Figures

Homescreen:
The homescreen is laid out like a file cabinet. Select tabs to play or edit. Play/edit buttons do not become selectable or enhanced until a tab is highlighted. The 'More' tab brings a user to more tabs and is only visible if there are more tabs than those that fit the screen. Selection of 'New' only allows 'Edit' to become selectable. Most recently used decks are stored furthest forward.

Anything + Edit Mode:
Add/edit/trash/copy cards to another deck with available buttons. When cards are selected (checked) and trash/copy are selected, those cards are deleted/copied. The deck name is tapped to edit or highlight. When the deck name at the bottom is selected and trash is selected, the entire deck is deleted and returns to home screen. The deck name can be changed through double tap. The default name is Untitled. The Edit screen is similar to the Add screen, except only the selected cards are displayed on the Edit screen. All changes have a confirmation dialogue.

New + Edit/Add:
Cards are added/edited in a similar format as "playing" the deck. Tap folded corners or swipe up/down to navigate. Editable areas on cards will be highlighted/enhanced/surrounded by dotted lines and have "Previous Back"/"Next Card" written (that is not actual writing like in MS PPT template slides) to suggest that that area is editable. Text/image/save/return are menu items. Scrollbar is defaulted to the bottom for every new card and is proportional to a reasonable degree to the location of the card that is currently being edited. New cards are automatically created when the next card corner is tapped. All empty cards are removed at Save.
The scrollbar is on the lefthand side even though it is non-standard to avoid interfering with the tapping corners on the righthand side.

New + Edit/copy cards:
Background is greyed over and put out of focus. The dropdown menu contains current available decks to copy that card into.

Play:
Play mode is a metaphor for flashcards on a keyring. Tapping folded corners/swiping allows navigation. At the answer side, a card can be marked right/wrong/known (check, X, thumbs up). A second tap of the button will unselect it. Only one of the check and the X can be selected and the thumbs-up/known button can be toggled in addition to one of those two. The '?' on the keyring implies a help/options menu. It is part of the metaphor for the keyring because "opening" it allows organization of the cards like in real life.

? Menu (Keyring Menu):
Shuffle, Home, Save, Stats, and Layout buttons are available. Shuffle shuffles the deck. Home returns to the homescreen. Save saves the stats for the session thus far. Stats allows the user to view flashcard statistics. Layout lets the user see all the flashcards in the deck. It is identical to the screen for Anything + Edit Mode except it doesn't have the menu bar at the top and the check boxes are replaced with thumbs up for known cards. Missing Button: there is also a button for reversing the front and backs of the card impermanently, so Thomas can test his French-to-English and English-to-French abilities.

Stats:
Allows viewing of stats from the current session or all sessions combined and for the current card or the current deck. Correct/Incorrect are updated depending on the selection. Known and Unknown should also be displayed beneath (not shown). Session/Card are the defaults.

Tasks

The analogy of this design is the use of a ring that holds the flashcards that are flipped to see answers, and which are stored in a container arranged and sorted with a tab file system. Thomas will be able to use this system to create decks for each language and can even re-use/copy cards from some decks into others if he finds it convenient. For example, perhaps he has separate decks for Belgian French and Quebecois French and would like to re-use some cards. Thomas can then also see if Quebecois French was easier for him to learn after already learning a few phrases from Belgian French.

Creating Flashcards

Figures for task: Homescreen, Anything + Edit Mode, New + Edit/Add, New + Edit/Copy cards

To create a new deck of flashcards, highlight the 'New' tab on the homescreen, which will make the 'Edit' button have focus, and select the 'Edit' button. This will bring Thomas to the Anything + Edit Mode, but with now cards available. By selecting the Add button, he will be brought to the New + Edit/Add screen where he can tap cards to edit them. He can add as many cards as he wants by flipping each completed card and editing the next one. Selecting the Text tool allows keyboard/handwriting inputs. Selecting the Image tool allows image input from a file. Each completed card can be viewed again by navigating to previous cards. Added cards can be saved to the deck by selecting save. Since Thomas wants to import cards from his Belgian French deck to his Quebecois French deck, he can go to his Belgian French deck, select/check cards that he wants to copy over, and click the copy button, which will bring him to the New + Edit/Copy cards screen. There, he selects the Quebecois French deck from the dropdown and selects OK.

