What’s with the new dashboard UI?
Everything is pushed over to one side, and the buttons and bars all stretched out. It all feels cramped and too big, but zooming out doesn’t help because it pushed everything further to the corner.
At a glance it’s harder to get an overview of what I’ve done, and I can no longer immediately see what’s coming next without pinning it to the dashboard which just then makes me scroll infinitely more than I need to, or had to before. It is genuinely so much worse.
Please reconsider
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I have already sent them an email about it.
I agree it’s quite horrible, and I’m actually considering stop using CM.
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I just noticed the dashboard too and want to use it for a few days before deciding how I feel about it. in the meantime, I would like to suggest one thing already - that the play button in each collection in the “In Progress” section be smaller so that it doesn’t visually get in the way of seeing an overview of the actual progress bars. Right now, the play buttons are so big that it overpowers the progress bars.
So far, I do like the left side bar which makes it easier to get to the reading section. It would be nice to have the forum link on the side bar too.
Because the collections are so easy to get to, I have unpinned a bunch of the collections from the dashboard, leaving only those few that I am actively working on.
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This is how I feel, too. I’m sure that the roughest edges can be evened out fairly quickly. An UI overhaul was long overdue, so I’m glad to see some progress here.
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It is common practice on many pages to move the sidebar to the left and open it again if necessary. would it be here a option?
also, if I click on collections on the left sidebar I see a black page
I use safari on Ios18 with all updates installed
Thanks for the feedback!
A lot of the feedback that we’ve received was that the dashboard had too much information and was too cluttered, and understandably so - if I was playing a Grammar Collection, for example, I’d have to scroll down past a bunch of collections every time I wanted to play. The goal with this update was to make the UI simpler so that I can open the site and the play button is right there for the collection I’m playing. Collections I’m not currently playing can be unpinned.
It also adds the same new Streak vs Days Played toggle included in the latest mobile app release.
I think you mean with respect to overall progress across collections, something like “I’ve completed Fast Track Levels 1-4 and am currently on Level 5”, is that right? Or something else?
How often is this an issue? One of our assumptions is that it takes a long time to finish a collection, so probably not necessary to a bunch of other completed / not yet started collections I have to scroll past every time I open the dashboard.
Responded!
Nice! Glad to hear, that’s what we’re going for.
Yikes, sorry about that. Is that on iPad? Does it happen as soon as you open the site?
Any and all additional feedback welcome. Thanks again!
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So in my case, I’m looking for various language tools to help keep me motivated and practicing, and I ended up finding this barely a week ago. Subbed and reset progress just yesterday though (though the progress reset may have been an accident, it just seemed to stop tracking what I had done)
However, starting out with something new means I had to poke around the different available collections to see what was too easy, too advanced etc. and I thought having everything there on the dashboard, categorised and compact was quite nice and easy to use, and of course which ones I had started and stopped. With German, there’s a lot I’d like to bounce around to and from.
So to the question how often is it an issue, I’d say right now it feels a bit more annoying to use and since the view of the progress on each section is larger than before, the at a glance of the dashboard isn’t quite as quick.
However, I think once I find my place and a few collections to go on, it might be easier to clean up and be just as good to use.
Anyway, didn’t want it to come off as whiny or anything from someone brand new, just right now, I got a bit of whiplash from the old ui to the new one so suddenly.
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My only comment as a week old user, would be that a heads-up email notification to subscribers would have been nice. A “here’s whats coming and why” email…
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I agree with this. I’m finding the new dashboard hard to use. At first, I thought there was something wrong and I had accidently changed the setting or something, so I came here to check and and found this thread. I much, much prefer the old one for the reasons in the above quote. I used to be able to see everything, or most, at one glance, and I now have to scroll down to find collections. It’s all so big! I think if it were more in the centre, made smaller so more is visible, or something were on the left hand side rather than just a blank space, it would be more aesthetically pleasing and more convenient to users.
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@mike Hi Mike, no, same issue on my Ubuntu with Firefox. But it occur only in [ENG-UKR]. it load a black page which I previously posted.in other languages it works.
and another thing, whats about “cloze-reading” ? is there none at ENG-UKR? at least none is displayed on the left side
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Yes, I really don’t like this at all.
“Cluttered” as such has never been a complaint I’ve had; my main issue with the interface has been that things have been tossed in over time and as a result it has become ridiculously hard to find some things. Example: The game settings being only accessible from when you’re playing a set, even though they are universal to an account. You get used to it, but it would be incredibly confusing for newbies.
“Hey, how do I stop these level up notifications?!”
“Well, first you need to start playing a set and THEN you can go into the cog, and THEN…”
Then there’s the review cycle setting which has the opposite problem, since it’s annoyingly universal when in reality it is NOT a one size fits all solution and would be better being able to be set by collection; a player WON’T typically want the same review cycle for “100 Most Common” if they’re down playing “10,000 Most Common” by that point. Which means remembering to manually flip the cycles before playing some collections. That USED to be on the main page but that seems to be gone.
