This morning I went through the day’s reviews of ~100 cards, only to get yesterday’s new words in a chunk at the very end. In addition to them generally being together, many of the individual words had their cards back-to-back. This makes those reviews pretty much worthless to me and the results meaningless to Skritter. Given the total number of reviews, it was completely avoidable.
A really simple solution: if I’m reviewing Due Cards, which is theoretically a small batch I’m expected to finish today, just shuffle them. It won’t guarantee you avoid back-to-back cards, but it is good enough. (Stirring the pot would have the bonus effect of distributing cards you just got wrong so you’re not retesting them in an obvious batch.)
The one downside to this is it will have a significant effect on people trying to work down a review backlog. If you are only making it through 100 of your 2000 cards, without shuffling you are repeatedly confronted with the words you don’t remember (frustrating but guarantees slow progress), whereas with shuffling you are exposed to the entire deck (lets you access the low-hanging fruit but is worse at cracking the harder nuts). I feel like this use case shouldn’t be the design center, but making randomization an option would satisfy both preferences.