General Site Feedback

kevinleitch

November 09, 2011 at 03:08 PM posted in General Discussion

Hiya ChinesePodders!

I've been using the site for a few weeks now and just have a bit of feedback with some issues I've run into. Sorry if this is rehashing stuff that's already been brought up, I find the groups/conversations a bit tricky to navigate.

For the record, I've subscribed to premium subscription and generally use the latest version of Firefox (though for some of these problems I've tested with IE and Chrome as well just to make sure it wasn't a browser compatibility thing). Also, I've done a bit of Chinese study over the past couple of years (via Pimsleur's 3 units) so I'm possibly at the elementary level but starting with the newbie stuff for now.

Level/Shows Subscriptions - When I first logged in after upgrading from my free account I discovered I was subscribed to everything. When I unsubscribed to the levels I wasn't interested in I found that they didn't actually leave my lesson feed. To remove them I had to click the 'All Lessons' link below my feed and manually remove the ones I didn't want. I hadn't bookmarked anything, so I would have expected these unsubscribed lessons to just disappear.

Being subscribed to everything just gave a generally cluttered feel and I was a bit overwhelmed with what was presented. Instead, I would have much rather had my self study lesson feed be empty apart from the list of levels that I could subscribe to (similar to what is seen on the feedsettings page).

Lesson Sets - I love the idea of these, however the 'Bookmark this set' link doesn't seem to work (in any browser tested). I've done one by manually clicking through each lesson and book marking it, but it's not ideal. How do these differ from the courses by the way? It would be nice if book marking a set put it in my courses tab (or even a new Lesson Set tab) so that I can keep them organized.

Link buttons - this is purely cosmetic, but a lot of the button links on the site don't properly convert the cursor/mouse pointer into the hand people are used to seeing when you mouse over them. For example, the green Join or red Leave boxes for community groups, or the bookmark links within the lessons.

Dashboard - I like that I can set the default display to the self-study page instead of the courses. I'd also like to be able to remove some of the extra widgets in the right column (specifically the Interested in speaking classes? form, but also maybe the chinesepod ads). At the very least, I'd like to be able to move them to the bottom and have my levels/shows and groups widgets above them.

Courses - I'm not certain how a course differs from the self study lessons? I did a search for a few of the lessons within the courses and they all seem available to me as a subscriber, is there a particular reason I'm not able to download the courses? This maybe my ignorance over what they actually contain versus the individual lessons. Also, this would likely be a non-issue if I could download the lesson sets as a course (or even better yet, create and organize my own courses. Or allow users to create and share courses!)

Vocabulary Manager - I've got a few issues with the vocabulary manager, mostly relating to labels so here goes:

1. My labels don't seem to exist in the Show select box so that I can filter this list based on a certain label (I can click Edit Labels and then on the label itself to filter, so I'm not massively worried about this one).

2. My labels also don't exist in the Apply Label select box, which means having to type them over again each time I want to add a pre-existing label (unless I've created that label in the current session, they seem to stick around until you leave the page).

3. This one is the most frustrating. The Apply Label defaults to whatever you used last when you perform an action, but executes it's tasks on an 'onChange' event. So, in what I think is a fairly normal circumstance I'll select a few words in my vocabulary list, select New Label from the dropdown, enter in my new label and click ok. Everything is fine at this point and my new label has been applied. Now I want to apply another new label so I click a few more words but find that New Label is already selected and there's no way of executing the command.

So far I've been getting around this by making sure none of my words are checked and then selecting whatever label I just created from the dropdown. This throws an error (no words selected or something like that, which is expected), then I check the words I want and can now select New Label again.

I think adding a submit/go button to this form would fix the problem as I could just click that if New Label has been selected by default.

4. This is just for the sake of tidiness, but the Remove button could easily go into the dropdown as well (maybe called Remove Word so there's no confusion over removing words vs. labels). That way you could add a title to the select box and things would be a little clearer.

5. This one is just a question. Do the More Actions option and those little grey + icons in the list actually do anything?

6. At some point I've selected to have 100 words per page displayed and it continues to do that which is fine. It defaults to 20 each time however, and the pagination shows that I have pages 1 though 5 available even though I have less than 100 words in my vocab. This fixes itself when selecting 100, but returns to this state if I leave the page and return.

