What's up with the abomination of the new UI statistic?

[arendpeter]

Controversial opinion, but I like the update!

I’ve been using LingQ for years and it was a long learning curve for me to get used to the interface. I think making the interface more focused for new users will go a long way towards improving adoption. It’s a real shame to first impression videos online, and see people bounce off hard.

That said, I still love diving into the stats, and those are all still available to me on the separate page. I also like how the detailed stats page has a lot of added context for all the statistics. “Known words” vs “LingQs learned” is particularly confusing for new people, so I’m sure the added text will help them as well.

[nicolasbrunel]

Or like this:

[mark]

@SeoulMate Thanks for the feedback. It is helpful to list the issues like this especially if they are reproducible. I’m not sure if these issues have been reported before but, you can’t assume we know of all issues. We rely on users reporting things that occur. It is not possible for us to identify all issues ourselves.
I have forwarded to the qa team to try and recreate them. Any specific steps that reliably reproduce these issues would be helpful. The reappearing meaning seems to be working fine for me at the moment, but, I don’t doubt that it happens. If you do figure out what particular sequence causes it to happen, that would help. Anything reproducible can be fixed.
As for the additional reader themes, those were requested by multiple users. Unfortunately, the implementation was not perfect. We are working to fix those issues. Should be back to normal in a few days.
As for dictionaries, we used to have them embedded but there were issues and we had to go back to popups. It has been a while since then so we can review and see if it is possible to embed them again, but, to assume that it’s easy and something we just arbitrarily choose not to do isn’t accurate. The fact is that the reader page is a very complicated page and anything done on the page is not easy to do and takes significant effort. There are far fewer issues on mobile because the environment is much more under our control.

It is more helpful to calmly report issues which we fix if we can reproduce them. Yes, it can be frustrating as a user to encounter glitches, I get frustrated myself and understand the frustration but some issues are just difficult to fix and identify as they are caused by a variety of factors across different browsers which can have their own issues and are also being updated regularly. There’s really no need to be angry with us! We usually try to fix issues if we can. And, if you can ever identify specific steps that cause the javascript etc… to glitch up, please let us know. We can’t fix what we can’t reproduce.
Also, in fact, the web app mostly works well. I think we are letting our frustration get in the way a bit in this thread.
Regarding the stats, we will be incorporating a bunch of the feedback we received into some updates that will hopefully restore things more or less to the way they were.

As for some of the other things you brought up:

What is wrong with paragraph formatting?
You are able to batch add/remove tags in the Vocabulary page. Editing tags is more difficult but it’s easy enough to batch remove an incorrect tag and add a new one.
AI definitions are being worked on and coming very soon.

@perplexing Are these web issues or mobile? I have never seen the next lesson issue but specific steps to reproduce would be helpful. We will try to reproduce ourselves.
There is no obviously good way to separate multi word LingQs beside each other.
Are you talking about the confirmation window on mobile?
Which LingQ widget? When in hover mode on web? On mobile?
Canceling is not hard. It can be an issue if users are trying to cancel a subscription from the mobile app stores from the web and vice versa. At any rate, a quick email to support resolves all issues quickly, with no hassle.
@iam3 Can you provide specific steps to reproduce the phrase LingQ status issue? Seems fine for me. Which browser do you use? Which language, lesson, phrase?

[ericb100]

@davideroccato, I understand now. I guess my question, is how would they implement what is being asked, if not for a popup. I mean…yeah, they could block of another section of the interface to load what is coming in the popup, but might the result be rather cramped? What they are popping up are the full web pages effectively for those sites. If the site is not designed to go smaller than a certain size, it would be an even worse experience would it not?..

Example with Linguee…here it happens to show all you might care about even though half the page is off screen (I would try to find something that would illustrate my point better, but have to get back to work).

Personally, when I use the web, I just copy and paste from the pop up window if I really want to get elaborate, but I understand this may not be everybody’s preference.

For myself, I think I’d rather have the popup for the dictionary than having a cramped, scroll-needy, result. They could potentially screen scrape the result, but if it’s changed somewhere down the line, then it doesn’t work and needs to be fixed. Maybe there’s other options I’m not aware of to handle what you guys are looking for.

[davideroccato]

@mark

As for dictionaries, we used to have them embedded but there were issues and we had to go back to popups. It has been a while since then so we can review and see if it is possible to embed them again

This could be a good thing. When you do, maybe you could ask the customers that write thousands of definitions, and that benefit your sofware for free by adding good material to the popular meaning, how to approach that, and what would be useful or not. Then you can decide if you can do it or not.

[davideroccato]

@mark Have you seen this one too? Next LingQ Downgrade: Dark Mode in Lessons not available any more - only some background colors

We experience things like that on a weekly basis.

