I certainly think better communication wouldn’t go amiss. Most of the time, we are kept in the dark as to what is going on. Nothing is ever said about upcoming updates and new features.
I also get the clear impression the team doesn’t really listen to users’ input and will only improve or change what they see fit, with the rest falling by the wayside.
I can just assume that if all the members of design/development team would be actual users of LingQ as students learning some language we would probably see today much different and much better LingQ system. That’s the problem. The system is being designed by the people that probably don’t use it in their everyday life. But we do.
As a retired professional programmer, that’s my take. LingQ is a brilliant conception, but the crummiest software I’ve ever paid money for.
Everyday I use LingQ I find the keyboard shortcuts don’t work in unpredictable ways. Nor do bookmarks. This is Programming 101 stuff.
Initially I tried some of the more advanced features like timestamps or even setting up tutor appointments and it was so painful, I gave up.
My guess is that the codebase needs a major rewrite and something, probably several things, are out of whack with management and the programming team.
Without looking at the current codebase its hard to say what exactly needs to be done. It could be anything from a complete re-design and re-coding to maybe just a reasonable restructuring and refactoring if the the system core has been designed and coded properly. Actually it might be the case because there is a chance that the LingQ system has been created in several layers by several engineering teams in the last 15-20 years that LingQ exists.
But what is absolutely clear to me that at this point LingQ Engineering needs very strong, knowledgeable and experienced leadership that will be able to put things in order, to implement some strict and disciplined engineering processes in product management, design, coding, testing and release processes. That’s hard thing to do, its painful and pretty expensive. But continuing wild-west-style hacking around will kill the whole thing pretty soon.
I don’t see that LingQ owns anything special here. Display a sentence, connect words and LingQs to a database and dictionaries plus TTS for audio. Add user incentives like streaks and challenges.
If a serious software company thought it was in their interest, they could steal LingQ’s market.
However, at this point I suspect AI tutors coming up are the real threat.
I completely agree. There is nothing special here and actually it is absolutely not necessary to have some special functionality or patentable ideas to create a successful commercial software product. What is really challenging is to create a reliable, robust product with well thought-over functionality that its easy to evolve by adding new functions on the top of the solid foundation.
But the most of the challenge would be to create highly usable product with a lot of time spent on user-experience design and interaction design. Those serious software companies of even good startups with the right people who are ready to invest time and money in implementation of LingQ-type functionality and who will do it in the right professional manner from the very beginning will be the winners.
My guess is that at some point in the past they’ve build pretty decent LingQ prototype and got their initial financing etc. But after that instead of building a commercial production system from ground zero as it is supposed to be done, they started to enhance the prototype by adding bits and pieces of functionality to this prototype. And now, many years later we use this pretty awkward system. But there is a huge difference between prototype/demo and solid production system. And it requires solid software engineering experience to see it and deal with it. A lot of startups died after getting into this trap.
That’s my impression. It’s a lot more fun to add features than to fix spaghetti code.
I am boggled that LingQ can’t make keyboard shortcuts or bookmarks work reliably. Aside from the elementary nature of such bugs, they also degrade the basic everyday user experience of LingQ.