posted by hotpotmike on September 10, 2008 | 0 comments
here's an idea, just throwing it out there because i like thinking about site usability issues.
the site design is currently straightforward to use, allows users to subscribe/de-subscribe to shows, bookmark/un-bookmark lessons, etc, all coming together on the Home page. this is the type of design that organized people with average intelligence can learn quickly and enjoy using.
what about the other people, possibly a very large percentage, who require supreme simplicity. here's an idea that would cater to those people yet maintain the organized nature of the site for web-savvy people.
currently the layout is home, lessons, tools, profile
i'm suggesting the following..
lessons, community, vocab, tools, options
(no home anymore)
under lessons, you have the following tabs:
beginner, elementary, intermediate, fun, tests, latest, custom
when a new user visits the site, the menu defaults to lessons:beginner, with the user seeing the last x # of beginner lessons with 1 click access to start playing any of the x mp3s. the lesson list here is not customizable in any way (not bookmarked, etc). the custom tab would work the same as content is now (bookmarked/subscribed shows/lessons). the choice of tab that the user has last accessed would be tracked, so that the user is automatically returned to their favourite/last used tab if they've navigated away from lessons and returned.
back to the main menu options.. if they click community, they get the message board, if they click vocab, they get a tabbed list to choose from, e.g. easy (maybe 50 most common Chinese words), medium, hard, hsk 1, hsk 2..etc, and custom, which would behave as the current vocab option does now. basically right away they can access easy lists of words to start using flashcards with, and web-savvy users could start building their own vocab lists.
back to the main menu, clicking tools would give you tabs like publish lesson, tell a friend, other new features/tools.
back to the main menu again, Options would give you tabs for Shows (to subscribe/de-subscribe), account/profile options, settings
having the user make the connection that lessons they've bookmarked are on the lessons:custom tab might be a bit of a challenge, but anyways just throwing out some UI ideas here.
forgetting everything I just said, as the UI stands now, the main suggestion i can make would be to add the mp3 player to each of the mp3 lessons shown on the home:content page.
just throwing out some thoughts
I'm also *very* interested to see how people will react to the design decisions we made. Just commenting on your suggestions, it would be difficult for us to switch to a level-based interface for a very simple reason: we don't actually have difficulty levels. This is disguised to avoid scaring newcomers, but it is true. What you are seeing on the left-hand column of the lesson page is the name of the user publishing the lesson.If you grok the implications of this, I think you'll understand why we want to avoid hard-coding specific users into our navigation interface. We are working on a platform that is structurally indifferent to who is actually publishing content. You can subscribe to my stuff (visit my profile page) and I can subscribe to yours too.The really challenging usability issues we kept running into during development all involved reconciling this "extra dimension" of potential UGC with what we wanted to be an uber-simple interface. We settled on the design philosophy of "hiding things in plain sight". It's difficult for users to stumble into UGC territory without meaning to. But once they are there they should be comfortable with the interface since nothing has changed.It took a leap of faith to throw out hardcoding explicit difficulty levels when designing Popup Chinese (they're so pervasive in learning systems that people set them up reflexively!), but I'm increasingly convinced that the notion of "progressive levels" is a seductive but problematic lure. I think it seems intuitively desirable to us because it combines two things:
- Group Consistency: asserting the similarity of in-group objects (if you are at this level, all of these are right for you!)
- Progressive Structure: an implied hierarchy, and the comforting illusion of lessons as sequential units that will bring us to fluency if only we finish listening to them all....
hotpotmike on September 11, 2008 | reply
hmm.. i'll have to think about this when i have more time. one comment i have for now is that the words click on a user name to visit their profile/unsubscribe and seeing hsk beginner, etc, beneath that definitely made me pause and think user name wasn't the right word. but i see what you're doing..another idea, instead of user name, what about show name - (user mike).. e.g. HSK Beginner (user PopupChinese)Chengyu Challenge (user Joe)orJoe - Chengyu Challenge, Word of the Day, more...gotta run
@mike - it's definitely a challenge. One of our strategies right now is helping find their feet by keeping things simple and making the pre-loaded content something of a site guide (new learners go here, advanced learners go there), etc.I know of at least one case where someone has visited the site and complimented us on a lesson someone else actually created. The lines between our own content and other content on the site are really blurry. We may have to do something about that.And off-topic, but you're the only other foreigner I know who's seen 那是花开 btw. Only reason I ever stumbled into it was that the video stores in Tsinghua were stocking it when I was (very briefly) there as a student.