[D.lfzM]

I think a lot of anguish could be diminished with announcements regarding the updates. I know they happen at irregular intervals, but it would be preferable to have them together with each update. It seems this time many of us were unsure about what was intended and what was a bug.

[ericb100]

@D.lfzM
I like that. I would also be curious as to how some design choices are made. It might be good to get some user input. HOWEVER, there are so many diverse opinions on these things that someone is going to be annoyed no matter what they do…

@davideroccato and @SeoulMate don’t like the popup dictionaries. I disagree. I think I much prefer them being popups than having a cramped, scrollable area embedded in the window (perhaps there are other ways it could be done, but I don’t think so).

So how do you choose? Some things you could make configurable and LingQ has done that, but there are probably some things where it really just may not make sense or will make any other change way more difficult in the future.

Some of the things people suggest I know I’d absolutely hate. I think in general the team is trying to do what they think is best overall. We can give some polite feedback, but some of the vitriol here is lame imo. I sometimes go through these posts and wonder if I’m even using the same software as I enjoy my experience with LingQ every day. I can understand the frustration of some folks that are having issues. The best thing they can do is what Mark stated. Provide the examples, identify the app (browser, android, iphone). What lesson, or a link to the lesson that was imported. What language? etc. etc. I’ve seen plenty of the bugs that I’ve seen fixed that no other person has reported.

Design choices are going to be subjective so that’s another topic altogether and as I said before, provide polite feedback and let them take it into consideration, but also consider that one’s own ideas may be the complete opposite of another’s ideas of what would make the software great. So a little understanding from everyone would be nice.

[mark]

I’m sure that’s true. We will try to announce things better and try to test them more thoroughly before pushing.

[perplexing]

• I’m referring to the website
• No idea how to reproduce the next lesson issue, it seems to just happen intermittently
• there obviously is a way to separate multi-word lingqs, the same way words are separated, or at least round the corners
• There used to be a confirmation dialog when moving to the next page, but it doesn’t appear anymore
• by “lingq widget” I’m referring to the sidebar box that appears when selecting a word in the reader

[davideroccato]

@mark

We will try to announce things better and try to test them more thoroughly before pushing.

Both of these actions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks for taking these steps!

[iam3]

I haven’t used LingQ for other languages that much as of late, but this happens frequently for me while using Norwegian:

The selected phrase should be underlined/highlighted like a ‘‘4/Learned’’ phrase, but instead nothing, just like the phrase immediately next to it which is actually set as Known. Also this happens when phrases are not adjacent to each other nor overlapping with other ones. And it’s kinda annoying cause I tend to got through the text with the arrow keys to jump between words/phrases, and often the flow gets kinda disrupted since I get further in the text only to check back a sentence or two etc. cause a phrase wasn’t highlighted (but as I’m going through with the arrowkeys, it still sets it as active (as it should) once I get to it).

Here’s how the current phrase looks like without being active (although again - it should have … under it):

[fabbol]

Here are two issues that AFAIK remain unfixed:

• One is a UI/UX issue: iOS: How many coins do I have?
  In short: neither the browser nor the app display how many “coins” I currently have. The only information I have is all the coins I ever earned, and how many coins I earned during a particular period of time - nowhere does it show me how many coins I have remaining after spending some on saving my streak. Thus I cannot know for sure whether I can save a streak or not, until I actually try it.

• And the other is a technical issue:Recurring bug is back: overcounting Words Read - #5 by fabbol
  In short: the browser overcounts words read by multiples, resulting in unusable statistics and way too many coins. As far as I can tell, the problem is a combination of two issues: 1) the browser counts a word as read as soon as it is displayed on the screen, and 2) the browser re-counts words on the screen at a certain, seemingly unpredictable interval. Together, these two mean that the very same word is counted as “read” multiple times if it is displayed for long enough - in my experience, at my reading speed, a double-column page is counted at least twice or three times before I manage to finish reading the page.

[sma_grodorna]

@mark

Canceling is not hard.

I don’t know how you can say this in good faith. Look at the hundreds if not thousands of people on this forum who could not manage to cancel on their own. There are posts on other platforms calling LingQ a “scam” because of this. How does all of this benefit the user experience? Why not just make the process simpler and more straightforward so that so much employee time isn’t wasted on this nonsense and you can focus on more important things? It baffles the mind how you guys willingly choose to operate so inefficiently!

[davideroccato]

@ericb100 not that I ever asked for this change, but while I was studying now, I encountered an example, so I made a screenshot, just to show what was mentioned before. Or at least, so I understood.
I bump on these situations multiple times every day. As I said, I write many definitions, and not at random.