Learnability: The interface completely lacks many instructions and depends more on the user's ability to translate the metaphor. For example, it never says that the user needs to select a tab to use it or that the play button will "play" a deck and the pencil button will edit a deck. It relies on the user knowing that the left-pointed triangle is commonly used to play and that the pencil icon is commonly used for editing. The interface does give some hints by not bringing focus to either of the play or edit buttons until after a tab is selected. And after it is selected, only giving focus to actions that are available to that tab. In the Anything + Edit Mode, the interface hints that there can be scrolling by displaying half of the next and previous cards and it also tries to use common icons, like the trash can and the return button. For editing, the cards use the highlighted, enhanced, surrounded by dotted lines editable areas to try to hint at the fact that that space is editable. It also includes a bit of text as in MS PPT, that is only for sample purposes.

Efficiency: The interface allows pretty comparable speed to creating hand-made flashcards, with the additional ability to add images. It also allows selection of many flashcards from a deck at once, which allows mass-editing, mass-deletion, and mass-copying.

Safety: The interface is relatively safe as confirmation dialogues are given for any edits/saves/deletes. So, in terms of making huge errors, the only real threat is in deleting something, but even so, it is relatively easy to remake a flashcard that does get deleted and there is not a huge cost in doing so.

Using Flashcards

Figures for task: Play, ? (Keyring) Menu, Stats

To play/use a deck, Thomas can select a deck from the homescreen and select Play, which will bring him to the Play screen. There, he can navigate through the deck by tapping the folded corners to navigate previous or next or by swiping. This is a metaphor for a real flashcard deck on a keyring. He can keep track of how many he got right or wrong by selecting the check or X on each card. If he knows the card, he can also select the thumbs up, and it will be removed from the deck only for this session. The opening the keyring is a metaphor for being able to rearrange and organize the flashcard deck. By selecting the keyring, Thomas will be brought to the ? (Keyring) Menu page. From here, he can shuffle, layout, reverse, save, or see stats for the deck. Shuffle just changes the order of the cards in the deck that are not known, layout brings him to the layout page, which is in the description for ? Menu (Keyring Menu), reverse switches fronts with backs of cards non-permanently, Save saves the statistics for the current session (to update the overall statistics), and the Statistics button leads to the Stats page. The Stats page shows Thomas his overall progress for the flashcards.

Learnability: One analogy that is really abstract is the keyring menu. It does give a question mark to try to indicate that it is some sort of help menu and to tempt a new user into clicking on it to at least see what it does.

Efficiency: It is pretty fast to go through the deck and to navigate to the menu for stats.

Safety: The check/X/known buttons can be toggled, so safety for those are pretty good.

Organizing Flashcards

Figures for task: Homescreen, Anything Edit Mode, New + Edit/Add, New + Edit/Copy cards

Each deck of flashcards is stored in its own tab. Organizing flashcards is similar to making them. If Thomas misspells a word on one of his flashcards, he can go to the Homescreen, select the deck, click edit and go into Anything + Edit Mode. There, he can select the faulty flashcards and get to the New + Edit/Add screen, which will only display the selected cards. Tapping cards allows edits.

Learnability/Efficiency/Safety: For efficiency's sake, since Organizing uses many of the same screens as Creating, but uses the features only slightly differently, I'll include the analysis for this task in that for the first task.

Summary

So, now Thomas can create his flashcards for all the different languages he wants to try to learn. He can do so rather conveniently and can re-use flashcards as well as analyze to some extent his progress.