Important announcement about Decks

JBorrego · February 11, 2020, 11:13am

Hi everyone,

I’m here today with important news. As you know, some time ago we decided to split community-created courses from Memrise and give them a different home, Decks. We thought that this split would best serve the community content (with a simpler experience in a separate website and app), while also allowing us to build new experiences in the main Memrise app in a quicker and simpler way. We’ve received a tonne of feedback on this decision from its announcement and during the building and trialling of the Decks website and apps. And after thoughtfully considering all of your feedback, we re-evaluated both roadmaps, for Decks and Memrise.

In a nutshell, we recognised that Memrise’s community-created courses are actually best placed within the main Memrise apps and website, rather than as a separate experience - there’s too much overlap in usage and we heard that it’s much better for you to have them all within a thumb-press’ distance within the app, or website.

Because of this, we decided to close down the Decks project and bring all community-created courses back to the main Memrise product and brand. Although we’ve already invested time and work into separating them, and even though some of you were growing used to learning on Decks, we believe this will lead to a better overall experience. We hope that the experience of creating and learning community courses will thrive when properly located in the main app and website. We’re grateful for all your engagement and your continuous support in the meantime, and we hope you’ll think it’s the right call too.

What will change?

From the 25th of February at 16:00 UK time, the Decks website will be closed and all traffic will be redirected to the Memrise Website.

How will it affect you?

Your account, learning progress and any courses you have created or are learning will not be affected. They will be fully available on the Memrise website and app. We will deal with all the database migrations and necessary stuff so that you don’t lose out on any of the content you have created.

Is anything changing for community-created courses in Memrise?

Nothing will be different or change immediately. We have been in touch with some of you and we have lots of really good feedback on all areas and we will be analysing it to make Memrise better, including to your experience as a course creator or learner of community-created courses.

Kind Regards,
the Memrise team

JBorrego · February 11, 2020, 11:14am

Olaf.Rabbachin · February 11, 2020, 12:42pm

I do think that this is a very good decision - I never fancied the idea of having to use two apps!

Hydroptere · February 11, 2020, 1:06pm

Lol! just loooool

DW7 · February 11, 2020, 2:14pm

Thanks for being willing to re-evaluate and to seek users’ opinion.

As I’ve said elsewhere, the brilliant MemRise language courses and the Community created ones can be mutually beneficial, plus Community courses are available in a lot of non-language topics.

There are lots of comments on this Forum, but my main comments are:

1) I prefer the colour and graphics scheme of the Decks web

2) I hope people will be able to search for Community courses within the App rather than having to go to the web-site. (And added filters and searches would be great.)

3) The structure of which category courses are listed under and hence the Forum could do with some rationalisation. (I’ve previously made some comments and suggestions.)

4) Community courses could benefit with a clearer link to the Forum area. (Perhaps with some sort of announcement and raison d’être.)

PS : Thanks for explaining it so clearly too @JBorrego

Thomas.Heiss · February 11, 2020, 2:28pm

Hello,

what I liked on the decks.memrise.com website was the colour scheme with some red/green/blue or orange buttons (from the old old design, before the recent changes in 2019).

Instead of throwing away the webcode completely why don’t you support different styles in the user settings?

Why can’t I choose from 1-4 web styles on your www.memrise.com website?

Yes, I am using it (as the screen is not jumping, the review session dialog and multiple-choice boxes were “jumping” a bit up and down on your new decks subdomain) mainly.

But please do not ask me how I can get along with those yellow buttons.

Thomas.Heiss · February 11, 2020, 2:30pm

Can I get the streak dialog back for my completed Portuguese BR 1-6 courses?

Or please add a bonus level with 1-3 new (unlearned) words in all your official courses (from UK/US English) so I can see my daily course streaks.

Like I can do with any unfinished courses:
Your official BT BR 7 course also has a bonus / congratulation level with three words so I do not have to “finish” it and I will never lose my “daily streak” view.

Thomas.Heiss · February 11, 2020, 2:37pm

How about adding more category filters to your web UI so a user can subselect which courses he/she wants to find and shall be displayed on 2-4 pages?

Like:

Official courses created by Memrise team vs
beginner (shorter) course series from Ben Whately (e.g. Learn Brazilian Portuguese Basics, French Basics, Minimum Viable French/Italian,…) or
your Hacking series (from the blog) vs
other (bigger) user-created courses (1000/2000/5000 frequency, 501/1000 common verbs,…).

Quite often I simply get lost in the sheer mass of (very different) available courses with no proper ordering options (by total learners, course size in hours, popularity, quality) when I visit my own user course learning page or the learning pages from other users I do find in the course leaderboards.

Why is there not a rating button for a user-created course or where people can leave a heart (up-vote) depending how good it actually is?

Even for one single language category like Portuguese BR it is hardly possible to get a good big picture which ones you should REALLY start from that huge course list.

Therefore I have to spy a lot on other user profiles…

MemriseSupport · February 11, 2020, 4:11pm

Thanks everyone for your feedback! We’ll pass this on to the team for further consideration.

Best wishes,

Memrise team.

DW7 · February 11, 2020, 4:37pm

Filters :

And community courses offering audio - the use of a on the course logo used to be a good idea.

PS
Many thanks for all your support (aka “likes”). Hopefully @MemriseSupport will notice this and perhaps be able to help.

Norsk_VietNamesisk · February 11, 2020, 11:24pm

Too groove.

