Some feedback on where we are with developments courtesy of Hank. We’ve been listening and trying to respond to you - Eileen alone answered 170 emails yesterday. (Poor thing.)
1. bookmarked lessons
- hurting usability; user saves but doesn’t understand need to schedule lessons
- solution: changed Lesson List to Scheduled Lessons, adding Bookmarked Lesson to help make more obvious
STATUS: will be done today
2. vocab audio
- missing for left-click added words, previously imported vocabulary
- working on a solution (this week?)
3. pinyin chart audio
- weren’t added
- should be added today
STATUS: working on
4. vocab sets
- weren’t added
- should be added today
STATUS: updating Wed
5. vocab management
- no folder called ‘vocab w/o tags’ which made navigation hard
- no erase all button
- instructions are very incomplete
STATUS: updating today and tomorrow
6. personal feed
- no level RSS feeds
- people can customize own feed
- Saturday Show & Word on the Street to be included
- missing level indicator in title
STATUS: updating Wed
and a number of smaller isssues.
- buggy lessons -> updating
- missing practice plan -> updated
- Praxis Pass -> updating Thurs
- comment bugs (not accepting some puncuation) -> updating Wednesday
- missing comments on ChinesePod Extra -> can comment now, but need to import old ones
- cookies set to expire every 24 hours -> fixed
- deleting watchlist users -> fixed Hope that helps.
Things are starting to get smoother. I hope the vision we have for ChinesePod is becoming apparent. I’ve seen a few pretty cynical comments and some harsh words in the last few days, but we haven’t lost the faith. Some may tell you we’re making the changes for selfish, pecuniary reasons, and trashing the best interests of our learners. Don’t believe that. We’re definitely a business and we definitely must approach it as such, but no-one on the team doubts for a second that if we keep your best interests in mind, then that’s the best business strategy of all. Trust me!
Update: The pinyin chart is done - both online and version and downloadable version. (You can save it to your hard drive.) We push on.
Ken Carroll
I’ve been harsh in my comments, but I just want to get back to learning Chinese. Discussions are clogged with bug talk, making answering lesson questions unreliable (where’s Amber, btw).
Ron,
I think your comments are always reasonable. You’ve provided lots of useful feedback in the past and we value your comments.
I just want to get back into the learning, myself. I don’t doubt that that’s what most people want. I’m convinced we now have a much more powerful tool at our disposal. We just have to get used to it.
Ken Carroll
We trust ya Ken, and I for one am sure that you are doing this with the interests of your users in mind.
But it looks, from some of the comments I’ve read, that you have made switching over a huge effort. People don’t want effort; they want ease and ease is what you advertise. Some people sense a disconnect.
I’ve looked at these features and I think they are great. I think they will help you add more customers but I’m also sure in the long run that it will make our learning easier. But people are suffering in the short run. I don’t know what you can do to ease this suffering except to fess up to the problems, and tell people what you are doing to right the ship. Maybe paying customers (of which I’m not one) should get something extra. Whadaya think Big Brain?
Michael,
I’m not denying any problems. I made them fully public for all to see and discuss. When you say ‘fess up’ it sounds as if we’d done some kind of immoral act or some PR scandal! Ouch.
Ken Carroll
Hi. I’m a paying customer on a premium plan. I live in China, I’ve visited the ChinesePod offices personally and they *work* at making this a viable way to learn Chinese. This website change came as a surprise actually because I thought perhaps they would take a breath and let V2 work for them for a while. After all, even V2 wasn’t that old.
In addition to being a paying customer and student, I am also an Information Technology professional with more than a decade of experience; and, I know that most people have no idea what ChinesePod just did. In total, there are probably 10s of thousands of lines of code behind this website, many of which were just examined, improved or added. There are probably several physical production servers and many HTML, PHP, ASP & SQL programmers making this work. There are graphics/design artists, integration groups and management all working together to make this website a great place to learn Chinese. Regardless of what company creates a software application, or website (which is an application in its own right), at no time is the first run perfect. The interesting part is that most users out there have no idea what it took to make this change happen, how complex the site really is, or how many things the programmers and other staff really got right.
So, I’ll say what I feel… Thanks guys, for doing a stand-up job. I know for every bug found, there were 20 others that were caught and fixed prior to the site being released. My Chinese studies have not been hurt and I’m comfortable in calmly, patiently and politely informing you of any potential bug I might find in one of the two ways you kindly provided. I know you’re working hard and that, even if I couldn’t access the site at all for while that I could take the opportunity to learn some Chinese history from another website or practice my pronounciation on the words I already know. I am a paying customer and I know every dime is well spent. Thanks again for providing this resource, improving it continuously and I look forward to continuing my education with your help.
This list is precisely what needed to be done, even if it pushes some of the fixes back by minutes or hours. Communicating clearly what is known and being addressed is key in maintaining both personal trust and a professional demeanor with viewers/paying customers, and I applaud you for making that effort. From the looks of it all of my minor (and one major) gripes with V3 will be sorted out within a few days. Anxiously downloading the pinyin guide at the moment.
