Currently, it is possible to see exactly how many people have signed up for the courses, so I know, for example, that for the first part of the 8,000+ Most Common Swedish Words course, that 12.3K people have added this course to the list of courses they are using. By hovering over this number with the mouse, I can see that the exact number is 12,338.
Will this feature be exported to Decks?
It would be good to know if new people are managing to find their way to Decks once the new website has been launched.
Well, as many others have pointed out already, it stings that they are going to spend resources to maintain this site for free which generates no revenue at all. Itās a sign they are not to be continued or if they do, the quality of the site will decrease with time.
It seems like a risky bet to do that be because the app tries to sync with the server and you could potentially lose all your progress of weeks (months, years?) should your local app inyour phone stop or suffet any issue.
This is sad, I developed a mobile app myself to push new words into my courses in memrise in a convenient way. Iāve lost many hours of my free timeā¦
Create two sections of the app and two different sections of the Memrise servers. The first section works for user-created courses. The second works for official courses. The sections work independently.
Many of us pay for Pro and study community courses on the mobile app. We keep our mobile app, you keep your revenue, you gain the ability to move faster with your official courses.
The only way to generate revenue with a free website is ads:
So basically by destroying the user experience, they can monetise āDecksā, as it is becoming apparent this mobile āfriendlyā website is where the community courses are being sent to die. The website will be not be promoted, the user experience will be poor (due to ālack of resourcesā), user numbers will fall, then the plug will be pulled.
I would love to see a costing from Memrise for forking the app. Renaming one fork āDecksā and freezing development and making it a freemium (suggest a certain number of free minutes a day like āDropsā) or subscription only app with offline access.
Iām working on the assumption that the user experience on the āDecksā mobile website will be poor and that it will be switched off entirely eventually.
UPDATE:
Note this quote from a recent job posting from Memrise (you can find by searching Communication Design Manager Memrise):
āWe have just completed an in-depth rebrand project and now have clear direction on how we can best manifest our character through our products and communications. Now is time to bring that identity to life!ā
No. Most users are people who barely use the app and probably donāt know community courses or Decks exist. So Memrise will not suffer that huge of a loss in the end, but theyāll still be affected.
Yes if their new target are āNew yearās promise to learn a language and forget it a month laterā audience then decks and custom classes is not in their interest.
Just did a search for Spanish on the Google Play store, there are 14 rows of 9 apps (i.e. 126 apps) listed before Memrise. The casual language learning market is very competitive.
Personally Iād target all the casual learners AND the intermediate learners AND those who want to go all the way to proficiency. Casual learners donāt pay for multi-year subscriptions.
This is a very intriguing question how many users Memrise has on each platform. According to SimilarWeb they have about 9 million users per month on desktop and mobile web.
Given the latest tendency to use smartphones more than desktops this number for the app should be more or less the same. Also, many users going to desktop version only to subscribe for courses/create them.
P.S. With this tool you can see how many positive and negative reviews Memrise get in the last days.
Iām working on the assumption that the user experience on the āDecksā mobile website will be poor and that it will be switched off entirely eventually.
UPDATE:
Note this quote from a recent job posting from Memrise (you can find by searching Communication Design Manager Memrise):
ā We have just completed an in-depth rebrand project and now have clear direction on how we can best manifest our character through our products and communications. Now is time to bring that identity to life!ā - hence āDecksā where community courses are sent to die.
Itās not hard to find ways to care for your customers. And the simplest way to do it is to make your product work in the way your customers want it to.
