I notice that discussion re navigation led by the LingQ staff tend to focus on gamifying the user interface. And I see that this has been done.
I don’t see any benefits in gamifying the experience. I am more interested in intuitive navigation.
My user objectives are to create a hierarchy of navigable texts with ‘courses’ as the top level and ‘lessons’ as the content. This is how text information is organised universally.
The way the site is currently configured is very unintuitive and appears to offer this gamified experience with no attention paid to actually finding stuff - like your own stuff. Here are some observations.
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Nowhere on the home page can I find my ‘courses’. They are on no pull down menu.
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When I click on ‘My Lessons’ I open a page with them all there. Like all the individual lessons with no reference to any course I have put them into. They are sortable by ‘relevance’, ‘likes’ and ‘newly imported’.
You’re kidding, right?
How about alphabetically? I have named lessons which are in a particular book or course so that they can be sorted. I know there is some other way I can look at this where I can do this but the site is so unintuitive that I have forgotten the sequence of tabs I have to hit to get there.
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The search box on this pages invites the user to ‘search my courses’… It’s the only occurrence of the word ‘courses’ I can find on the site.
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The search bar in ‘lessons’ invites me to search the whole site. Why? Why not courses?
The web interface is virtually unusable. I am a pretty educated user and designer of CMS interfaces, databases, websites etc.
Can you tell me. Why is it more important that I get a ‘logo’ ‘reward’ popping up in my window than that I can find and organise the content I put onto the site.
The concept behind LingQ is good. And the site is not cheap.
Why are you so uncurious about improving the interface?
I see the site as a personal library. If you go on treating it like a game then I’ll have to consider whether I can go on using it in the future.
Paul