You see the popup opening on the left, with two red boxes for the same word, sometimes there are lot more and you also need to scroll down. The first red box represent the same word as a noun, the other represent the same word as a verb.

In this particular case, I write all the 5 definitions for the noun, and I open a new field to write all the 3 definitions for the verb. If there is the same word as an adjective, I write it in a 3rd field.

Each time we click the field of the definition to start writing, the popup disappears. As I don’t have a super great memory, in this case, I have to go back and forward, bringing back the popup window multiple times, before I finish to do the job.

@mark Actually, at least in my case and thinking about it right now, it would be even great if there would be an option to leave it floating on top until I close it. That would work too. Maybe it’s possible and faster, and could be activated or deactivated like in other apps.

In any case, there is all the space in the world, possibly, to make the popup dictionary on the left side (left green box), like I have shown in the example. Considering that I was even in a small laptop.
Btw, opening the entire right side is also an option, so whoever wants the popups could just not use the sidebars. Or maybe there is the possibility to choose between both options if really necessary.

Now, my place as a customer, and not expert in developing or UI/UX designing, it is to share my concerns, frustrations, and suggest options. It’s the team that can tell me that they don’t know how to do it, don’t have ideas on how to do it better, or that’s not possible to do it, etc.

So far, I have written and shared 65.000 translations. Even if I haven’t asked anything about it, I can say that I can definitely understand the problematic.

[MartinGuehmann]

Each time we click the field of the definition to start writing, the popup disappears. As I don’t have a super great memory, in this case, I have to go back and forward, bringing back the popup window multiple times, before I finish to do the job.

For switching between two Windows, I usually use ALT-TAB, works on Windows and KDE/Linux. For Mac you need to install an add-on to get this functionality. Mac comes with something similar, but that only allows you to switch between programs. If I remember correctly, this is CMD-TAB.

But I agree, having it in the same window is nice. Actually Vivaldi has split tab feature, so you can have two tabs in the same window. Or you arrange the two browser windows so that they don’t overlap. But still, you would have to copy and paste from LingQ to the dictionary and then copy it back, unless of course you want to write yourself.

That is a bit less integrated but I have open three external dictionaries open anyway.

[davideroccato]

@MartinGuehmann

Mac comes with something similar, but that only allows you to switch between programs. If I remember correctly, this is CMD-TAB.

I can switch between programs or between tabs. It wouldn’t change anything, the moment I click on the field, the opened dictionary disappears below, and I would have to click a shortcut multiple times to make the window appearing again. I use the gestures to achieve that anyway, multiple times, because each time I keep writing in the definition’s field, the window disappears again.

What would be the add-on? Maybe something like that would switch from the two windows, if the program recognise the popup as a secondary active window, and would bring it to the front each time.

In any case, by switching back to the window with the definitions, it probably wouldn’t go right back in the field when I want to continue finishing the definition. As soon as you get out from the field, LingQ saves the definition, and you need to click back again inside the field to continue writing. Anyway, thanks for helping.

[jt23]

@mark

@SeoulMate What are the “countless bugs on the platform” that you are referring to?

Does the LingQ team actually use this app? It seems not.

[SeoulMate]

Agreed, and that’s definitely the main problem here.

[MartinGuehmann]

@davideroccato

What would be the add-on? Maybe something like that would switch from the two windows, if the program recognise the popup as a secondary active window, and would bring it to the front each time.

It is quite some time ago that I used a Mac. So I don’t remember what the add-on was. I just googled “Mac Alt Tab” and that gave me:

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
https://zapier.com/blog/alt-tab-on-mac/

I don’t know whether I used this or something else, but I would expect that it allows you to switch between different windows, whether it is a pop up window or the main window. Basically, I expect it to work like on windows. It may use a different keyboard combo.

@davideroccato

In any case, by switching back to the window with the definitions, it probably wouldn’t go right back in the field when I want to continue finishing the definition. As soon as you get out from the field, LingQ saves the definition, and you need to click back again inside the field to continue writing. Anyway, thanks for helping.

That’s true and I find that very annoying, too. I don’t mind if the thing is saving, but the insertion mark should stay there. I also consider that something to fix.

At some time I also wrote some JavaScript and it turned out that Safari is a special browser. What’s working in other browsers does not work there, even so it’s standard. And that time I had no access to a Mac. So I installed a MacOS in a virtual machine just to debug the code on Safari. That isn’t really nice but I can imagine that the LingQ team has that problem, too. (Well, that’s a guess.)

At least, I don’t have many problems with Waterfox on Kubuntu. Except as mentioned before that sometimes after finishing a lesson that the next lesson isn’t shown, even so there is a next session. And that isn’t nicely reproducible.