Direction of Memrise/Decks

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I’m really becoming rather concerned, I have to say. I’ve been a user of Memrise for a long time, I’ve created a range of courses, some of which are being shared with students nationally by other tutors in the field. I’ve delivered training to tutors on the benefits of promoting Memrise to their students. I’ve been quite the megafan and advocate, and have probably been fairly instrumental in bringing several hundred people to the site over the years. However, I’ve gradually, over the last year, started to worry. It has really come on in small stages, but as of this week it’s becoming quite an issue for me.

My problem really boils down to this - that functionality is being left broken, while Memrise focuses on unnecessary display makeovers that many people appear to absolutely hate (myself included). This site used to feel extremely professional and polished, and I was proud to direct people to my courses on this wonderful platform. Now, Memrise feels like a kids learning website, and Decks has so many little issues with display etc that it feels distinctly unprofessional. And for MONTHS audio recording has been gradually becoming harder and harder to do; at present I can only use Firefox, as Chrome and IE have both, in their turn, decided that they won’t play nicely. The fact that audio recording is STILL using Flash, when Adobe are going to end support for Flash next year, is surely a problem that someone should be working on? Bug reports and emails on the subject are going unanswered, except that it’s “a low priority issue”.

I’m struggling to see reasons to continue with my pro membership given that everything I do is on Decks - there are a lot of people like me from what I’ve seen on the forums, and if Memrise start to lose money from people’s pro memberships, won’t that mean that they’re even less likely to be able to fix the problems that they apparently are unable to fix now? I’m feeling extremely sidelined by the whole thing; since the Decks release a lot of things have needed fixing, and I can’t see that anything has actually been fixed, but instead, Memrise gets an unnecessary makeover. At least I now know WHY nothing has been fixed on Decks, Memrise has been too busy going blobby, yellow and childish.

Please, Memrise, focus on the things that are important. You would never have had to fix the UI if you’d have left it with the garden theme in the first place, there was NOTHING wrong with it whatsoever. The people who are going to be attracted more by a bright theme than functionality aren’t the ones who are going to stay long term. The functionality of learning is what’s important, and the sites as they stand don’t look like they belong to a serious company at all, what with the blobby yellow design on the one, and the range of display problems on the other. You’ve had a tremendously loyal following, please don’t alienate us.

I would welcome a response from Memrise indicating the direction in which they plan to take Decks. Will audio recording be fixed? Will functionality ever be enhanced according to the many requests by the community? Will there be any point whatsoever in a pro membership for those of us who are focused solely on community created content? Will Memrise give any love to the Decks platform, given that there won’t be a lot of money coming from it that I can see? Do we as community content creators / users matter at all?

[TLDR : I’m really worried about the direction that Memrise is taking, and haven’t found any reassurances yet, since actions speak louder than words. Perhaps I shouldn’t have invested so much time and effort in a website that I have no real way to influence. Please don’t make me regret being one of Memrise’s biggest advocates for a number of years.]

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Very well said, I agree on all levels. It might again be time you commented on things yourself, @edcooke!

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Thanks, @Olaf.Rabbachin - I’d forgotten about the ability to tag people in my posts. It doesn’t seem to have spurred anyone into action though (can’t say I’m surprised). :frowning:

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thtat’s the point for us, long term users… well…

unfortunately, the team did not address yet at least one, one! of the many bugs plaguing Decks… we had some answers in the beginning, after which those from the team who were active in here seemed to have vanished into thin air…

(well, many of the complaints over the new memrise design are formulated in some more childish uneducated stupid manner than usual… somehow I can relate to that)

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After the Decks-announcement I had had the feeling that the Memrise team had sort of sprung into life, commenting and answering questions here on the forum, generally being more active.
Sadly this very positive development seems to be more on the dwindling side again. All the current ranting surely won’t help much either, which is why I like your original posting very much - constructive criticism is what we need, swearing won’t take us anywhere …

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@Sarigne, Thank you for setting out your concerns (which I share) so clearly and eloquently. I hope it prompts a thoughtful response. I have pinned this thread temporarily so that it maintains some prominence. Hope that’s ok with you.

