it easier to think about organizing their notes and cards by deck, it might make sense to move some options to deck-centric contextual menu, or perhaps even buttons next to each deck. I’m thinking of “Add” and “Browse” in particular, but “Description”, and perhaps also “Statistics”, would also make sense.
4 Likes