Here is a novel idea from 2011! Beta Testing. The most recent redesign of the lesson import process seems to show a total lack of real user testing. Yes it’s pretty. Yes it’s simple, but it looks like a first draft of a redesign. This should never have been rolled out the way it was.
You have users who would gladly participate in beta testing, if you’d just ask. I’d be the very first to volunteer. I have over 40 years of software development experience.
Besides that: I’d really like to love Lingq. I’d really like to be able to recommend it to others. But there’s no way I can do that at this point. What am I supposed to tell friends? “It’s an amazing tool, when you’re not working around the flaws or trying to deal with the latest changes.”
Use case: I have an audio file and a transcript and I want to make a new lesson.
I click “Import New Lesson”.
I am given five choices: Type or Paste, Web Links, Audio Files, …
I can’t tell which is appropriate and the screen does not tell me.
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To me, this is a big opportunity to improve the UI right here–when the user has (what I think is) a simple, obvious desire and can’t see how to do it.
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I try clicking “Type or Paste”, but that leads to a screen with no place for the audio file.
I go back and try again, clicking “Audio Files”, but that leads to a screen with no place for a transcript (neither a typed one nor a file).
I give up and post to the forum.
zoran tells me to click the “Import New Lesson > Type or Paste”.
But this is exactly what I tried first, but, as explained above, does not seem to cover what I think is my very simple use case.
If you did beta testing, maybe one of the beta testers would have asked you how to create a lesson from an audio and a transcript, and then you would have thought of this use case.
So, see above suggestion about beta testing.
We are working on a fix for that, which should be available next week. We actually did have our librarians beta testing and did find a variety of things but not this one.
My experience with internal users is they know too much. Years ago, I had a very good calculator program running for a class I was taking. As soon as the teacher touched it, he found a bug – because he didn’t know enough not to do that! Funny, but true story.
That is quite the novel idea! It would also be good if they had some way to easily revert the changes they make if needed, because it almost seems like every update destroys everything previous, and to go back, they have to rebuild everything again from scratch, taking at minimum a month to fix (if you complain enough).
I agree. Honestly if i could do it all again with what I know now, I would probably have used one of the more basic Lingq alternatives, but I have put too much time and effort (not to mention the cost) into creating courses, saving definitions etc. with lingq that I just want it to work.
It’s odd that I’m not able to like your post. Anyway, yes it is frustrating to find even basic functionality suddenly fails, and it becomes umpleasant to use until they fix it. Recently the most basic feature of playing a video broke, and just getting it to play can be hard. It’s as if the iOS app is written by one or two people, and they don’t bother to test anything after they make changes. They just verify that the feature they fixed or added works, job done, next.
£100 a year is expensive for software that often does not work. It’s annoying because just making it work is enough, no need to add new features . It makes me think I might be better off using other options . A Google shows that there are plenty of German courses for free funded by German institutions and the EU.