Ziggy is rubbish. I liked the old streak system. Now I have nothing to bring me back everyday.
What is Ziggy supposed to achieve? The different Ziggy icons mean nothing to me, I don’t care for them because I’m not a 12 year old girl. The levels, it’s hard to tell whether e.g. level 16 is something to be impressed about or not. Overlord, now that was impressive, along with a massive streak, that showed dedication straight away. Anyone can get a high level if they periodically use something for long enough. What’s impressive about that?
Don’t think I will continue with my pro membership when it expires. The apps are too easy for a start. You can guess the answers based on the characters they give you, and there is no time limit (on iOS anyway).
Web version is better. You don’t get any clues and have to write something before the time runs out.
It’s live, Jim, but not as we know it.
Dear @lurkmoophy and Memrise team, could we ask you back on giving us feedback on feedback you received on your question?
Bring this type of responses any value to you and your consideration?
Hi Devs
Instead of offering ridiculous discounts for Memrise “Pro” every time one earns a new streak, perhaps you should really consider your users’ feedback. Editing typos, personalising a course, adding different testing systems to the “Pro” version and the like. A popular website like this will only continue to thrive (and earn, as you probably have been trying to do via the discounts) IF there is continuous, constructive improvement based on your users’ needs.
Moves like Ziggy are simply uncalled for and will probably continue to fuel disgust for your development team.
Yes, I agree, Ziggy is terrible. I was only a Membassador, but I was excited to obtain future ranks. The childish new system is really discouraging. And so long as I’m complaining, I miss the old Mem creating system with the image search feature. Why are they making it harder to create good Mems?
We hear you and we are taking in all your feedback. There are fair points that we are planning to act upon - from adding more ranks and making the progress more motivating for long time learners, as well as rethinking personal bests (namely, streaks) and how to visualise them better.
The way in which we tested very different progress visualisation concepts, ranks, icons and characters will be a case study we are planning to share - there was a lot of user testing and feedback involved, from new and existing learners with often unexpected results. We’ll be sharing this in the next month.
As we mentioned above, this is very much v1.0 of Ziggy. We’ll continue to improve and iterate on this to make it better.
I remember the days when Memrise had a cat working for them, the site was great then. Bring back the cat.
and the garden, and all mems for an item (not only those 3 that…)
and basically bring Adam back…
who’s adam?
Thank You!
Good to hear from you.
(please! be giving us some feedback on our feedback …just a little bit more often … even if by “liking” something or someone in the thread or by curt “we care” reply - to make it show: you are watching and actually caring)
Adam was the first admin and dev at memrise. Left before DZohar came.
I’m quite positive that I see more
That actually explains it a lot!
I haven’t been following the intern events at memrise before everything started becoming a close-to-disaster, but it did seem as if somebody wanted to get rid of everything that was there before in order to proof him-/ herself from the bottom.
Kind of like a divorce … and we’re the children that are pushed around and have no idea about anything that’s going on before we’re getting hit by the changes.
(A scary thought, actually)
So I guess that there really is no hope of getting all the good stuff back again with Adam gone?
No that analogy doesn’t work at all. The vision of a company develops and the things that work when you have a small number of users sometimes don’t work when you have a large number of users, so the product has to change as well. I generally agree with the direction the product is developing in, but it’s the implementation that still leaves a lot to be desired; spaced repetition is good, but please have some variety in the review interval based on relevant variables; a cute character that grows with you is good, but have it grow in some logical fashion and have more levels, and so on.
Absent insight in the internal workings of the company, I’ll refrain from making guesses as to why changes are sometimes or often poorly implemented and why communication is lacking. I guess any problem can be more effectively attacked with more knowledge though.
I would say that the “vision” of Memrise didn’t just develop, but changed drastically right after Adam left.
If you look at this page on Adam’s personal blog, https://adamj.eu/one-minute-happiness/ you can see something that looks like the original Memrise vision; bright, sunny, happy, uplifting, positive, etc. Now that Adam is gone, everything on Memrise is dark, post-apocalyptic, alien, and senseless. Adam must have been the source of the happy gardening metaphor that drew us all into Memrise in the beginning. Now that he is gone, in my opinion, everything has changed for the worse.
I agree! The color palette on the page is simple yet engaging. The gardening metaphor reflected Memrise’s goal so well. The atmosphere has always been important to attract and maintain users. No wonder users have switched to other websites.
Agreed. And the atmosphere of Memrise is nothing like it was in the beginning. They originally billed themselves as a “social learning” site, where users would learn and socialize, competing and encouraging one another. But they abandoned all of that.
Even the interaction of the staff with the users is much worse now. In the beginning, the staff was very friendly and collegial towards the users in the forums. Ben, Greg, Adam and others used to engage with us and address our concerns promptly and respectfully. A user would point out a problem and Ben would say, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry for that. We’ll look into it and get it fixed right away.”
Now, when the staff does deign to address us, they are usually cagey, dismissive, and generally officious.
Of course, it’s just my subjective opinion, but the “tone of voice” used by the staff is very disrespectful towards the users, and I would almost say contemptuous.
Adam left Memrise in March 2014. I have an email from him saying he was leaving.
As I recall, he had various roles in the team and, from the summer of 2013 until his departure, he wrote the regular updates (site developments, bug fixes, etc) that were posted on the Memrise Blog page in those days. You can still find these in the ‘archive’ section.
I was sorry to see him leave, although it’s good to see from the link provided by xvg11 that he seems to be doing well in his current job.
I don’t know what role, if any, he had in the origins of the ‘Memory Garden’ metaphor but, if anyone is interested in the initial thinking on this, a quick read of the June 2011 blog post will show just how far Memrise has shifted from its vision in this respect!
If you have the time, there was another blog post in November 2011 which sets out the origins of Memrise. It’s an interesting read.
I have to agree, I used to recommend that everyone in my language class at university use Memrise and now I’m going to think twice because it’s so childish. Teenagers especially would care about this. I highly doubt that children at age 5 would have the discipline to do Memrise – there are better learning tools for that age group out there already. Memrise is great for teens and adults.
If they really are to make Ziggy “a thing,” they should make a specific “Memrise Kids” site with it, as well as kids-centered activities. Typing tests are likely too difficult for children (they would most likely be chicken pecking), and I read studies that show that kids shouldn’t really learn how to type until they’re older, around 5th grade, when they’ve already learned how to write, otherwise they don’t properly learn how to compose coherent thoughts.