To reiterate some of the main points already being made:
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Please do not eliminate or reduce typing test questions. Multiple choice tests for something thatās already been learned are a waste of everyoneās time and significantly dumb down the product. I can see how audio questions could be useful for some people, but they are not for me. Please allow an option to continue to use typing tests exactly as before.
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Visually, the new version looks terrible on my laptop. Everything is way too big, except of course the Chinese characters Iām actually trying to learn, which are way too small. This was not a problem in the old version.
More general feedback: Iāve continued paying for this service over the years through a lot of pointless changes that degraded the quality of the product. But Iāve stuck with it, because as we all know the switching costs out of this thing are high.
Itās weird, because Iām also a heavy Duolingo user, and they just never do this stuff to their users. When I use Duolingo, I have confidence in the product and the team behind it. Whereas when Iām using Memrise, as much as Iāve loved the product over the years, I use it with this constant low-grade anxiety that tomorrow Iām going to wake up and the product will be significantly worse, because it has happened so many times.
This sense of anxiety is not good for your business. I continue to use Memrise because Iāve sunk so many hours into it. But I wish I had never started. I donāt recommend it to other people; I actually warn them off of it.
You guys appear to be a team without a coherent strategy. At times, it has seemed like Memriseās greatest ambition is to become a worse version of Duolingo. At other times, thereās just endless, confusing fiddling with the design (flowers to robots to rocketships to whatever). There seems to be a strong overriding preference for making everything progressively larger, requiring lots of pointless scrolling from the user, while obscuring more and more of the actually relevant information, i.e. āhow many mems do I have ready for review across all my coursesā (I still find it utterly baffling that the home page doesnāt do this - you have to go the Groups page to actually get this information in a clear, concise way. Stranger still, the home page used to show this information, but at some point there was a deliberate design change to make it harder to find).
The goal for this product should be to make it faster, visually cleaner, and more effective for learning from the perspective of the user. Dumbing down typing tests into multiple choice doesnāt serve that end, and neither does making everything visually huge so that users have to waste time scrolling to see all the relevant informaiton. So often with Memrise it seems like the people making the design changes donāt actually use the product themselves.