I suppose it’s almost impossible for tech companies to admit their own mistakes, even if deep in the heart they know they have made one. It should be a real freak up, only then something could be changed. But it’s like every man are, ain’t it?
Though this ziggy thing is disgusting and the so called old system was much better, I’m sure they can show you some graphics, statistics and whatnot just about how good they actually are, how good things are going since the invention of Ziggy and all the dissatisfied users should shut the mouth up…
Oh wait, it’s a yesterday’s news:
My guess is there’ll be another redesign, for example, in about a year or two. But nobody inside the Memrise team gonna say that Ziggy was a freak up. Anyway, Ziggy is not the end of the world, you can still use Memrise for your pleasure and pump up your language skills.
I honestly think Ziggy is cute, but I still don’t like him, since he’s always ugly looking, and sometimes strikes me as just plain hideous. (This is coming from someone with a tacky troll face on his profile, so that should say something!) Hopefully, if they do decide to bring badges back (or some equivalent), they won’t try to work Ziggy into them.
My Kindle Memrise app still has the old badge system and I greatly prefer it. It isn’t intrusive like Ziggy. I’m not a little kid and I don’t find kawaii culture and “cute ambassadors” in learning experiences to be very appealing. The problem with kawaii is that to like it means you must adopt the particular cultural frame of mind that enjoys it. Badges and titles didn’t ask that of me. I can been the dour, cynical Western jerk I am and still be like, “Hey, I earned a new title!” Now it’s like I’m being asked to agree that this ugly cartoon is cute and that him sprouting a new limb when I reach the next level is adorable and I’m just so tired after typing that please kill me
It’s the same thing with Duolingo, which I find myself constantly reminding people is a tech company pretending to be educators. Does anyone like their new crown system over the previous system? No. Literally no one does. But Duolingo is quick to cram it down everyone’s throats that their alleged A/B testing results SHOWED, yes, SHOWED that it was an improvement. Hey, you there complaining in the Duolingo forum that you find the crown system unintuitive and cumbersome, hush now and prostrate before to the almighty tech start-up god, A/B testing. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
I’ve worked in education my entire adult life and I know the difference between educators and tech companies that are pushing a product. I have worked mostly with special needs students and students with various disabilities, and the primary quality of a good educator is that you are RESPONSIVE to the needs of your students. You have to be able that admit an approach you thought was good isn’t working and then CHANGE it. But when tech company invest so much time and money into an idea they become very calcified and aren’t able to adapt responsively like a good educator would. They NEED it to work, and it ends up becoming a waiting game where they hope their users will just stop complaining or at least buy themselves time until they can get more funding. Le sigh.
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My Kindle Memrise app still has the old badge system and I greatly prefer it.
Lucky. In the old Android app with badges you just can’t login anymore.
New duolingo system is actually bearable. You get used to it after a while and even start seing positive things in it. On forums there are even people who say that do like it more than the old one (so there are at least some). And the duo team at least have tried that system on someone before changing everything. So on this point I tend to disagree with you (that noone likes it). Voting would have cleared the situation.
But I totally agree that needs or wishes have to be considered. Systems or apps should be changeable and be actualy changed according to the wishes of the most users. To know which things to change or even whether to change them or not, a poll should be made, so that everyone could vote on something. Don’t think that there a lot of people here who prefer Ziggy to badges.
As another dour, cynical jerk, I think Duolingo’s crown system has one thing going for it over the previous design: I have a more exact idea of which skills I have more fully developed. But “crowns” are silly, mostly because they’re still minor things. (“Level up? {Flat} Whoop. de. doo! Let’s throw that on the pile of worthless participant medals.”) And besides, there’s a better way to do that than using those crowns. Anki automatically renders statistics for how many cards I get right in an average review, among other things; I think putting up some display of “strong suits” and “weak areas” would provide something more direct to go from in Duolingo as well.
And I only said all of that because I think Memrise could use that feature more effectively than it’s using Ziggy.
I agree this is a minor issue, compared to various other changes. However, this “cosmetic” reason, plus the bad official courses that are being promoted so much, is the reason why I cannot recommend Memrise to anyone in my real life (out of the internet) anymore. If they spend only 5 minutes on it, they will think my tastes are rubbish and see me as a more childish and stupid person. So, it is not that unimportant.
I don’t know that that in and of itself proves anything. There are any number of reasons a person might buy a product they’re less than thrilled with. Especially in the realm of technology, there’s a weird pressure to keep buying the newest thing lest one be left behind, as well as the engineered obsolescence of older models that force people to buy new phones whether they want them or not.
The same thing is true here with Memrise. We need the site to study our vocab because that’s where we’ve put all our vocab, which means we automatically have to put up with whatever the site chooses to do. The only other option is rather drastic, as it requires finding a way to port all of what we’ve stored on Memrise over to some other system either manually or with someone’s coded program, often to another system that does not have the features we do appreciate about Memrise. Given that the option opposed to staying is drastic, it would likely require a drastic change in the functionality of the site (such as the loss of mems) to spur many people to leave. Otherwise, the instinctive cost-benefit analysis in our heads is willing to put up with the space theme and the Ziggy and the purple and everything when we don’t prefer them, whether we complain actively or not.
(raises hand) I like the crowns system on Duolingo significantly better than the old system. For someone who learns extra languages slowly, on the side, around schoolwork that requires me to learn different languages at a more deliberate pace, I find the crowns system much easier to work with on Duolingo. Because it preserves your progress, you can return to the app and begin learning where you left off, rather than re-reviewing topics that you already know well. Then, if you need a broader practice session, the new practice session actually does take concepts from across the levels you’ve learned, rather than simply stepping you through the review process you would’ve done anyway if you’d obsessively tried to keep everything gold (maybe that was my real problem).
I totally agree with everyone mentioning bias in such the poll, resulting from the fact, that those who were happy with Ziggy wouldn’t even look for such the thread.
But there’s one more problem, related to all those Memperors titles. While they might be totally understandable if English is your first language, the rest of the world might find them confusing. Wondering if they are real words and we should learn them or what.
In fact, I think the ideal solution would be let each user choose which system they like best. It could even be the feature available only to those who have a paid account. I personally don’t, but I pay for my two children who really loved Ziggy and they never feel as motivated as they used to be, now that Ziggy’s gone
I personally disliked ziggy, but yeah I agree that it should be optional. I’ve always asked for more customization on memrise, even if it was for pro members only(which would be fair, programmers aren’t cheap. But it would also be more incentive to pay for pro)