After hunting around enough, I found it under the cog wheel icon of the Ready For Review block.
On the subject of discoverability, all the things that USED to be on the right side panel that appeared when you clicked the drop down next to your big, obvious name and language button in the top right are now under an obscure, small, unmarked drop down triangle. A visit to the forum is still a two click solution rather than a one click solution, though I’m wondering if there will be less traffic anyway since newbies may not even know that there IS a forum unless they’re the kind to wonder “Hey, what does this do”?
Where I, personally, have a problem with clutter is that in a lot of the collections, in 2 of the 3 languages I’m active in, I’ve played 100% of the clozes in the collections. That means that the overwhelming majority of the collections on the dashboard are, for me, clutter. Clicking on the (now huuuuuggggee, elongated) [Play] button will result in nothing more than the accursed sight of crying Pikachu, and thus the opportunity to practice swearing in my target language. The whole box has no value to anyone who has played 100% and is in review mode because (a) There is no review button in the box, you need to go through the Review button at the top, and (b) The play button is useless once you’ve played 100% of the questions (whether you’ve mastered them or not) unless you actually like rather than detest the crying Pikachu animation.
Agreed. Even leaving aside the aesthetics of it, at my normal browser window size I’ve got maybe a third of a screen of white space, and to me that’s just wasted space especially when things that I use regularly (like changing review cycles since I can’t set them by collection HINT HINT) and the Forum link are now buried away under obscure controls. To me, that’s a waste of screen space.
Edit: Also, to get to Activity Feed at all, you now have to go to the obscure drop down, and THEN go to Notifications, or Account, or some page that gives you the old control button in the top right, and then, only then, will you be able to find Activity Feed.
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Quite a shock, slight panic thinking it was my Samsung tablet playing up. Managed to find both my courses but much prefer the “old style” format which I found clear and concise. Still happily learning lots though, that’s the main thing.
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I really enjoyed being able to see a detailed breakdown of my progress through Fluency Fast Track, and now I can’t figure out how to access that. Is this functionality still available? How do I access it now? If you got rid of it, can you bring it back please?
Additionally, I don’t like how so many perfectly functional apps and websites seem to be in a perpetual state of development. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Why do we have to constantly mess with things that work just fine? Imagine if someone randomly rearranged the furniture in your home every few months, would you like that? This is actually one of the reasons I paid for a subscription to CM and stopped paying for Duolingo - the constant updates were disruptive and made it hard for me to stay focused on the language learning.
Adding functionalities or adapting to new technology makes sense to me. But why do you feel the need to redesign the UI every X amount of time? Can you decide at some point that the site is no longer in Beta version and release something stable that we can expect to not keep changing on us?
Fine, though, the product is still functional and I’ll get used to these changes. I’m mostly just grumbling.
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What seems to be missing is the button that allows you to do new sentences which then mixes in the various levels of Fluency Levels. Not you need to click the actual level, which is definitely a negative, Not liking it at all. Far less user friendly and very annoying that the problem exists on both the app and the website version.
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Responded back, with additional information and a few screenshots.
I definitely not like the new font and layout, it makes it hard to get an overview and navigate.
It’s too much or too big text in every “box”, especially on a small screen.
For me it’s the opposite.
I prefer to have each “play-button” in it’s context, now they are totally mixed-up on the dashboard in alphabetical order. Yes, it was a bit of scrolling but with smaller and clearer text it was easy to navigate and get an overview.
I couldn’t agree more.
For me personally I won’t get used to this new UI, and if I decide to continue, it’s on a much slower rate.
But for now I just feel so demotivated to continue…
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The button to play sentences at random from “Most Common Words” seems to have gone missing (Spanish from English).
In a separate thread, It has been reported that file upload of sentences is no longer available.
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I noticed another functionality I was quite fond of that I can no longer find. The page with statistics of how much I’ve done each day, %correct per day, etc going back to the beginning. Where is this now?
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I can still find the “Full History” button, which opens the “Daily Stats” page, as before.
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Also- There doesn’t seem to be an option to add words to a collection anymore, only sentences? Being able to add new vocab was one of the main reasons I loved this resource.
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In addition to all of the “Add Sentence” options that are gone (mentioned above by @morbrorper and discussed here), another thing seems to have vanished; that is, the Download button that used to be under the “Favorites” block of the old dashboard.
As I recall, this was used mainly when people wanted to download groups of built in sentences to upload to custom collections. You could add the sentences to the Favorites, download the Favorites, make whatever changes were needed then reupload the file to the custom collection. I thought there was a thread about that but I can’t find it.
However this thread shows that it’s not the first time that the option has scarpered.