I can’t look at it either, it hurts my eyes after a few minutes so I created a stylish skin/theme for the desktop version. You can use it too, it will look a bit better and I’ll improve it even more over time, but it’s good enough for the start:
Oh thank you thank you thank you!
Thank you! That’s much better
The new design hurts my eyes and I get dizzy watching at it for longer than a few seconds. Unfortunately it looks like I have to move on if nothing changes.
I don’t know much about how this works, so please forgive me if this is a stupid question. Is there any way to use your theme to adjust the colours without installing a browser extension? I use memrise often from my work computer, and I don’t have the admin rights to add the extension there. 
I’m loving it on my home laptop though! <3 At work I can use either Chrome or IE 11.
You want to know what happened? You should have rather asked ‘who’ happened to them. Most likely the urine yellow design happened because of a certain user, or at least he was part of it. A kid with a self-proclaimed “IQ”. See the 5th post in this discussion from “Hombre_sin_nombre”. Right after his post, we got a reply and the new “design”.
Which is really a shame, as the Spaceship design was what drew me, my family and friends to memrise in the first place. It was clever and new and fitted perfectly to the language learning setting as you have to go on a unknown and long journey through systems and places unknown to you. Not to mention that you can start your journey alone or with a “crew” 
I loved it! It was The Most Beautiful Language Learning App Design I have ever encountered and we wish with all our hearts to reach the hearts of the Design-Team. May it touch their hearts and give them a small push in the right direction to give them the courage again to continue with their beautiful blue spaceship design language they dreamed up in the beginning; build up with sweat, love and dedication to their dream and maintained lovingly for so long 
In the meantime: I did some research and found out that you can manually roll back the update. Deinstall the app from the appstore and go to apkmirror dot com and search for “memrise-2-94_10042”. Download it and install it (disclaimer: beware that downloading apps outside of the appstore can pose a security risk. So be sure about where you get it from and do not deactivate the play protection as it acts as a last line of defence).
It did the trick for me and I am going to stay with this version for ever, as long as they do not change it back.
I don’t know how to do it without an extension. Perhaps you can use some portable browser, installed on the usb or something? Not sure, not experienced enough with that.
Thanks! I appreciate that, it was a long shot anyway. I appreciate the reply, and the skin!
I am also doing the Ultimate Korean Vocabulary course.
Several users complained about this ‘‘whitish’’ design.
This is so much better. I hope the designers saw it. It would help the “overwhelming” response some testers apparently had to the previous design which used brighter colours, while retaining the beneficial aspect of the colour coding and staying in line with the pastel theme.
@JuanGuaido, I was one of the users who complained about the 'whitish’ design and suggested a dark mode.
The aliens were in the old design so I want them back. The purple theme, the aliens, the consistent, clean tidy UI - I want it all back.
@Hombre_sin_nombre - It’s a simple metaphor - if you’ve ever been abroad (to a place where 99% of the residents are native), you feel like an alien. The overall theme of this website doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. Were you expecting a metaphor to tickle the deepest depths of your brain (and I’m oh so sure that’d be SO deep… )?
I speak for the Desktop version - just look at how ugly this front page is when I log in…
it’s so inconsistent and messy :S
this may not be a permanent solution because the server side code may eventually become incompatible with older versions of the client.
It looks like Memrise’s Twitter is back to being active again. Of course they aren’t actually addressing any of the issues.
I’m at a complete loss. I’m invested in this because I literally got to use two weeks of a year long subscription. I waited, thinking this would get better. It hasn’t. Now I doubt I can get a refund.
Heh. So much for assuming good faith. There’s not even an official “oh, crap. We didn’t even think this would trigger headaches in some users. We are working as fast as possible to fix this!”
No updates, nobody official to say “I hear your concerns, and you’re right, this sucks”.
@PolarBearCabal If you’re still within 30 days you can get a refund. I cancelled and refunded my new subscription due to the new design making the site so ugly and painful and aggressive looking. The change came right after I had paid. It’s not what I paid for anymore.
Here’s how to do it. Nice thing is that they do have an area where you can tell them why you’re requesting the refund. I don’t know how much they listen to it but it’s nice to think maybe they might.
There was also this somewhat lukewarm response from one of the UX folks on another thread, for what it’s worth.
“Changes are being considered” isn’t much, but it’s what we have.
In the meantime, I highly recommend using the app rollback trick that St.Birdy suggested above and kiboke’s stylish skin for your browser. It makes things a lot less painful. I feel like I can actually use the site again, at least when I’m on a computer that allows browser extensions.
Such high requirements – have to traveled abroad for this metaphor be ease to understand – just prove the point that it is not a good metaphor for a company that serve people with different backgrounds.
I stupidly waited, thinking they’d fix it. I’m past my 30 days because I wanted to give them a chance.
Yes, I’m a stupid idiot.
You are free to feel any way you want, but for a big international language learning business to use such metaphors as aliens, spies, secret agents, which have a lot of negative connotation in this field is no-good. Maybe it was good for some tribe thousands years ago.
There’s enough alienation in this world without Memrise’s metaphors, but there’s no Spaniards or Chinese on the Moon, there’s no direct association between language learning process and going into outer space. It’s cold and lonely out there, and all these metaphors are dividing, not connecting. People are learning languages to communicate, to better know each other, not to feel isolated or alienated.
On top of it, it’s not obligatory to have spaceships and planets to make a user friendly interface.
