Hi!
Over the next few days, those of you learning on iOS will see some changes to the course dashboard (Android is following soon!). We’ve removed unused buttons, made it easier to find your next course, shifted the layout, and, most obviously, reversed the direction of the dashboard.
Why have we made these changes?
We’ve had loads of feedback from you over the years that the dashboard direction didn’t make sense, which we also found through user research
Without the space theme (RIP Ziggy) it makes even less sense; shifting the layout gives our Design team much more freedom to build awesome features for you in the app.
We know that communicating our decisions hasn’t always been our strongest point, so whilst this is a relatively small update in the grand scheme of things, we wanted to let you know why the changes were made. We hope you enjoy the new dashboard and we’re always pumped to hear your opinions!
P.S. We’ve been working on other things as well (…fixing streaks and offline mode…). More announcements will be made in the next couple of weeks!
I am a little disappointed with the new update. Pretty much a user can no longer see the brief description for a course or see the particular leaderboard in the selected course. The new update is still not a very strong design approach for better user experience, in my opinion.
Now on Android, this update is confusing a bit. Shifting to two buttons (from the original three) in the bottom bar seems to be a bit overthought change but the menu can still be accessed via a separate button, so that’s okay, I guess.
The course list, however, is now tiring, I’d say: courses are closer together, with useless share buttons and remaining two icons so large, making it really… unpleasant (don’t know how else can I describe this feeling).
I get it, you want to keep changing everything (RIP Ziggy indeed) but is all of this that necessary?
I envy a friend of mine who stopped updating her app when she saw the yellow theme on my phone… She still has this lovely, pleasant garden theme
Thankfully, I still have my last phone with Ziggy still kept alive, so I have a way back home
@JBorrego@MemriseSupport
This latest update (android) to the dashboard has messed up the streak counters and the daily completed indicator.
most of my courses now show 51 or 52 day streaks ( should be considerably higher) some with daily goal complete and some not.
All are showing the correct streaks on the web and all courses are showing goal complete.
I just noticed that the same thing is happening on my other android device which has not been updated to the latest memrise release.
also when i log out and in again most of my courses now show as 51 days and all show with no goals completed.
All courses still showing complete and correct streaks on web.
I am having trouble getting some of the courses to load, for example when I try to go to one of my American Sign Language courses, it shows the name of one of my French flashcard vocabulary courses but I don’t get anything but the loading circle.
I tried to open one of the official French courses, and after a few minutes it opened a user-created course in a different language. Using android version 2.94_18817_memrise. App on the Kindle Fire still working flawlessly.
Thank you for letting us know about the things you are experiencing. I am sorry you are seeing some issues and I will try to separate them so we can work on them.
There seems to be an issue with your streaks @LarBoylan and @neaz333
That issue is unrelated to the improvement dashboard and it is part of the streaks effort we are trying to deliver. We are looking at your accounts to debug them and see what is it that went wrong so that we can sort it out for you.
@FishSlap your issue is definitely related to the changes and improvements to make the dashboard not just better UI wise but a lot more robust, easy to work with (for us) and overall faster and better. Unfortunately there are always edge cases that we miss. We have now fixed the first issue you mention with the loading screen (it was related to courses with no description) and we are looking at the second one but I am not sure we will be able to reproduce it so if you are, please let me know how
scrolling inside courses and levels is fixed (you return to the last opened level or word)
Not plus points:
left swipe to open a home page (courses list) does not work anymore
condensed view of the courses on the home page looks esthetically unattractive, such buttons as bin and share are certainly not much needed to be there
settings button migrated from the bottom to the top right corner, it takes more finger distance to reach for it
points score for each course has disappeared
when you open a course there is only a name of it, but many courses have similar names, thus to see title pictures there would be great
“learn new course” button takes a lot of space and so repulsive yellow
formation of the levels is reversed - it is going down while previously it has been going up. Does it mean we are descending into Hell as of now? Not the biggest concern, but this change does not have much sense
I understand the need to update the look and feel of the app over time but I haven’t been a fan of the changes the past two times. I miss the theming overall as it kind of game-ified the learning and gave it a narrative that felt fun, whereas now it feels bland. The course leader board doesn’t matter so much to me, but I can’t help but feel that if it’s going to exist somewhere on the app it might as well be on our profile in place of the friend leaderboard. Some friends have joined the app and stopped using it so my leader board has really just become a permanent account graveyard on my profile.
Since the dashboard update removed the button that allows you to see the course overview I now have no way of reviewing individual units (aside from scrolling through them). I used the individual unit reviews a lot in the old version to refresh my memory in a more focused way and I’m pretty sad that I can’t do that anymore. I know the team has given us a lot of improvements over the years and I appreciate the hard work. I do like the new look of the streak days at the end of a lesson!
Overall though the app still feels like it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be
I personally don’t feel like any of these changes were needed or that they are useful in any way… As has been previously stated, the course list looks too crowded, too small, with share and bin buttons that are too big and are really not that important here. I’m also annoyed that when switching from one course to another I have to scroll down to find the next one in the list whereas before it would automatically update to display the next one. I just find these changes more confusing than anything. Then again I’ve never really understood why you’ve been constantly redesigning the interface tbh.
To be fair, most web sites do refreshes of their look and feel, to fix mobile app issues (which by now is the biggest client of web sites), so I don’'t mind changing the look and feel from time to time. It does not cause me problems for learning languages.
I rather want their resources to be used to fix bugs and add useful learning features.
Last Friday my Android app got updated and I thus received the dashboard update. It really did drive me up the wall and I committed myself to sleeping over it before posting.
Still, it does again feel like you guys asked some web-developer - who knows nothing about the app or its features - to change things. No or too little effort was made to ensure that existing functionality was not affected through the update Because, as it seems, the course page (including the share option, leaderboard and others) has simply disappeared. In the previous version you could tap the title or the pencil icon. Neither of them works anymore.
Not good, not good at all.
As said by others, it is really incomprehensible as to why there seems to be a focus on continuously changing the layout when there is little need to do so, particularly when fixing things should be prioritized.
All that said, I was lucky to find out that, while my cell phone already updated to the latest version, my tablet (which is the device I use most of all times) hadn’t.
I didn’t find any setting to keep auto-updates while only turning it off for the Memrise app.
Any pointers to how to do this?
yes, if it is an android tablet.
Go to the google play store and select the memrise app.
In the top right corner select the 3 vertical dots.
You should be able to see and disable “enable auto update”.
Can’t wait to see what’s next.
