Flashcards: anti-procrastination feature and haptic feedback

[dustpuppy]

I would like to suggest a feature: an anti-procrastination feature where something start flashing in red if i've been staring at the flashcard question for too long. With my reviewing style, I either know the answer or not, so there is no sense spending more than 10 seconds thinking about the answer (which I do sometimes, don't know if I'm daydreaming or not). The feature would add some unpleasant feedback if wait too long before showing the answer.

Another thing I would suggest is to have some "pleasant" haptic feedback when choosing a "remembered" answer, and an "unpleasant" one when choosing "didn't remember". Maybe a soft vibration and a hard one. Basically give the user a reward for remembering a card. Most android keyboards give you this option to

And now that I think about it, why not some kind of "points" animation like in a game when I hit a high score ? This would help motivate me in reviewing. I understand motivating me to review cards is not pleco developer's main goal but it's still an interesting concept to think about in my opinion.

Any thoughts ?

 

[mikelove]

You could pick "Card Timer" as one of your "Top fields" - wouldn't start flashing but it would at least tell you just how long you'd been staring at it.

With the other items, to be honest "gamification" is a tricky road for us to go down - I don't think we could really reap any benefits from adding haptic feedback and points animations without going all-out, hiring an artist or two / a sound designer / etc and really making our flashcards feel properly game-like; if we stick those two things into our current flashcard interface the overall experience will still feel pretty bland. So it's a much larger question to consider than a simple new feature.

 

[dustpuppy]

I understand that once you get into this concept of gamification, people may request more and more stuff around that which may detract from the core features of pleco. That being said I consider pleco to be the BEST flashcard app which could very well stand on its own without a chinese dictionary attached. I have not seen any flashcard apps that implement such game-like features even though I think it would be a good idea.

And what about a middle ground, simple feature where the timer label is shown in red once the time exceeds N seconds ? Not sure whether i'm the only person who's having trouble with spending too much time thinking about a flashcard when in fact i should really answer "don't know" if the answer doesn't come within 3 seconds.

 

[mikelove]

Possible, but all of these little options contribute to our flashcard system seeming overly complicated - a "timer label in red" feature would necessarily take at least one more setting to let people customize the time interval (and probably two so that they can also turn it off).