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Please could the MemRise team comment on the fact that Official language courses seem to have now been removed from Decks (without an apparent announcement?).

Official MemRise Courses not available on Decks

Correction - apparently they were never there.

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@Sarigne - I too have been a prolific supporter and evangelist for MemRise (for many many years) and have always tried my hardest to create and improve courses as well as assisting users in the many Forums (over the years) as well as sending positive feedback and requests.

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Thanks so much for taking the time to formulate such a well thought-out response! I agree with absolutely everything you say!

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“He who runs after two hares catches neither” , that’s the feeling I’m getting from Memrise. They took the dreaded Duolingo route, where everything has to look silly and cartoony. Unfortunately, for an adult, these things hinder you more than anything. As for their involvement, it looks a lot like minimising the damages to me. Memrise will not go anywhere anytime soon, but Decks just might.

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I absolutely agree with everything you said in your post.

For the Decks app I really hope these following features are included;

  • Ability to upload image memes.
  • Automatic ‘text to speech’ for words that do not have an Audio file (just like tinycards by duolingo.
  • Ability to edit courses directly from mobile devices.

It would be a shame if the Memrise team literally replicates the same features of the main Memrise website. Decks is a community contribution, therefore, these features are essential for the created application.

Please consider Memrise!
Kind regards.

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Well, they said a month ago that they will move the community courses to Decks and keep their courses on Memrise web site so this is as planned.

Kind of happy with the Decks web site and eagerly awaiting for the promised Decks mobile app, the Decks web site looks good, has some small issues but those could be fixed.

So, move over to using quality community courses on Decks.

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Yes thanks @Lodrogyaltsen3 - just found that out through this post:

Official MemRise Courses not available on Decks

Actually I predominantly use Community courses and create and support hundreds :wink:

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Thank you for this post. I am (was?) a new user but 100% agree. And I believe they will lose revenue because of the direction they’re headed; after seeing the new site design I applied for a refund of my annual subscription because it was still within the 30 days. I initially decided to subscribe because the content was good and the site was visually appealing and professional looking, even if navigation was a bit confusing at first and there are some features I could wish for. Then, days after spending the money (which I hadn’t budgeted but was able to scrape up), the entire site changed into a place I cannot imagine myself spending any time and the colour scheme is very unconducive to learning. Even just writing this, the ugly-yellow bar at the top of the screen keeps trying to pull my eyes. Once you’re actually in the lesson the yellow ugliness is not as bad, but I just felt so turned off by the entire redesign. I really liked the content of the Arabic course I was doing and, until/unless I find something better, I will keep checking back now and again to see if things have improved. But I’m not going to pay for a subscription again until they address this terrible mistake.

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hmmm

I don’t want that… i dislike profoundly tts (artificial voces), unless they are tremendously good. About editing from the app, i am not sure what for a number of course creators are really burning for that…

btw mems, memes are something else…

anyhow, sad days, ours (i am thinking more of assange than of memrise decks team being utterly absent lately)

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I have to disagree, Tinycards text to speech is pretty good, I rather have an artificial voice than no audio because at least I am getting some understanding of how the word sounds. For me doing a course without audio results in a lack of motivation.

Statistically it is proven users spend most of their time on mobile devices so having the ability to edit a course directly seems more logical. I hate to keep referring back to Duolingo but since they are a leading competitor you can see they have made it available for users to edit their courses on Tinycards from the app. Memrise might be surprise with the accessibility of users able to create and edit directly from the app, more users might create courses.

Well at least you knew what I meant about Mems, image mems are so much more motivational and associating images with words have been proven to be an effect way of storing the learnt word in the long term memory.

So overall I think these features are at least worth considering, rather than instantly dismissing them.

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I could have sworn that I read about someone editing a course from their mobile. But maybe they just accessed their course via their web browser on their mobile phone.

I might just try it on a tiny course I made for myself which nobody else uses.

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Hi @amanda-norrsken,

I read it too. The topic is:

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You have an amazing memory and ability to find things!

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