[ this topic was originally posted in Bug Control, then moved to General Discussion by a mod ]
Device:
iPhone 6
OS:
9.3.2
Bug:
I have 193 words to review.
Yet, the notification on the app shows only 50.
Unsuccessful things I tried to fix this bug:
Screenshot:
I don’t believe this is a bug.
I’ve been using this app for about a year and a half and it has always been this way. I always just assumed that they limited it purposefully. I, myself, would like to see this changed too, though.
This is intentional. What if a user has 5,000+ words to review? Wouldn’t you find it demotivating and annoying seeing that amount in your notification badge?
That’s a double-edged sword. Seeing 50 words for review, reviewing 50 words and finding out there are still 50 left can be also demotivating.
@Joshua, I can see where you’re coming from, and there certainly needs to be a cut off at a certain point.
Though I have to agree with @widle, reviewing words and not seeing the notifications number decrease is demotivating.
If this app is capping at 50 notifications on purpose, why not raise that number up to about 500? Then users can see their progress on the home screen each time they study.
(Of course 500 was just a number that came to my head, it would naturally be better to see statistics of the average number of words each user needs to review and making a decision from that.)
Nah. This is bad. So what if I had 5000+ items to review, like I sometimes have. Only showing 50 items gives me no clue as to what my progress is. It would be extremely demotivating to review every day and not see the number change for weeks, or ever. It also doesn’t motivate at all to put more effort in to reduce the number as you get no feedback at all. Can I relax a bit because I only have 300 items left to review, or can’t I because there are 5000 items left and every day another 1000 get added on top of that? And as the sequence of items to review is not perfect if you have a backlog, allowing a backlog to build up unseen like this is bad. You could review all you want but because you are presented with the items too late, the reviewing you do becomes less and less effective the bigger the backlog. And you could review like you normally do, but unwittingly build up a backlog because of something you did 6 months ago.
You don’t want to scare users away with too many reviews and there is a good thing about it in that it helps users do a little at a time: oh, there’s only 50 items to review, I have time for that…, and a lot of little efforts add up to a big effort, but…
Anyway, the info has to be presented somewhere easily accessible and intuitive. Don’t force me to go on the website to see if today’s effort made a dent in my backlog.
This is really annoying.
And to think that is deliberate.
I’ve turned off its badge icon. I’ll rather lose the feature completely than have it lie to me about my progress; especially when it’s in my face any time I look at my phone.
I don’t really think it would be demotivating, I personally would find it more annoying to see that the number 50 always stays, when you see that a big number like 5000 forever stays you will eventually not even notice that it is 5000. When someone does find it demotivating he or she could switch notifications from the app off, I don’t really use the app so notifications are turned of, and I don’t see a number.
Absolutely agree. For learning new languages at least (my usage), I regularly have 500+ vocabulary to review and I want to know this fact at a glance, seeing 50 constantly is just annoying. Why bother having this?
Maybe space out the notifications. End user finished 50 entries. There’s a 1-2 hour gap and then another 50 are prompted…
This is a really frustrating “feature” can you at least provide an option to change this in settings? Our options now are to either be irritated by the notification or turn it off completely. I have 12 items in my queue within the app, but it says 50. This is the most useless implementation of notifications I’ve see. I want notifications so it reminds me to use the app each day, but hone in on one direction or the other. This is just a silly method.
PS - are you listening to users at all? Because this has been talked about for a couple years in the history here and I essentially repeated what others have said.
