Probably i should write that it’s a rant.
We have 2022 - you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make something better. Overthinking is never a good option. You are creating an application to learn language/specific words - not an indie game. That kind of app should be simple and minimalistic. You want to add feature? Make it customizable(changing the background color, font family or color of font are simple futures to implement).
Today i had to review 70 words - and i am tired… i’m tired of the new layout. I am tired how the enter button works, i’m tired how the reviewing for difficult words works. And this is not the way how learning application should works. I should have been tired of focusing on specific topic - not a app.
Another thing are memes. Personally - i didn’t used them BUT you definitely shouldn’t delete work of the community. Many people spent hours - bah - even days on making them. And - just like that - you are throw that work to trash? Not nice.
I don’t want to offend or insult you - but the communication between community and you - devs is far far from good. I see that you are answering at many posts about bugs in new layout and that’s good - because you want to fix that as soon as possible, but from the other side - what’s the point of fixing things when the core is just bad. You should make some kind of Q&A or make a statement if you really want to keep that layout.
I am pleased that there is at least an option, which allows to have typing-only most of the time. Thank you.
However, there are a few issues I would like to highlight, even though they might have already been mentioned by others:
the page has become a lot slower – both with Firefox and Chrome/Chromium
there are outages (errors 502 and 504) with the result that the website will not load at all or is very slow (10 to 40 seconds instead of milliseconds)
when repeating vocabulary the process of handling wrong words has become tedious, i.e. it may happen that I cannot at all remember two out of ten repeated words; now the system will repeat these two words 4 times in a row. Unfortunately this method is (at least for me) tedious and does not help me to learn these words
when making a mistake there is now a new page showing the mistake and the correct writing of the word, but there is no longer the option to type in the word correctly and then being allowed to pass the page; instead in the new version the next word to be repeated is shown – I preferred to have the old version, but that may be a matter of taste
no more timer (I’ve already read that this feature is gone for good); I liked it a lot as it trained me to think more quickly
learning stats (so-called premium content) is now hidden. There used to be a colour-coded grid on the main page which showed learning strength
design – I will get used to it, but for now the graphic features feel over-sized as if reading a book with extra large letters for the elderly or small children
I am not sure if this is the right place to mention it, but the size of Chinese characters in the new web version is not apt for easy readability, and (imho) definitely not well thought out for a learner’s purposes. See the screenshot below. @James_g_memrise , @MemriseSupport , anyone?
I have been using Memrise now for around 10 years, and have put up with many of the updates. This new dashboard is terrible, it is oversized, difficult to navigate and far less intuitive than the old dashboard. They have also removed the option to edit my courses and words while reviewing.
PLEASE BRING BACK THE OLD DASHBOARD.
It feels as though this update is just to add the ability for adverts for those free users, rather than to make it more intuitive and better for learning as they originally suggested.
So you’ve said it’s gonna be at least 6 months until you’ll completely remove the old design. Now, as we can see, you did that today, mid of the first month of 2022. I don’t understand. Is this your mistake or you were just lying to us? I am confused, sad and disappointed.
Yes, you have confused something. They were going to change design and hide mems on the 1st January, it happenned only yesterday as we can see. Removal of the mems is preplanned for the middle of the year.
There is no plan to remove mems. We would like to bring functionality back when we can, it’s just a matter of prioritisation.
By mid year we hope to give some people access to the new learning system but timelines are very fluid as we continue design work.
They are not in lessons at this time i’m afraid after the full rollout of the beta yesterday. You can currently only your mems on your profile or another user’s profile page
I was just trying to clarify from hombre’s statement which implied there would be some further deletion, this is not the case. All mems are still stored in our system, and we hope to have a improved way to show, create and use them in the future when priorities allow.
I am sorry, you folks are aware of a bug related to a popular feature and impacts user learning, and yet are still preventing people from reverting back to the previous version of the layout until this is resolved?
Not a statement, just citing your initial plans. Don’t remember you or anyone else from the Memrise team officially saying that you’ll bring mems back. There were a lot of “we’lI look into it” and all that, but it’s not the same.
Oh, I have access to your new system. Nothing to write home about, at least at the moment.
Apart from all the issues everyone’s already mentioned, the ESC button seems to not work anymore to not enter an answer and just look at the answer for the current session? Instead you’re forced to either enter a blank or wrong answer and get it right before the current session terminates. Also if you happen to fall on 2 words like this in one session, it basically gets stuck in a loop between the two until you get one right. So you can’t make progress on any other words in the current session until you get those right. Previously, if I wasn’t sure of a word, I’d press ESC, see the meaning and then continue on and that word would remain marked for ‘review’ for future sessions. Instead now, because we’re forced to answer, it ends up being marked reviewed but becomes a difficult word because we got it wrong.
Speaking of which, as others have mentioned but it’s worth repeating, the new difficult words features are ridiculous. Reviewing the difficult word isn’t akin to learning the word from scratch and having the difficult word appear in text that you’re then supposed to just mimic and type-over is a baffling addition. Difficult words is basically the only reason I have a pro membership because I found it so beneficial to my learning but if it’s going to remain as broken as it is now, I really don’t see the point of continuing to pay for this.
A UI overhaul in and of itself wouldn’t be so bad, I’m sure eventually I (and others) would have gotten used to it but what’s puzzling is the decision to upend so much of the underlying functionality as well. I (and am sure others) have made so much progress in language learning over the years thanks to Memrise and so all of this is just really disappointing.
I wonder if this is a deliberate change, or it’s due to something that went awry during the Memrise development process. Either way, the change has seriously degraded the learning process, at least for me.
The only actual benefit that I see is that the dashboard loads faster. There still isn’t a way to see how many words are ready for review in each course. They overall total is more accurate than the the individual totals, for some inexplicable reason, since the total is obviously accessing information for each course. And now, each lesson does not list the number of words, so there is no way of knowing how many words you will be reviewing either before or during a lesson. The difficult words change is a total fail. There is no option for a timer, which some of us liked. Mems are gone. All of this for faster load times and an arguably nicer design? OK, one change that I might end up liking is that typing the answer to a mistaken word comes after the next one, which forces you to try to commit to memory before moving on. For now it is annoying, because I automatically start typing it, but it might turn out to be better when I am used to it.
Nothing to write home about, at least at the moment.