Conversations - It took me a while to wrap my head around the Conversations/Groups section of the site, though I get it now. I think the titles themselves are a bit odd and something like Lesson Chat and Forum, but that might just be me ;)

I'd also love to be able to change what's displayed in the group section so that I only see a list of topic titles, total replies, the date of the last reply and maybe who replied last. The user icons & brief text seem to just clutter things up.

Sorry this was so long. I've got a 2 year subscription so I'll be around for a while. Would love to see a couple of fixes in the future!

Thanks again for a great study tool!

I was going to ask about this in an app feedback post, but I'm too keen to wait. I've found a couple of links on the site that direct people to the chinesepod API, but the links are broken. Is the API still available? If so, where can I find details about it??

jcheinbockel

November 10, 2011 at 07:43 AM

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for all the comments. I wanted to respond to the vocabularly manager questions.

Your labels should appear in the "Show" select box. They should also be in the "Apply Labels" box. I've got my vocabulary manager open in Chrome to check, and everything looks normal. I'm not sure why they don't in your case, but it could be a temporary glitch.

As for number three, this is a bug. I usually find that after applying a label, I have to refresh the page to apply different labels.

The little gray boxes do have a function. If you click on them, the page will display a list of lessons in which that word appears and a "listen" button.

Number six also looks like a weird bug. We'll add it to the board.

Best,

jcheinbockel

December 27, 2011 at 06:02 AM

Hi Podster,

I'll reply to this post over here: http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/12504

podster

December 26, 2011 at 03:00 AM

I am having exactly the same problems. Vocabulary Manager is full of bugs and often unusable to me. I also have to click more than once on the gray plus boxes to see what lesson the word is in. I currently can not see the labels for my many lists, nor can I apply an existing label to new words. Extremely frustrating bugs in what is other wise a well designed function. (I do agree that design changes like clarifying what "remove" means should be made).

kevinleitch

November 10, 2011 at 12:51 PM

Hi JC, thanks for replying.

My labels definitely aren't showing up in those 2 select boxes. I've tried in 3 different browsers at work and 2 different ones on my home computer and still nothing. It could be something with my account or account id?

Refreshing does sound like a faster work around than what I'd been doing. Cheers for that.

As for the little grey boxes, you're right! I seem to have to click them all twice to get them to open up though (firefox & chrome tests). It's a bit weird as I don't have to click them twice consecutively, I can click all of them once and nothing will happen, but clicking any of them a second time will open that one up.

It's a brilliant feature though, one I'll definitely use.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate it!

jennyzhu

November 10, 2011 at 03:40 AM

Kevin,

Thanks a lot for taking the time to write this very thorough post. There are some really great ideas. Our Product Manager John Biesnecker will chime in the discussion. But overall, I just want to say that most of what you've raised is a combination of design issues and bugs. After launching the store, which was a major undertaking, there has been some disruption and bugs on the site. We are focused on stabilizing the site and providing a reliable user experience. Of course, we are also working on new tools such as tablet apps for iPad and Android devices.

To answer some of your specific quesrtions:

Lesson Sets: we wanted to provide self-study students with more guidance, that's why we came up with the sets. But I must say there weren't implemented particularly well. We are working on other ways to provide such guidance which integrates better with the entire user experience. You might want to try search for lessons using a key word instead. I've found this to be quite useful. Also, take a look at the courses lesson list on the store page which will give a more structured path to learning.

Courses: most of the lessons in courses are available to subscription students too. But buying a course gives you lifetime access to these lessons as opposed to time limited access. Like what I said in the previous point, I highly encourage you to take those lesson lists and structure your study around it. This will dramatically reduce search cost on your end.

Hope this helps!

kevinleitch

November 10, 2011 at 12:37 PM

Hi Jenny,

Not a problem at all. I completely understand the efforts involved in launching a site (I'm a web dev) so I'm totally sympathetic :)

Thanks for clearing up my questions about the courses, it makes sense now. It's definitely a good idea to use them as a lesson guide and I'll very likely do that going forward.

I still really like the idea of Lesson Sets and will chew through a few of those as well. I'll just keep trying the 'Bookmark this set' link until it works!

Thanks again!