In the "Look up more info" window that pops up by pressing the magnifying glass, one can find when was the last time a character/word was reviewed, when would be the next time, how much time was spent learning the character and what was the success rate. I would be much more interested in the _number_ of times I reviewed a word, and not in the total time spent. Would it be possible to add that information?
For example, instead of just saying "Success: 90%", it would be nice to have "Success: 9/10 = 90%". I think that other users might also find it useful :-)

yea I also think this would be helpful, it has been mentioned before. Maybe it's hard to implement, or makes the popup slower, it needs a lot of data from the past. Otherwise it would be nice to be able to get this info at 'my words'? Just to keep ourselves humble (舒 2/98 = 2,04% succes).

It's not so much the availability of the data (the number of reviews and successes are used to generate that percentage, so we have them on hand already) it's getting it to fit in that tiny space with all the other pieces of information. One thing I could do is have it as hover text for that table cell. It's not very discoverable but it would provide you with the data when you're curious. Would that work for you?

Are the times listed under "Spent" really useful for anyone? (Can anyone out there comment on it?) It is very hard to interpret these times, especially as we don't know how many times the character/word was reviewed.

IMHO it would be a much better use of space to show the #successes/#reviews fraction. The meaning of this is self-evident.

A hover text is not ideal but would at least supply the information.

(I would have the "Time Spent" as a hover text :-) )

The time spent information is useful because it shows you if you've spent an inordinate amount of time on something. Things that you're spending too much time on you might consider removing completely so they stop wasting time on them. These items are called 'leeches' and we'll be working on making them more visible later on. Whereas I'm not sure what you'd use the number of reviews/successes for other than computing the percentage done right (again, to identify things you're not getting right often enough/spending too much time on so you can focus on or eliminate them). What exactly are you using this information for...?

I have to say, I think Swimming's suggestion would be more helpful for indicating Leeches. The problem with time spent is that I have no idea what a "normal" amount of time spent is. Is 1 minute typical for me for a word I added two months ago? Is 1 minute typical for me for a word I added 2 years ago? Evaluating time spent seems to me to take a lot more work than seeing say 22/44. 22/44 immediately seems like an awful lot of incorrects for a words I have seen a lot of times...

Time spent could also be thrown off if I was paying attention to something else and let the full 30 seconds elapse even though I knew the character stone cold.

I think that #successes/#attempts is a really basic data that would help users understand their learning process. When I currently see "Success = 50%", I am really curious to know whether this is 1/2 or 10/20.

The "Learned" bar is also very important, as 10/20 may say that I got it right every other time, or that I got it wrong in the first 10 attempts but then right in the last 10 attempts, which indicates that I pretty much know the word. (How is the "Learned" indicator calculated, by the way?)

Are hand-held devices the bottleneck for the width of the popup information window? (I don't have one yet, I am afraid...) On my small notebook it seems that there is still room for widening the window. Adding the ratio would only require 8 additional characters "??/?? = ".

Thanks for listening!

I've been wanting to see the raw data for a while myself. The "time spent" field may be useful for scheduling (is it?) but I don't find it useful at all. It doesn't take very many bathroom breaks without pausing the study window to skew the data into meaningless obscurity anyway. :-)

@swimming: The "Learned" bar is directly related to the interval between reviews. Basically, the more you know something, the longer you go between reviews, and vice versa. The "Learned" bar fills in slower as the date between reviews grows larger though. The formula is:

log2(# of hours between scheduled reviews) * 9.531

So that the learned bar is full (returns 100 or more) when you're going two months or more between reviews. But it's half full when you're going about 40 hours between reviews. That way the bar fills up gradually even when intervals between reviews go up exponentially.

While there's space there for the characters without widening the popup, swimming, that doesn't necessarily mean we should put it in. Pages can be as large as we want them to be, really really big and long if we so choose. But if we added everything that could possibly be useful, the site in general would become bloated very quickly, being difficult to read and making it harder to see the things that are particularly important. So before we add anything new, we have to be sure it's worth the space, even if the space is already there. This is especially true for info dense places like the study page and the word popup. To keep the site compact and readable we have to be choosy. Does that make sense?

But in this case it looks like it's important enough to you guys and it's small enough, and the upcoming leech system won't fill the same needs, so we'll put it in.

It would be great to have the information added. One of the things I really like on skritter is your receptiveness to users suggestions and requests.

I can certainly understand the need to keep things compact, so what you say definitely makes sense.

Thanks for the formula for the "Learned" bar. I guess the next natural question is how do you determine the number of hours between scheduled reviews? Is that published somewhere?

Thanks again!

That formula's a little more involved. It's described here:

http://www.skritter.com/faq#scheduling