Many of you will have already noticed the changes we have made to the main navigation. You will notice that the icons on the right hand side have been rearranged with a new Help icon showing and a new “Import” icon as well.
The Import icon allows you to click to Import lessons from any page now. It also opens up a subnav which allows you to access the Vocabulary page to import vocabulary. The Help icon shows options for the LingQ Academy page and Help pages which we felt were a little too hidden away before.
Finally, we have added sub-navigation options to the Lessons tab. You can now go to the Vocabulary and Challenges pages from the subnavigation and those buttons were removed from the Lessons page sidebar.
Hopefully, this cleans things up a bit and makes a few of these controls more accessible from everywhere on the site. Let us know what you think!
To be honest, I didn’t really like the changes the first time I saw them, but as time’s been passing by I’ve got used to this alteration. The team have done a good job. =)
Seems like you should increase the size of the help button and decrease the size of the import button.
I’d like it if the silhouette menu opened via mouseover, like the Lessons, Exchange, and Import menus do. Then, even better, it could be possible to have clicking the silhouette go straight to the Profile page… That is generally where I leave LingQ sitting between uses since that shows all the languages’ word counts and activity ranking.
I haven’t had any notifications yet, but does it now take two clicks to see them?
I think that the old “lingQs/vocabulary” button on the Lessons page showed a count that you couldn’t get anywhere else. I think it was probably a count of lingQs plus ignored words? Not sure that it matters much, but that was my quick approximation of my total LingQs count since it was so visible.
Glad you like it!
1.We wanted to emphasize the Import button so it stands out. The Help button is a downplayed a bit since you don’t need the Help once you get the hang of things. We just wanted to make it more prominent than it was before in the profile dropdown.
2. I like that suggestion! I will propose it to the team.
3. Yes, it does, although if we if we open that menu on the hover, it should be one click again.
4. The old button should have showed the total number of LingQs you have ever created. It would not have included ignored words which are not LingQs. But, would have included all the LingQs you have learned, which are not included in the lessons.
My thinking here is that the info in the “oval” section looks stylistically consistent, but the icons to the right look less so. Maybe reduce the spacing between silhouette/help/import? My brain thinks there should be some “gravity” that causes the big oval to compress the other icons.
If I’m not mistaken the old button said I had like 2000 vocab in English, but I only have 86 English LingQs, so I thought maybe I have ignored ~2000 words. But that doesn’t matter… I think I can live without a prominent total LingQ count (since there are a couple of ways to go get it) but I wonder if, given that you want users to be making lots of LingQs, it would make sense to show off that value a bit more.
one other thing:
5. I think I regret somewhat that the streak count is no longer dead center (or roughly so). That and the apple seem a bit deemphasized.
Thanks. We’ll look at the help icon. Maybe it can still be a little larger without feeling like there is too much happening there. Interesting thought about the streak count. I must say I haven’t found that but it is an important metric for sure. We felt like the menu needed some more room especially for smaller screen resolutions. It does feel cleaner now. We will see how we like the changes over time and can always continue to make adjustments as we go.
Not major, but the drop down menus in the menu bar are kind of unusable on mobile devices or touchscreens in general because if you tap/click on them it takes you directly to the default page. Eg. clicking on ‘Lessons’ takes you to the lessons homepage and it’s impossible to get to the vocab or challenges pages.
(PS I love the new menu/navigation look by the way - makes everything look more modern and clean definitely!)
I’m on an Android tablet (nougat), and tried with the default android browser as well as Chrome. Yep, the first tap does open the menu, but it also navigates, so I see the menu for a short time while the next page is loading.
With regards to suggested improvements, I don’t know if the following is only a problem for me or if it is how the system works. The review lingqs after each page function is helpful when first reading/listening to a lesson in order to limit the number of words and phrases a student is to review at a time. This makes sense and I use it at the beginning and then turn the automatic review function off when I no longer need it and want to listen to the lesson straight through. However – and this is the problem – when I go to resume the lesson after a review break, the audio has reset to the beginning which is very annoying. I want to resume where I left off, not start over. The longer the lesson, the more time it takes to try to figure out where I was. Starting over occurs about 80% of the time. Only rarely does the audio of the lesson pick up at the end of the page I just reviewed. The fact that this happens at all – albeit rarely – suggests to me that maybe starting from the beginning is a glitch. Whether it occurs only for me or for others as well regardless of frequency, I think it should be fixed/changed. Thanks.
I’m just trying to recreate this. Are you finding this in your browser or on the mobile app? Which browser or app? What do you mean “after a review break”? You do a review session? By clicking the yellow Review button?
This occurs on my computer (MacBook Air). I open a lesson, click on several new words and then when I click to scroll to the next page, a review session opens of the words I have turned yellow on the page I just read/listened to. I do the review of these lingqs. However, when I want to continue with the lesson, the audio has reset automatically without my doing anything to the beginning. I don’t want to read/listen to the same page again because when I hit the forward button to “turn the page,” I will get a review session again (cloze, multiple choice, etc.) of the words/phrases I have already reviewed. I want to continue to the next page. The only way I can do this is by moving the cursor on the bar that shows where I am in the lesson forward from the start. This is hit or miss, however, since I have to listen to wherever I stop it and try to figure out whether it is before or after what I read on the previous page.
I tried this on Safari, which I assume you are using on your Mac, and I was able to make this happen a few times. It did mostly work though and after a while I wasn’t able to make it happen anymore. Is that the experience you are having? That it stops happening after a while? Are you using long or short lessons?
One thing to point out also, if this is happening, is that you can turn off the automatic review between pages if you want, in the Settings on the Reader page. Or, if you want to page without reviewing sometimes, you can click on the next segment in the lesson progress bar and that will take you to the next page without showing the review.
Please let me know any more information you can think of. I have created an issue for this for our tech team to look into.