Do you plan some kind of Collaborative Filtering & Recommender System based approach?
Users who this lesson also viewed the following exercises? Or recommendations based on similar ranking, from similar sources, with similar success, similar demographics etc. Those attributes might also enter some cluster algorithm to group users...
Maybe this way you could gain some kind of
Maybe this way you could gain some kind of "natural level system", i.e. a level system generated by usage patterns.
Another question: Do you really want to cover the complete spectrum of Chinese learners from absolute Beginners to fairly Advanced ones?Beginners will always demand for more structure and guidance, a stricter level system etc. Your envisioned customer centric approach seems to be more suited for intermediate or advanced learners who can very well define their own needs?The competition is also different, with all those free newbie material floating around on the web.
hotpotmike on September 12, 2008 | reply
hmm.. originally i suggested the new menu layout as i thought the popupchinese content would be the main focus with user generated content as extra or separate, but now i see the true intentions of the platform. having a list of shows (which are actually user names), combined with real usernames who are also publishing content under their username, may cause some confusion. i think having user PopupChinese publish shows such as Absolute Beginners, instead of user Absolute Beginner publish a show will make more sense to a new user once they start using advanced areas of the site and using user generated content. it would also allow the user publishers to easily group similar content without multiple accounts.i definitely see huge potential in what you're doing.somehow i stumbled on na shi hua kai on the net back in 2004, and dl'd it. i've asked in various Chinese dvd stores in Toronto for it and nobody has it or has heard of it.
Film Friday on September 12, 2008 | reply
@mike - > having a list of shows (which are actually user > names), combined with real usernames who are also > publishing content under their username, may > cause some confusion.I think you get it, but this description is still a bit confused. There are no shows. There are only users. The words show, user, publisher, podcaster, listener, student and teacher are completely interchangeable.I suspect the reason this invites cognitive dissonance is that we're burying the publishing functions in the profile section to avoid overwhelming or confusing people on their first brush with the site. The reason for this is that I don't want people fleeing in terror because it's their first week of Chinese class and they think we're asking them to start writing eight legged essays.A more fundamental cause may be that people don't expect to be invited to cross the line from passive listener to active learner when it comes to language learning. Posting this comment as user "Film Friday" to underscore the point. He (she?) has a profile page just like everyone else. The graphic attached to the podcast is actually the user photo we uploaded. :)--dave
@henning - you'll have to wait to find out how we'll provide more structure.... guessing is allowed though and I'll buy you a beer if you get it right.We're expecting to roll out these features in about two months once we have enough content to justify doing so. At that time we'll review the site layout and pull lesson creation out of hiding to put it in a more logical position. :)> Another question: Do you really want to cover the complete spectrum of Chinese learners from absolute Beginners to fairly Advanced ones?We're going to move mountains to help people. This doesn't necessarily mean producing all of the materials ourselves, but we can do it quite comfortably if need be.
hotpotmike on September 12, 2008 | reply
hmm.. i agree with burying the publishing functions for the reasons you mentioned, but i think the interchangeability of the words show/user/publisher would cause even more confusion than inadvertently making new users think that they have to publish their own lessons to use the site.if you take the words on the lesson page "This is our lesson archive. Click on any user's name to view all their shows, or any lesson title to visit the lesson." i think they'll be unlikely to make the connection (at first anyways) that Absolute Beginners is a user. maybe they'll see mikexx88 on the list and make the cognitive leap but i don't think so. i think this site model is more suited for youtube than here, for a couple of reasons:- the site operator is publishing content, not under the username PopupChinese, but usernames that sound like content.- a typical user name likely won't contain any words relevant to the content they are publishing, unless they intentionally change it to a content name, which makes them seem less like a person. but here, much more so than youtube, a username that reflects the content type is much more important, for reasons i don't have time to list at the moment.- basically, i just have a hard time seeing what i call 'show names' and 'user names' in the same list, even though in actuality they are the same thing.i'm not saying it won't work but i think the abstraction is at the expense of clarity.maybe it's just been too long since i left 1 twilight lane.. :)
hotpotmike on September 12, 2008 | reply
ack.. i'm not saying this site model isn't suitable, i just think that one more level is needed beneath username to separate content names from user names.
Dave,agreed, I stay put and get a beer if you introduce automatic clustering technology for ordering content.This sure more and more looks like the LHC of Chinese learning sites ;)
@hotpotmike - this is all good food for thought. you're right that our own text is misleading here and we should change it.