Saw the e-mail on my phone. Immedately head to forums (never post usually) and see exactly what I expect.
Now, rather than just echo everyone, even though I 100% agree, lets consider some things.
- Memrise will think: Okay, let just post it. Send the e-mails, post to the forum. Yeah we will get some negativity, you always do, but it will all blow over.
Guarentee that is is the mentaltity of at least some of the Memrise staff/execs. I seldom see businesses actually listen to their user base. The ones that do don’t make these kind of bad decicions in the first place and so don’t end up in the position where they need to listen to the desperate outcry of their userbase. It’s probably all too late.
- Keven is probably just here for clear up
There’s not much point asking the poor guy for the strategic basis of the decicion. He probably has an initative to only answer questions about the transition to decks and how decks will work.
- A ‘mobile friendly’ website for decks
There is rarely such a thing. I work in the technology industry and I think we all know as well that even some of the biggest and best tech companies struggle to make a ‘mobile friendly’ website thrive. The technology meta has been about easy to use ‘apps’ for a long time now, cmon’, we’re not stupid. Memrise just have no interest in developing one. For what reason I do not know.
- Decks is either an attempt to compete with Anki, or just a waste bin
If it’s the former, good luck with that. Serious Anki users are usually the technical type and will expect some serious stuff and are not likely to move across. If its just a waste bin because you want to purge, that makes sense. Sadly.
- Who on earth is your target audience?
I don’t understand who you are competing with. We know there are the likes of DuoLingo but frankly you need a unique selling point and there is no logical reason I can think of that you should get rid of community driven courses. It only serves to better the learners experience. I can only imagine its legal issues or some other technical incompitency on your part that has led to this move. Either way you shoudl work on a solution, rather than just dishonour your users and devalue the experience they came for in the first place.
- and therein lies the crux of the issue - do you even care about the learning experience?
Companies who want to thrive usually follow in the footsteps of Apple, Dyson, South West Airlines: the user experience and custoemr service is above all. You’re simply demonstrating the opposite and its painful.
I am so sorry to be so negative to the Memrise staff. I really love this app. As others have also said, I have a pro subscription to support the app and I don’t mind paying it whilst it fits my needs. I would even be willing to pay a bit more in return for improvements and more offical content. However - your own courses are OK and I enjoy them, but by removing these extra features and courses, you are removing the value that most of us are looking for. Clearly. It’s also pretty awful that some people have paid for lifetime access and you are willing to do something so extreme with little to no research or customer relations.
I am sorry that you are recieving a flurry of savage comments, but the reality is your users are not stupid - we are the kind of people who learn things for a hobby, remember? We are precisely the kind of people who expect logic and rationale behind changes. You’ve not provided any.
Because of all of the above, I can only concldue that Memrise has a strategy that has nothing to do with the users needs, they probably want to do a massive rebrand, compete with someone, or just have some money troubles. They can’t be this naive to not realise they will lose ton’s of subscriptions, so I can only think that they simply don’t care.
I welcome any feedback from Memrise themselves. Thank you for the service you have delivered in previous years, either way.
