Hey folks! Just wanted to get some feedback on the Memrise Dashboard. This hasn’t been touched for almost seven years now, and we’re just kicking off a project to see if we can make any improvements.
I had a few questions for your folks, as I know you’re our power users…
What are the three things you do most often on this screen
What information/thing would you be saddest to see go?
What niggle or annoyance would you change if you had the chance?
Big questions I know! And don’t worry, we’ll be doing LOTS of user testing, rolling things out to Labs and getting feedback as much as possible on this one, as I know it’s an area that could so easily be messed up!
Can’t believe it’s been the same for 7 years. There must have been minor changes in the look!
What are the three things you do most often on this screen
1 - Find a course I’ve previously started (either by scrolling down or filtering to a category)
2 - Click on a course to start learning or revising
3 - Check my current progress including stats (to check on my continuous streak of 365 days)
(PS Occasionally I use it to quit a course I have looked at, then decided not to follow.) (PPS Can I add I sometimes look the number to water, plant and difficult words next to their icons, under the blue bar.)
What information/thing would you be saddest to see go?
1 - Course picture and title
2 - My image and information
3 - My stats
4 - My leaderboard
5 - Filtering listing option.
What niggle or annoyance would you change if you had the chance?
1 - Go for square or circle icons that show the whole course image as intended (not blobs)
2 - Show the Creator of the course.
3 - Show the full title of a course
4 - Suggestion, perhaps darken the background slightly.
Come back if you want more information.
(I’m sure you’ll get lots of different answers!)
I had put this down:
Allow some filtering of courses by key words (eg “volcano” or “GCSE”).
I know that one can filter by topic (eg “Architecture” or “Stars”) at the top right on the home page but one can search by key words by going to “Courses”.
I mainly use the app. I usually access the dashboard to find a course and edit its data, so I can’t really say much about 1 and 2.
The performance! When the page has (initially) loaded, it takes like 5 or so seconds until the first 5 courses show up. If I want to navigate, say, to the 25th course I work on, it takes a lot “scroll down + wait + repeat” action until I get to the course.
Not using web a lot, mostly to add new words to my community courses, so scrolling down to a certain course is my favourite action.
Strange question. There’s not much on this page, everything is more or less in its place; what would you like to remove?
Not exactly nuisances, but what I would change:
make courses list more compact, for instance, days of the week info is almost useless
as Olaf said, loading time is enormous
it was my proposition for Android team, but applies to web, too - pin feature, like pinned notes, would be of great help. Meaning courses won’t change their given order if you open any of them.
put a quick link to the left side to the list of courses you are teaching so to save navigation time.
agree on those points about design by DW7
make visible a real number of items to review for courses which contain more than 1000 items (not end them with the highest of 999, more details in this thread).
The three things I use the Home Page most often for are: navigating between my courses; accessing my Profile Page (although I can also do this from other pages); and seeing what my total review load is.
As others have said, this is a bit of an odd question. I wouldn’t want to lose the blue ‘Review’ button; and the drop-down box that lets us filter the page content is important for navigating between course/subjects.
What are the three things you do most often on this screen
1 - Wait for it to load initially
2 - Filter by language, and click Review
3 - Wait for it to load, scroll down and try to click on forums whilst the next part loads, mostly fail in doing so, thus scroll down and try to click on forums whilst the next part loads, mostly fail in doing so (4x at the moment). then click on forums.
What information/thing would you be saddest to see go?
filter at top
ability to revise mixed words from multiple courses
What niggle or annoyance would you change if you had the chance?
loading speed. sorry, loading endless slowness
streaks/goals - provide switch to turn these off to stop the waste of space
provide ability to limit to courses I currently work on instead of full list (no, groups don’t really work as you have to go there every time again)
I think in general maybe something could be done to make points more meaningful - more achievements or something? Otherwise they’re only really useful in the immediate sense of making sure you practice X number of words a day, while not meaning much cumulatively.
We badly need some added metrics like just a simple little graph that shows how many words you learn per day over time. The calendar with 3 very similar light shades of green (and no clear idea when they flip colors, like 1500 and 2700 or something? Cant tell) for learning events is ok, but more could be done with that as well. I really mostly just want a words learned/words reviewed kind of plot chart each day that also maybe tracks mistakes you make each day, etc, etc. There were some browser extensions that did these types of things but they don’t seem maintained anymore.
As a workflow thing we really need a way to say Ignore Reviewing for Today when you just want to learn new words. Like for me for example I want to just do speed reviews once 100 words have accumulated to review, and its very annoying to have done one, then want to progress to learn more, then it constantly kicks you back into review for just 1-2 words so I have to make a couple extra clicks at the end of each learning session to learn new words instead of reviewing.
I don’t really know what groups is and would be nice if there was some kind of graphic on the page, I in fact only realized it was there after kind of studying the homepage to think about what I’d change.
Otherwise it could just use a little polish that’s a bit beyond my paygrade, a refreshed look, maybe some curved edges instead of everything being squared off, maybe a font change or two. Minor tweaks that would just give it a fresh feel.
Yes I have my own Google spreadsheet I update daily with how many words I learned and how many points generated the previous day. Those stats are – for me – more meaningful than any other stats on that page.
The great waste of real estate and the giant course rectangles. I would divide the screen into two course-columns with smaller course rectangles. If that were not enough I would also try a better colour scheme adding a bit of contrast. Then and only then would I start to use this page.
If you are wondering how I use the website without using this screen, the answer is simple. Many years ago when the changes were last made I quickly put my courses in groups and proceeded to avoid using the home screen.
I just did a quick wireframe, by no means is it extensive, but it at least expresses the general idea that I want to portray. When an icon of a category is selected from the top, the grid below changes accordingly. I feel like the drop-down filter is a little cumbersome and this design has a better hierarchy, plus it is more suitable for users who are undertaking a larger amount of courses.
Can I draw your attention to this comment - as I think it is still ‘wrong’ in my mind.
True of Preview and Review.
When Learning, hitting the X asks if I want to leave the page but then does nothing but hitting the pause allows quitting and returning to the course which is correct.
