I hate the whole dashboard.
But now they made a big step towards unusability as I cannot see if there are words due to review. Dashboard, you had only one job.
Hey Fronika. Great to read you. You are one of my “competitors” here in Memrise. Whenever I look at my leaderboard chart I always think, where is Fronika… I need to beat her. 
Regards!
This dashboard update is so confusing and cumbersome. I don’t see the benefit of adding more steps to be able to select simple learning/review exercises, and there is absolutely no benefit in hiding the number of words that need to be watered. And the dashboard has been slow for awhile, but now it loads even more slowly. 
@BeaTrisy
I would also like to add that the new dashboard doesn’t seem to work correctly. I don’t like it anyways (for the reasons others already stated above), but it is showing me that there are courses that need “classic review” although there is nothing to be reviewed (or maybe I’m not understanding this new layout…). On the other hand I know there are difficult words, but I can’t review them from the dashboard since that option is greyed out (only via the coursepage itself I can review those words). That all is really annoying!
With all those changes and the backlash in this forum Memrise really should consider talking to its users (and I know some of them are already so horribly frustrated, that they can -at best- laugh about this suggestion).
Why don’t you ask your users, if they like the changes and act accordingly? These would be simple yes-no-questions, that would not take a lot of time- neither for the users to anwer, nor for you to evaluate them.
Please at least try to hear the voices of those who are paying customers and using Memrise every day.
I have been here for such a long time and I’m really good-natured and didn’t complain (all to much) until now, although most of the changes of the last years really haven’t been all to great…
Please listen to my voice as well - after all I am someone you once even featured in your blog, I am a really a dedicated user who wants this site to be properly useable.
Do you or any Memrise Staff have anything to say? It is infuriating the silence YOU ALL have when confronted. You (Memrise) has the WORST customer service I have ever known.
The “next up” entry is clearly selected at random, and their claim that it is selecting “what’s best” for us must therefore be false. I wonder if their false claim counts as false advertising in the legal sense? What other claims are false, I wonder? Is there really any “science” at all behind their algorithm?
Doesn’t anyone at Memrise realize that lying to their customers is fatal to their business in the long run?
Granted, it may work for a few months, until the customers catch on, but eventually they will resent all of the deceptions, and quit doing business with a company that lies. Memrise staff already have been caught in so many lies that it is reasonable now to assume that everything they say is a lie. That’s why there is so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt expressed in the forums about the future of user-created courses, and where the site is heading in general. And it appears that the management is very pleased with itself, and with this state of affairs, because they alone have created these conditions and perpetuate them constantly.
It does make me begin to wonder if Memrise isn’t really a site for learning as it purports to be. Maybe, as @Leggi suggested, it is all just a psychology experiment, perhaps to see just how much abuse customers will take before abandoning a business?
thank you soooo much! 
How long will we have to wait until you revert to the old dashboard button layout? Or will you stubbornly stck with your ‘improvements’.
i have almost a year here, being pro since the beginning, each update makes me feel like they do whatever they want without caring about users…
That’s great! Thank you very much!
Thank you for pointing this out!! But now that this is out in the open, they might foil us by changing this too!
You know what is worst, I have sent Tweets to both Ed Cooke and Memrise´s Twitter account. Neither has replied. I feel frustrated, is like talking to the wall, a child of 4 or a plant. Memrise is like living with a Chihuahua dog, it is cute and all but out of the blue it starts doing s#|?. You know that arguing is not an option, since there is no reply from its side and you know probably that if you make the animal understand the same result might come again in the future.
I was once captivated by Memrise simplicity and usage; I love explaining my students that knowledge was like a flower: fragile and beautiful, it required love and time to take care but at the end the pleasure was worth the effort. I loved making the connection between words and flowers, they decay if you don´t take care of them. My students loved Memrise too. They used to compete saying they had the biggest garden.
Nevertheless Memrise has never ever been consistent on what it does. I actually change mobiles due to Memrise: I went from Apple to Android since at the time the Android version was way better. After the app because a Frankestein of flowers/rockets/space/planets/and this ugly thing that evolves I went back to the web base. At least it didn´t have any dumb planets ( BTW I still don´t get the dumb planets idea). Soon I discovered that when typing in Japanese, my answers would get accepted before I click enter, but since I have IME my answer would appear in the next typing exercise. I thought it was a bug, and I grew used to it, now I discover it is a “feature” and it can not be disabled. Ok fine, I just erase my previous answer, no biggy I am a grown up man and can live with that. Then the answers in the bottom. Man! They are spoon feeding you the answer. Where is the challenge now?
