My Lessons bug

h4rrydog

May 29, 2008, 07:34 AM posted in General Discussion

Hi ChinesePod.  Don't know if anybody else has reported this - there is a bug on the My Lessons page.  Although I have 12 lessons bookmarked for study (confirmed by the message at the top saying so), I can only see 10 on the My Lessons page.  The navigation bits at the bottom of the page does not display a second page nor will it let me click on the right arrow.  How frustrating?!?

Good job overall with the site redesign (the parts I can see with my Basic subscription).  On the positive side, I do like the visual look of the new site, and I can see that you are working hard to incorporate more cross-linking and more colloboration features to cultivate the community aspects of the site.  Also, the quality and content of the audio podcasts, both the lessons and the cultural bits, keep getting better and better in content and in humor.  I applaud you for always working to improve.  I have been around since before the previous site overhall, and I can see the overall brilliant efforts of a hard-working group of people who really care about the product they put out.

That said, you really have to do a better job with your website quality assurance and testing!  One reason that I downgraded from my Premium subscription down to Basic was that the premium features such as the dialogue and explansion sound files, and the flash exercises were really buggy!  Often, sound files wouldn't play when I clicked on the flash widget, and I would have to reload the page to get them to work.  Also, I would work throught the flash exercises only to find that it wouldn't score them after minutes of hard work. 

I think this occurred more often with the older lessons than with the newer ones, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one that worked from old to new to keep story continuity.  Although I don't do that anymore as I seem to be busier than ever and tend to bookmark a few lessons and do whatever is next at the top of my feed list.  This did make the whole Peter / ninjas story a bit like watching the movie Momento, getting story chunks in reverse chronological order.  :)

I might suggest that perhaps one reason I am harping so much on website reliability and QA is because for me, studying "on my terms" means fitting in a half hour of language study here and there between doing my lab experiments, writing my dissertation and any of a million other tasks I'm supposed to be doing.  On the other hand, syncing and listening to the podcasts on my Walkman phone works flawlessly, so that bit you guys have nailed down perfectly.

Anyway, please take this as constructive criticism from a fan and a paying customer.  I'll continue to be a subscriber as long as I feel like I'm getting something out of the service (pocast and website), which these days definitely is the case.  You still are many times better and more suited for my learning style than the language classes I tried taking at the University.  Kudos and keep up the good work.

Cheers,

Ifung Lu
London

Ps.  Not to keep harping on reliablity, but the first time I hit the "Publish to Conversations" button, it crashed the site!  Luckily, I copied the text I had written before trying to submit this post.  You get the same problem often in Facebook, so you're not the only ones... but still!  :p