And don’t worry to much about excessively harsh comments at this moment - as mentioned above switching to V3 was no doubt a monumental effort, and bugs and problems are to be expected. To expect them all to be resolved within minutes, hours, or even days of launch is idealistic. As the dust settles this whole V3 thing is starting to make more sense to me, and those parts that aren’t will hopefully fall into place (or be easily ignored, i.e. ’scheduling’ in my case). Hope your next weekend is a relaxing one after the last few wild days.
Michael Butler asks “I don’t know what you can do to ease this suffering except to fess up to the problems, and tell people what you are doing to right the ship.
since those who suffer most are the old(er)-timers, one thing is a few parallel screenshots somewhere showing how to do things under v2/v3. Or a prominent list of “how to”s, where you probably want to make long by adding all the new things you can do which you couldn’t before.
David Saunders is right about the humungous effort this must have represented, but that’s neither here nor there, we’re now used to very slick online tools (as well as mp3, smartphones etc.) that are expected to work fast and seamlessly. But I do agree that the enthusiasm and dedication of the whole ChinesePod team is to be applauded, and not just the few with their picture on the homepage, 加油加油
Yv
May be that some of my comments or bug reports were harsh, but: I really appreciate your work and also the work after releasing v3.
I am in the IT business and I know how much detail work has been done “behind the curtain”. Thank you for this!
On the last weekend while looking into v3, I was only wondering whether it could have been possible to beta/gammatest the whole web application in more depth before opening it to everybody. May be next time…
If all of the problems has been resolved, I am sure, CP v3 will be a great product for the worldwide Chinese learning community. Thanks again to the whole CP team.
I think that some of the harsher comments were made because people felt lost. The internet being what it is posting emotional reactions is all too easy. On the other hand every comment, bug report etc. contains a very important message, even if the message is one of frustration only. I think that it is absolutely remarkable that you have allowed most of the discussions to be out in the open and also that you have not let pride interfere with some decisions that had to be made. The speed by which some of the issues were addressed is truly amazing. The effort must have been huge! (I am an ICT professional and I have run a couple of simple websites myself…). Anyway, a big thank you for all this, I hope that you may reap the financial benefits of all this effort. May your subscriber base increase a thousandfold!
Hello again, all.
[QUOTE]
I’m convinced we now have a much more powerful tool at our disposal. We just have to get used to it.
Ken Carroll
{/QUOTE]
I have read all the very sensible posts above by genuine IT people, and believe me, I share their respect and admiration (if not their technical understanding!).
Ken, I went through every one of my posts on V3 a second time, just to be sure that NONE of my complaints were about “bugs”, which are to be expected.
The issue that has rattled me — and the issue which seems to have NO solution, because it’s not a problem for the ChinesePod Team, or in any case it hasn’t been heard — is the fundamental change in direction, pedagogically-speaking. In other words, your approach to language-learning.
By nature, I am such a “self-directed”-type of language learner that it was a revelation when I discovered V2 in December 2006 and found a tool/system that seemed to fit in with my needs so well.
What I cannot grasp is how “self-directed” in V3 seems to mean “no direction”. Can’t speak for other users, but for me personally, the “self-directed” learning is definitely being held up in V3 by the lack of conceptual and practical tools to manage the materials. As long as I am logged in on your site, there is no problem. But I stand by what I wrote in an earlier post about not enough thought being given to how your paying users use (and hence, how they archive and manage) the stuff they download. The archiving and managing part was unobtrusive and flexible in V2, it is frustrating (and inadequate) in V3.
If the truth is that the key concept behind V3 is that subscribers must learn to live with being within one particular level in order to be served best, and hence there is “no going back”, then it’s not the tool for me. Just can’t feel comfortable with that. Fortunately, I am an upper-intermediate student, and as a “heritage speaker” who is an overseas Chinese, the three months I’ve been studying with ChinesePod (*basic subscriber) are a probably enough of a foundation for future learning with other materials.
ChinesePod lessons will always be brilliant enough for it to be worthwhile to download them and listen to them, but I just won’t have the time to archive the MP3s and PDFs to the extent needed in order to use them “on [my] terms”. So you will no longer be my core source of study materials. Sorry.
Thank you for all the value that you have given me, the confidence, and for helping me to love this language more than ever before. I mean it.
Affectionately,
Sharon
I really can’t understand why the numbering scheme is such a big issue.
First of all it has been repeated often on the blog and in the podcast that the approach to the CP lessons doesn’t have to be chronological. On the contrary, the idea is that you pick a lesson that sounds interesting at a level that you feel comfortable with and take it from there. I know it is very hard to resist chronology because we have been conditioned by years of traditional studying to follow textbooks from page 1 all the way through the end, so ‘pick and choose’ can be stressfull. But I assure you there is no advantage to be gained by following the lessons in chronological order, on the contrary, some earlier Newbie lessons are way to difficult for beginners. All the lessons of the last few months have a clearer position on the difficulty scale (which makes the hole between ele’s and intermediate lessons all to apparent, but that is another discussion).
