Overview

Anki is a product that incorporates much of the science of learning that I want to include in my own app. So why isn't it already a good solution? Or is it a good solution that's solving the wrong problem?

I'm conducting market research to answer the second question, but in an attempt to answer the first, I'm going to analyze Anki to get a better idea of its qualities. To do this, I'll start with the classic heuristics analysis presented by Nielsen.

Outline

• Nielsen's Heuristics:
  • Visibility of system status
  • Match between system and the real world
  • User control and freedom
  • Consistency and standards
  • Aesthetic and minimalist design
  • Recognition rather than recall
  • Flexibility and efficiency of use
  • Error prevention
  • Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
  • Help and documentation
• Conclusions

Heuristics

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/heuristic-evaluation-how-to-conduct-a-heuristic-evaluation

Visibility of system status

Users should always be informed of system operations with easy to understand and highly visible status displayed on the screen within a reasonable amount of time.

This can be interpreted in a spaced repetition app in several ways.

1. How many reviews are due
2. Deck sync status with cloud

How many reviews are due

Anki displays this in a way that's great for experienced users, but hard to interpret for people who are new to the platform.

1. The main display shows a list of all the user's decks. To the right are counts for types of reviews due. From left to right, it's review cards, in-progress cards, and new cards to learn. Due cards and new cards are labelled.
2. This one line plainly states the number of cards reviewed and how long it took.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/de7db6ae-727d-4925-a42f-00aac72d92f9/Untitled

As I stated above, this structure is great for experienced users. In a glance, I can see which decks need how many reviews. The counts are fairly intuitive, but the three different review types may be confusing, especially the unlabelled in-progress cards (that maybe shouldn't have their own column). When there's a mix of review types for multiple decks, it can turn into an odd color-coded table of numbers, which is overwhelming and not clear.