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User Interface contribution
In this document we explains the rules regarding User Interface changes in AnkiDroid in the near future.
It is no secret that many users find it hard to start using AnkiDroid. Even after months of usage, users may have missed some features which would improve their experience. Improving AnkiDroid user interface is an important task, both for our user base (current and future), and for the success of this application.
Millions of users across the worlds already uses AnkiDroid regularly. We care about not breaking a tool that already works. While we welcome improvements, let it be clear that we require changes to be discussed before being incorporated in the application. The more important the changes, the more justifications it requires.
We must add that most of the core team behind AnkiDroid are softwares engineers who have limited experience with UI, design, UX for general public. In an ideal world, a senior designer would join the project, discuss with the userbase and the contributors, gain trust, and lead fundamentals improvement. In the meantime, we mostly consider incremental improvements.
Below, we list various criteria we take into consideration to approve or reject a change.
Our primary goal is to stay functionally compatible with Anki Desktop. If AnkiDroid has a feature which differs from Anki Desktop, we consider it to be a bug unless a strong justification is given.
AnkiDroid is available in 90+ languages. We want to be localizable. That implies in particular that no text can be hard coded or embedded in images.
We have users all around the world. In some places, internet access is expensive and devices do not have a lot of storage. We try to keep the app as small as possible. Any changes that increase the app size considerably, in particular adding images, sound and/or videos will probably be rejected unless there is an excellent reason for it. For example, we would prefer to link to a YouTube video rather than embed it in the app.
AnkiDroid has multiple color themes. We require screenshots in both modes as soon as we suspect one mode may break.
Some devices have very small screens. A lot of windows list elements one above the other, e.g. card in browser, deck in deck picker, fields in note editor. It means that if you increase the size of an element, less elements can be displayed at once. It can be an acceptable tradeoff but must be clearly explained. Similarly, each button, menu, entry added to a screen mean that some users will not see everything. This trade off should be taken into consideration.
Some users use tablets and have a very big screen. It sometimes is the case that we use different windows depending on the size. We try to keep the app similar for all devices, but if required, we already consider having different UI depending on the size.
Some users install AnkiDroid on e-ink devices. Those devices take time to display new content, and they should always have an option to have instantaneous activities. Animations which cannot be disabled are not acceptable for them.
Some of our users have phones with low memory, disk space and processor speed which would be considered low compared to latest models. We still want AnkiDroid to run smoothly to them. Any UX change that requires significant computing resources would be unacceptable.
AnkiDroid aims to be accessible and any change that is made should improve accessibility. We will ask you to check with accessibility tools (like the Accessibility Scanner app) to ensure your change does not create any easy to detect accessibility issues. Ensure that no new issues are introduced.
We do our best to follow Material Design guidelines. Ideas that do not adhere to those standards will likely not be considered as they will not have the correct UI/UX experience on the platform.
Please discuss with us any change you expect to make if it’s complex. If it’s really simple and you are okay with having your work rejected, you are free to make the change you want and send a screenshot with the project. Here is a list of cases where we may accept changes.
If a UI-based issue has been created by a maintainer, or has been labeled as ‘Accepted’ then it is open for PRs.
If for some reason our current choices do not work well for non-English users, we may accept change. For example, at the time I write this, people are working to improve the right-to-left experience for people using their app mainly in a RTL language.
If any other change is required for ease of use in a non-English speaking language, please discuss it with us.
AnkiDroid does not yet satisfy accessibility criteria. If you make a change for accessibility reasons, we may consider it. We will still ask you to do the minimal change that allows the app to satisfy accessibility criteria. We also require you to explain which criteria is not satisfied so that we can check ourselves whether your solution is the best one.
This explanation can be either an automated accessibility tool. It can also be a free document about best practices, that our UX clearly violates.
These are accepted more rarely, but if there is an easily demonstrated difference between our design guidelines and the way the app is behaving, and we judge in our opinion that correcting the difference will benefit most users with as few irritated users as possible, we may accept a design change.
Feel free to correct any typos and other obvious mistakes. As an example, a user noted that a window had an empty title instead of having no title. Correcting it decreased the space used by the window, which is a clear win for users with small phones.
AnkiDroid should not be surprising the user. If we do not follow an Android guideline, if we behave differently from other standard Android application, it's okay to correct AnkiDroid behavior. Please either provide the guideline, or an example of Android application that shows the change you intend to make.
It is hard to describe precisely what a small improvement is. In general, it is change that improves a feature and presents no trade off, that won’t make the experience worse for any criteria mentioned above. Examples are simpler to give:
- Allowing to search for deck instead of forcing the user to use a scrolling menu
- Highlighting the deck currently selected in the deck list.
- Adding a small orange circle to indicate that the collection is not currently synced with ankiweb.
There are a few changes that we work on, such as having a better interface to change note content. That’s a big non-trivial work that we accept to tackle because it is a neat great improvement for the users. As explained above, time is a big limiting factor, plus expertise. So, until things get calmer, we don’t expect to accept any big change to the UI. We may be convinced to make other important changes, but we don’t expect this to occur often.