Can some of those who answered "like it" on the poll about the prompt timer (underneath the session timer) provide some more explanation for why they like it? How do you use it, and how often, and what are you seeking to get out of looking at it? Do you like when it is small, or does it not matter?

(I ask because we're thinking of getting rid of it after watching it scare some new users hitting the practice page, and in the name of simplifying the practice page.)

It's nice, although more as a curiosity to be honest, to see how long you spend on any particular character. After difficult characters, or characters I tend to struggle with, I'll often check the prompt timer before moving on. It's basically a way to gauge my reaction time.

That being said I'm not married to it. If you can improve Skritter's feel or general functionality, by all means get rid of it.

I agree with everything murrayjames said.

Even though Skritter does not give partial credit on responses (at least not yet), I keep a kind of mental score of how I'm doing - how long something took, how many missed strokes, etc.
It's not a big deal, though, and keeping things from getting too cluttered is good.
I do a good bit of my practicing on a Netbook, by the way, and the practice page will *barely* fit on it's tiny screen. More clutter would certainly not be good.
Something I do like seeing how long it has been since I last saw a character and how overdue for review it is (I assume that's what the percentage means). It would be nice if that were a bit more legible; it usually has the blank for the character running through it.

The blank for the character gets in the way for me too when I have to use the computers at the office instead of home. I'm not sure what version of IE those computers are running but it's not current, that's for sure.

The more a new user has to learn the longer it will take (and the goal is to learn Chinese not Skritter). I say be gone with it.

The 1-4 self-ranking scares me a bit - it will make it that much harder for new users to understand the system. I am a harsh grader on myself (I often override the 'correct' if I get a minor detail wrong).

Similar to many others, I think I've just gotten used to it, but it isn't a major factor in my learning. Thanks for all the diligence about attending to so many details and working to improve Skritter!

Okay; it sounds like the prompt timer is okay for deletion, then. That's good.

The 1-4 scheduling will be mostly invisible by default, and we'll try to encourage people not to use it as much as possible (as Skritter should do a good job of determining scores by itself).

We know the important parts of the practice page barely fit on a netbook. We're certainly not making it any taller.

We're thinking of altering the way the ages are displayed--the "last seen, percent readiness" times, like "2 days 215%". They'd be a bit longer, like "Seen 2 days ago, 215% ready (overdue)" (or maybe we'd leave off the percents). You'd also only get one per prompt, for the most-due word-level item (instead of one for each part of the word and the character). And they'll be in a different place, of course. What do you guys think of that?

Let me cast my vote for deleting it. While I don't care about it myself, I think it could be quite stressful for people with test anxiety. Skritter is otherwise pretty good at tricking us into thinking that we're playing a game, so all those test-related stress emotions get turned off.

James

Another possible minor stressor - I don't think I'd like seeing the work "overdue" too often, even if I do know something is overdue by the 999%...

@nick

It took me quite a while (successfully using Skritter) to figure out what the 20 min at 323% meant). Since you would almost always see ones at over 100% it would almost always say stuff was overdue - which is a bit of a downer as James mentions. You might use colour or just leave it out.

What you want out of Skritter is review so that characters are committed to memory (burned in - in a good way). The feedback I get is how many I need to review and how many I have added. I feel good if I add a lot but I know that it is actually counter-productive to add too many characters (so why do I feel good - and why is there a nice large number egging me on). The number that really counts is the number I have learned but I can only get to this from the stats page, secondary are numbers about how much I have practiced. I know that if I practice when I am tired I will learn but more slowly (but I'll get a lot wrong and skirtter will say I have unlearned a lot). The review queue being large is generally not good but it can be daunting so should it be there at all?

The system is a bit 'sticky' with reviews of older characters at as low as 80% once it has added a lot but I don't think it is sticky enough with new characters (practice them more so as to slow down the adding process).

My vote would be keep it.

I mostly ignore the prompt timer, but it was helpful when I was starting out to work out how Skritter counts the time. And it's occasionally interesting to see how long it physically took to write a character.

I don't mind seeing the word "overdue", but would prefer to keep the clutter down rather than adding words to the interface. Adding mostly static words to the interface reduces information density. There's a detailed explanation in the tooltip. Rather than complicating things, educate the new users that things in Skritter can be moused over in the introduction.

Also I find the character level overdueness prompts very useful. If you get rid of those there's basically no way to see that information without diving into the vocab viewer. And I often want to look at that to see if I just practised a character if it looks familiar.

Basically I don't think any of the things you're suggesting will add anything to the interface, which is already good. Some will make it worse. I'd prefer to see more flexibility to the scheduling and stats before tweaks to the practice UI, of which I could say more, but will not to avoid 跑ing the 题.

I wonder if the prompt timer could be hidden while counting up, but appear once it's stopped counting. So you'd write a prompt and then :06 would appear under the session timer until you went to the next one. Still as useful? Less cluttered and anxious, certainly.

We will try a lot of things with the age indicators. If we put words in, "overdue" would probably be rarer unless you hadn't practiced in a while, maybe 200%+. And any short-term items would just say "learning" or something like that.

The character level overdueness prompts also give you a hint as to which character is in the word. If they exist, and if they're not always as important to see, then they can live in this "more info" box we're planning? (It's basically a big ton of info that you can call up on the words and characters if you want to check something out, but will probably cover part of the Flash, so you have to stop practicing briefly to look at it.)

We are reworking the practice interface in order to add a bunch of things not discussed in this thread, and also to support pinyin and definition practice, the new back button, 1-4 scheduling, tone coloring, etc. So it's got to be done. And since none of the new Flash code I've been working on for the past two months can go live until it's ready, we're concentrating all fire on it (except I think for the progress page thing which Scott wants to do first real quick).

I'm not too convinced by the age indicators as you describe them. I know I'm learning! I think the way you describe the prompt would be as useful, but I can't say the way it's looking now makes me anxious - when I'm practising I'm concentrating on writing not on the timers, so don't mind too much.