Hombre_sin_nombre · February 11, 2020, 11:39pm

@JBorrego

Jesus, could you be more specific about what’s in store for community courses? Are you planning to build new features for community courses? Any ideas about monetizing user-created content?

Surely, it’s better to have all your courses in one place, but it wasn’t the biggest concern for users. Mainly there were two issues with the Decks a) no app, which is uncomfortable thing for smartphone users and b) consequently, no offline mode. After you’ve agreed to build new apps, it was out of the question. It’s somehow strange to hear about this kind of feedback now.

Besides, you were saying that main reason to separate official courses from user-created is a technical issue, overlapping database or something, which was sort of an obstacle for you, impeding official courses from development. Did you solve it?

Jermo · February 12, 2020, 10:35am

I think this is a good decision. I’ll probably get my pro subscription back (I had cancelled when Decks was announced). Nice to see that the community feedbacks have been head.

SKKreativ · February 12, 2020, 11:47am

This is great news, I am happy to see Memrise has really considered the feedback from its users.

Perhaps now moving forward the team can really focus on refining all the platforms for Memrise.

Here are my suggestions for the transition;

Please make the Memrise website mobile friendly like how Decks was.
Now in the Memrise app there should be distinguishable sections created, one tab for Community Courses and another for Offical Courses.

Thomas.Heiss · February 12, 2020, 12:35pm

This probably means to corrupt the existing code for the webportal and the full desktop mode on a computer / laptop.

I strongly want to disagree with this.

Memrise team, if you want to support both platforms (desktop + mobile) please redirect to a dedicated /mobile website and split your code.

What I had tested so far (as explained in my previous post):
The DECKS website had a few minor issues (jumping screen up/down for multiple-choices) on a 14.1" Laptop with a 1280x800 screen.

The www.memrise.com website currently does not have those “jumping up/down screen” issues.

So my advise:
Please do not touch the frontend desktop html code.
Leave it as it is right now, please.

Example (for the worse)

Take a look how horrible the www.duolingo.com web portal is after they constantly tweak their website.

Last 2020 web UI code updates:

added too much space (erratic layout of the html div elements)
progress bar + footer does not fit anymore on a 14.1" Laptop 1280x800 screen
I have to scroll up and down all the time to read the footer / error text / alternative answer solution, multiple-choice text, go up to the progress bar and be able to read the first sentence
introduction of the React Javascript UI library (in 2020??) gives me regular “script does not react / freeze” messages on Firefox V52.9.0esr

Website code changes in 2019:

Are not really compatible with Firefox V52.9.0:
Constant freezes, high CPU load, blackscreens after only a few lessons/timed practice sessions (I regularly have to restart the browser which does not happen on any other learning website including Memrise)
to use a free learning learning website you basically first have to buy a new computer and only use the very latest Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox Quantum browser versions as the web code and 3rd party libraries heavily depend on the newest APIs

Duolingo is hardly usable anymore on a Laptop without an external monitor.
Why was this not the case in 2016+2017/2018 (even not in 2019)?

I have no idea why frontend developers think that they need to “waste” (limited) space.

Everytime something does not work anymore, which was working very fine before, it drives away the userbase and makes people mad.

It normally takes multiple months to do any serious functional tests in a QS departement and only to release frozen code in a “stable / very well tested branch”.

SKKreativ · February 12, 2020, 1:10pm

I don’t know a lot about coding but I just find it strange how some pages are responsive and others are not.

The courses page, settings page, and when a user clicks into a particular course; all the code on my iPhone safari browser seems quite pleasant with the layout as shown below.

However all the other pages like the home, groups, and profile page are all over the place, making some actions and navigation difficult.

It would just be nice to have a bit more consistency.

lurkmoophy · February 12, 2020, 2:39pm

Thanks for all the feedback! Luke from the web team here. Definitely taking it on board when we’re deciding how we improve the web experience overall (we know it’s subpar at the moment, and we’ve got teams actively working on it)

On the responsive issues, which a few people have commented on - Where we’re currently at with the website is that we’re slowly but surely migrating the old Memrise web code across to a new tech stack. In doing this, whenever we update a section, we’ll be making it mobile friendly. Until then, if you add a community course on web, you can then go and use it in the app (ps. reintroducing community courses into the app is a known issue and is hopefully going to be looked at soon).

KungaLodro84 · February 12, 2020, 9:14pm

I’m just happy there’s communication from Memrise about all this. Thanks!

Hombre_sin_nombre · February 13, 2020, 11:26am

Any chance you will put community courses under paywall? Because at the moment paywall sounds like a missing link between “we decided to close down the Decks project and bring all community-created courses back” and “reintroducing community courses into the app is a known issue”. It would be great to hear about your plans.

P.S. Very interesting that you called restrained access to community courses an “issue”, because we know that it’s an issue of your own making. It wasn’t issue for you a year ago, or when Memrise team decided to put this restriction on.

MemriseSupport · February 13, 2020, 11:55am

Unfortunately we can’t go into further details at this time, but please rest assured that all feedback is read and taken into account. We are collecting all your concerns and will add them to the feedback we’ve gathered in the past weeks by talking to some of you. All of the changes will be weighted against normal Memrise business plans - we’ll make sure to post updates as soon as we have more information to share.

Once again, thanks everyone for the extensive feedback!

Best wishes,
Memrise team.