New design

@Hombre_sin_nombre Sorry to see you were not able to follow my earlier advice:

As I consider these comments offensive, and in opposition to our community guidelines, I’ve suspended your forum account for the next 4 weeks (April 12th 2019).

We welcome feedback and constructive criticism. Hopefully when you return, you will be able to get involved in the conversation without resorting to petty comments.

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Thanks for the clarification! That all makes a lot more sense now. :slight_smile:

I just got the update. It’s not that bad after trying it. I like some colours that were chosen, mostly the pastel ones, and the new flowers are also nice, very poppy-like. It reminds me more of the pre-space theme.
What I really dislike of it though, because it literally hurts my eyes, is the yellow, especially for the keyboard, I can barely read the letters like that. I’d also like the colour-coded rview/learning buttons back, as they made it easier to tell first glance what was what, although I like that the main button and its icon became bigger so that I don’t mistakenly click on it as I did before. Just not yellow please.

Another point, it was said that this update was only a reskin and brought no functionality changes, but as I opened the app I got a message saying that now offline mode is for subscribers only, while it wasn’t like that before. So surely some functionality changes happened.

EDIT: after trying it out some more I don’t just like the new graphics, I LOVE them. Apart from the yelow which really needs to go, but I’m geting used even to that. But then I was never a fan of the change towards space-theme, so this is a huge improvement/return to the past for me. Very simple and functional, and not too dark unlike before.

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I think that is an unfair treatment. You single out one user to punish while others showed similar behavior and have not received any notification of this kind.

Also, your personal opinion should be irrelevant and have no impact on administrating policies. Or it is offensive or it is not according community guidelines.

Why do this forum have two guidelines? In two separate places? Here and Here

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@lucasheber You can find the community Guidelines Here

your personal opinion should be irrelevant and have no impact on administrating policies.

We want this hangout to be a comfortable, enjoyable one. To make it so, please be advised any threads or language that are off-topic or offensive will be removed and will potentially get you warned or banned.

As a moderator of the forum, I have made the judgement that the comments in question are in contrary of the above statement. As this topic is about the New Design (and to prevent this thread from going off-topic) feel free to send me a DM or create another thread in General Discussion if you wish to discuss this further.

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Looking at the screenshots, the color use and so is fine. But so much waste of white space instead of using it for language learning. The fonts and strings are so tiny. This will not sell well with people > 40 years with diminishing eyesight.

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To me fonts look bigger than before though? The sessions themselves are unchanged, but the screen with the levels and review/learn buttons have much bigger and readable fonts than before.

Yes, I don’t have access to the new design app and only looking at the scren shots in this forum but for example look at the Korean word listing above.

I do have to say that it is your very own fault that you are experiencing a sometimes latent, sometimes clear negative attitude, the reason being that you pretty much ignored requests and bug reports over a very long time. I for one am more than frustrated with the development of the Android app - apart from the lack of new features every single update seems to have introduced new problems while fixing none of the existing ones. I can’t believe none of you guys would be aware of that. The question is why this is happening continuously (I have my own thoughts there) and when you’ll finally start fixing things.

Somewhere in this thread someone wrote that what the beta presents is just a design change, there would be no other/functional changes. So you change the design without addressing any bugs again. Which leads me to the conclusion that your priorities are wrong, for whatever reason. Now I know that there will be teams working on design and other working on the development, so there might just be no correlation. But seeing how much you invest into design and marketing (Facebook, Instagram et al) while, obviously, the same doesn’t seem to apply to the development can be very frustrating. The negativity here is just a matter of venting that frustration.

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A colleague made the same observation about being self orientated on that post. I was going to edit my original message - but that never looks good. Still working on forum coms, slight lack of empathy there on my part. Have a nice weekend and thanks for feedback today

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I think it may be a bit smaller but I can’notice much of a difference. I tried to dig online for older screens and it looks the same, but you may be right.
In any case I was gonna say: “you can click on the word to check it well anyway” and that’s when I indeed found a readability problem. Grey on grey is pretty hard to read, I can’t recall how it was before but I don’t remember it so hard.
And I also noticed the background pictures of my memes, which are still present on the website, don’t appear on the app anymore, though I’m not sure this is the right place to say it.

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Yes, there are many languages with very thin lines or glyphs for the characters so small sized strings will make it hard to separate one character to another. If possible string size should be maximized in favor rather than non-pixel areas in language learning applications.

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I forgot to mention that this last beta version of the app allowed me to download one of the community courses (at last, after 1.5 months of unsuccessful trying). Maybe it was just a coincidence, but thanks all the same.

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Oh my goodness, is that the new deisgn? Then I guess I was praising the old design, since my app hasn’t updated to look like that.

@OliviaZavala: I suppose I have to retract my previous statement about the design. I like the design we have had for months now, but the deisgn in the screenshot above… I’m really sorry to say, but it is not likeable at all.

There’s no depth. 90% of the screen is one solid colour and any kind of definition is gone. The different features are not distinguishable and I bet it will be hard to look at in the evening or in a dark room.

Especially that last part. I am often studying in a dark room, so this will make it very difficult for me.

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I think the most important element to keep from the “old” non-beta design is the colour coding of the different exercise types. Green for learning new words, blue for review, red for speed review, orange for difficult words, cyan for learn with natives, etc. Removing that makes the app A LOT less user friendly. It will take longer to locate the button you want to press. That’s taking a step backward, which is not what an update should do… :confused:

Other than that, I absolutely welcome updates and improvements, but they have to add to the experience, not detract from it.

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I like the design, don’t have a clue why so many people dislike it.

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In the thread on the changes, the memrise team member, @kevin5284, was very active and responded to comments and questions, so I think this comment is not very fair.

It is really dispiriting when people get so negative and paint absolutely everything black. After a while, I kinda tune out because I just can’t take any more negativity. I wonder if the people from the memrise team feel like that sometimes?

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I was called on it, derailing the topic. So, let’s talk about the new design. You liked it?

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It’s always going to be that way though. This is the internet after all and online communities are alays going to have some very loud individuals that you cannot reason with. Expecting things to be different is just being naive. :sweat_smile:

That does not mean they should distance themselves from the community. Most people here are being constructive and really want Memrise to succeed. And many of us are very emotional about it because we really care.

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Yup, I guess you are right there.

This is most definitely a good and positive thing! I really care about memrise’s future, too. I’ve been a fan since May 2014 and put many many hours of my free time into improving community courses in Swedish and Dutch. I realised how invested I was when I heard about the new decision about giving Decks an app and the much-requested offline feature and was SOOOOO happy and relieved!

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