Hi Mike,

Thanks for the feedback and welcome to Popup Chinese!

I'll look into that difference in audio levels. We're working to get into a routine schedule for recording and have been having issues with one of our recording machines (Vista is giving us some problems with handling audio under Java). We've got a workaround right now and have disabled automatic audio normalization - will get this fixed before we leave beta.

I think our designer would probably agree with you on the site aethestics. Our back-and-forth over this sort of thing largely consisted of my proudly handing over greyscale screenshots I'd hacked together the night before in photoshop, and his immediately blurting out, "太难看了" or “单调死了". Say what you will about them, Beijingers are not afraid to call a spade a spade.

Now it's all together I think if anything the site probably *is* a bit too greyish and a bit more color would be nice. I also agree about the position of the create lesson functionality. It's in an awkward spot right now -- my concern with putting it in a more prominent position on the Lessons page was out of fear it might confuse first-time visitors. We're trying to be ruthlessly austere in part to help with usability. There aren't really existing precedents for a lot of the UCG features, so they're tucked away at the moment.