bunch
We are working on some of the kind of additional features for our community that you are talking about. Good thoughts and I will appreciate your continued advice as we build this up.
Steve
I don’t think that this system is hard to use. Help is visible and easy to find and whenever I had doubts at the beginning about something the Help was very explanatory. Also there is the forums where it is obvious that you can ask for help if need so. At first when I started using the system I almost thought it addresses to children not only because it was easy but also of the whole style. It needs some improvements as they have already spotted but overall it satisfies the usability standards for me.
Well, in any case I think that instead of making assumptions it would be better to ask every new user separately for feedback.
I believe that there is a percentage of people out there that they just don’t bother to register at all. The introduction is not bad but still you don’t know what to expect. I registered only because I had search everything else and it was just another thing to search. I got excited only when I clicked on the library and I saw the courses. For that reason I think that the Example course etc should be available even before someone is gets registered on the system. I m not very fun of videos, I prefer the real thing. There should be some trial session with all the functions available and which after its completion it would prompt to registration.
I agree that doing a course helps to engage the learner. I am more active and more committed now that I am doing a course.
We could provide incentive for our members to sign up for courses and to get their friends to sign up.
It is already possible to invite a friend to a discussion in the community. Please use this function. We will improve the communication in the community soon.
Maybe we should offer 500 points to anyone who persuades a free member or new member to join them in a course. So the person upgrading would get 500 points for upgrading and the person who persuaded them would get 500 points.
At any rate I appreciate the ideas.
As bunch pointed out we hope to have Twitter like functions so that people can follow what their friends are doing on the site- discussions joined, courses created, courses signed up for, content contributed etc.
We have ideas on writing as well so that people can choose to show their writing to others either via the Forum or the community.
We are looking at our automatic emailing. We do some now and maybe could do it better. There are many not so serious people and I do not think it is necessary for tutors to pursue them all with emails. It may be better to pursue friends in the community.
Design is not something we are going to tinker with now, at least not in a major way.
Maybe we need more competition and more rewards
We reward and recognize the leader in the Activity Index and Content creation. We should also do so for new members introduced, and also show results by country to create some sense of competition.
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and do the same for LingQing
I think I suggested this a while back…this is maybe a good time to suggest it again. We have the technology to display the (not very interesting) information of how many posts each user has created, next to their name on each forum post. It would be more motivating if it said: [name]: Top German content creator! or [name]: Swedish Student of the Month! and perhaps a little smiley: a star or rosette or medal. As it is I have to do some searches and filtering to even find out who is top Swedish Student, and read a post on a blog somewhere to find out who the top German content creator of the month is.
Also you could show novices with [name]: New Member (code for: hasn’t done any lingQing yet) and when they have an activity index of 100, say, change it to [name]: Active Member.
Other online communities do similar, eg eBay, and people can get absurdly excited to get a different colour star because they have been a bit more active.
I have set my small daughter onto a simple French lesson and she is totally grooving on to it! She finds the LingQ creation understandable (with a bit of help), and can play the audio and scroll up and down the lesson pretty easily. What she couldn’t cope with, and she needed me to do for her, was to find a lesson from the library and import it onto her workdesk. I think it would be good to have a “beginners start here” button which, when you click it, will automatically open up the workdesk, download one or two of the very easiest lessons in the selected language, put them onto the workdesk and open one of them up.
It also was not at all obvious to her what to click when she had finished the lesson. It would be good to have a “I have finished the lesson, show me what to do” button which will guide you through updating your statistics, then take you to the profile page which shows you you progress bars.
Actually, why can’t those progress bars also be on the workdesk? It would be a more logical place for a complete beginner.
I think you do need more competition. But you should offer something special for the winner. Not just a title or so. Points would be great!