I just had a glance of Memrise Beta for a week or two. When it became Memrise 1.0 members went nuts since many features were never ported into the new one. I remember the biggest issue was not been able to talk to users. Then it came a few useful changes like bulk upload which was praised and then it reached its peak to go downhill.
Many have pointed out: Memrise looks to be targeting kids from 5-10 who would forget about it in a week. In the meanwhile, long time users like us are left behind with CHILDISH interfaces. I used to recommend Memrise since it looked professional, I even said: Duolingo? What? GO to Memrise, that is a real company. Now I can say that Memrise is a company whose business assessor must be dumb kids who just left school and are trying to innovate something that is not broken. ( no offence to young kids).
Memrise should either disappear the flowers and planting and watering and mutate into Planets/ Discover and Protect? But you can not have both!
For those of you who are learning Japanese you should try iKnow.jp It is a great site with an amazing app. Everytime they make a change they explain WHY they do it. They answer your doubts and the site runs smoothly.
Memrise you are doom.
Yes. I never bought into the explanation they gave at the time of making the change, namely that there were people in some parts of the world who were confused by the concept of ‘planting a seed, watering and growing it’. I would like to know just how many parts of the world (that have access to the technology needed to use Memrise) have no understanding of the concept of planting seeds and growing flowers. There can´t be many, if any.
Instead, for the app, they introduced a confused mishmash of space rockets, planets, master spies and undercover missions, and bots… and then, bizarrely, retained the seed planting and watering cycle and imagery for learning new words/phrases which they previously said lots of people didn’t understand. That doesn´t make a lot of sense to me.
So I want to complain but there won’t be an answer or anyone considering my opinion. So I’m just going to say that I am now going to be looking into Anki.
IMHO Success should be measured by other things, other than conversion to Pro.
Continuity - being present every day for a certain amount of time (I have asked for a badge for a 1 year achievement many times before - not to be confused with learning streak on one course).
Progress through the different levels in a course (eg Memrise Italian 1).
Progression from the first course-level to the next level of course (eg to Memrise Italian 2 etc) right up to Ievel 7.
Exploration of other courses.
Contribution in the Forum - especially helping others when they have problems (thus enhancing the learner’s experience and saving the MemRise team, effort and keeping users interested).
Longevity - how long they stick with it (it’s not just about the numbers but about staying with the product).
Recruiting or recommending it to others - (don’t know how they would do that except they could look at Twitter and Facebook links used or by adding a “Recommend to a friend” button).
Willingness to create courses (with notice taken on popularity).
Willingness to support existing courses as a Contributor
Willingness to support abandoned courses that are still popular (what I call Custodian or Curator).
Number of followers and friends (a form of advertising).
The creation of Mems for others to use (are we still allowed to do that?).
The creation of “[Course Forums]” for our courses and willingness to support learners.
The contribution to official MemRise Language [Course Forums] often saving the team effort in replying.
Finding and reporting ambiguity or issues (ie proof-reading) official MemRise courses - thus helping the team improve their product by a quality audit.
Number of years of active participation on both the learning platform and the Forum.
And I might think of other ways.
All these ways, I think, show participation and success far more than a conversion to Pro which might not last.
Cc @lurkmoophy @Lien @BeaTrisy @MemriseMatty @JBorrego @Joshua @MemriseSupport
PS Many thanks for your support or endorsement with your “likes”.
I totally think that this is what they don’t get. It’s as important to get people to stay, as to get people to go pro once.
For example: myself: I took the 1 year membership in june this year, after considering it for a long time. I will not renew it. If many people do it (testing it, paying once, getting p**** off and leaving it), it’s not “sustainable”.
Keeping happy those who already are paying, should be their first goal. Otherwise, the pro-memberships may seem to grow now, but it won’t last. Things will begin to go bad in about a year, when people stop renewing their membership because the Memrise-made courses don’t have enough content and are not updated fast enough.
The thing is, anyone signing up for Pro recently won’t know how it was a few years ago and may decide what they see has ‘improved’ recently.
“Hey boss, our customers hate the new change we made and they’re talking about cancelling their paid memberships. I think we should admit all the money we spent on this new feature was a waste and go back to the way things were.”
THAT conversation is never going to happen. My paid membership is up in April. Kiss it good-bye.
Best of luck making your company profitable.
I just cancelled today. I hope others threatening to do so actually follow suit in order to teach Memrise a lesson.
One more week and still no answers from Memrise Team.
Hey Memrise, here are a bunch of people trying to provide feedback… can you hear us??? I guess not. Zidgy must be deaf.