But,…if you want chronology, it is still there! In the archive pages the lessons are ordered from the most recent all the way through the first one in that level. And if you download a podcast you will notice that there is a continous numbering scheme with letters indicating the level (A=Newbie, B=Elementary, etc.). So it is not all to difficult to work from there. There is a similar naming scheme for the dialogue-only mp3 and for the PDF.
If someone wants to rename files after downloading them, it can still be done manually (tedious) or in batch using one of the many freeware programs (http://www.nonags.com/nonags/fileren.html).
Marc,
I don’t think the numbering is missed for chronology reasons, but for quick orientation and ordering. I for example have a list of 800 sentences. Tagged with A61 and so on, so that I can listen to them, when I want to. This was easy. Now, I can’t find those lessons any more without using cross-reference tables created by users who seem to have the same problems.
It’s okay for me, to switch to a new numbering. But the numbers are only shown in the pdfs. I haven’t found a way to search for a lesson by number yet. This has quite an impact on my “workflow”. I think that’s what all the “mourning for numbers” is about.
Ken,
Er…sorry Ken. Soldier on. No middle ground here.
The work is greatly appreciated.. the enthusiasm, intelligence, and professionalism of CPod employees has always been incredible, but something along the way went terribly terribly wrong… way back at the drawing board. ChinesePod has essentially lost its identity and been replaced with this monstrosity of a website with absolutely no character, horrible layout, incredibly poor choice of link names, and now functions completely contrary to the way a website which publishes new daily material should operate. I think the UIs I design for sewage plants have more character, and are hands down more usable.
Submitted with the highest respect,
Mike
Dear Marc, as Anne M. explains, the numbering is not being missed for chronology reasons, but because it is now so darned difficult to locate lessons on my Mac.
Fact is, I may not feel comfortable being pigeon-holed into one specific level, but this does NOT mean that I don’t need to know the level of the lessons in my personal library. Some levels — eg., Advanced — I don’t do routinely — but I would still want to download them as and when they are released, for future use. For me, it seems a lot more efficient and intuitive to do this, without spending too many seconds thinking about the process, than trying to find a couple of hours one day to mass-download the past “Advanced” lessons all at once. It brings us back to the “level” question; I’m just not the kind of person who would wake up one day and decided that I had “finished” upper-intermediate, and will switch to “Advanced”. Having the Advanced lessons on my Mac, filed in a way that works for me, is in itself an incentive for language-learning and progress. It’s the main factor why I’ve now done 4 Advanced lessons.
Sorry, Marc, this is just my explanation. You don’t have to agree with me.
Ciao,
Sharon
Btw, Marc, it’s true that everything is still chronological in the online version. But that’s not helpful if you are the kind of (freaky?) learner who — essentially — does the lessons OFFline, whether it’s at my Mac or on my iPod. Not having numbering is a problem because it’s harder to keep track of what’s new, or to know if I’ve missed something.
Take care,
Sharon
Regarding vocab management, would it be possible to have newly added vocab automatically tagged as “new” so you can find them straight away and retag them?
I can imagine you are going through a hard time fixing all the issues and also want to thank you for the feedback and the way you handle ‘complaints’/tips/bugs
Here is a small one again: My approach is to listen many times to the lessons when travelling. But, I learned that i do need to take the pinyin at a certain point. Why do you choose not to offer alle the pdf’s also in a ‘megapack’. E.g a zipfile with all the newbie pdf;s together. Would save a lot of work of saving and printing all the pdf’s one at a time.
Thanks again,
Jesse
COCA-COLA - I like to simplify things in life, so if somebody talks to me about cross-national exchange rates and currency regimes I just ask, how much does it cost for a can of coke there? This pretty much tells me the proper exchange rate.
So today on the bus, a man was yelling for the bus driver to stop at this stop, the bus driver kept saying there wasn’t one “没有了”, finally this rather large man shouted “停” ting, STOP! Well, the bus driver had by now already gotten to the actual stop, and stopped. Everyone was very upset and there was a lot of commotion.
The bus driver continued to argue back, I guess to no one in particular, “你觉得我不干停..” Some others on the bus seemed to support the bus driver, saying things like, “he answered the guy and said there wasn’t a stop there anymore.”
I sympathized with the frustrated rider. I only knew better because I ride that line a lot and had seen the bus stop change and new sign. Often, however, bus drivers don’t stop at a bus stop unless you yell out, “I’m getting off!” “有下!” The rider was just trying to get off at the stop that before, he could always get off at.
So here’s how I see it, some of the very harsh comments about V3 were like the surprised rider trying to get off, others were a mix of people who rode the bus a lot, or weren’t particularly interested in that particular stop. And there was the driver defending his actions.
I mentioned this little scene today to a Chinese colleague, saying why didn’t they put up a little piece of paper in the bus noting the bus stop change. Even better, why don’t they put up a list of bus stops INSIDE the bus? And why do the bus drivers sometimes feel compelled to F-1 race thru their stops? Where was the communication?
In this way, I felt very much like a foreigner today, I couldn’t understand why some to me very commonsense steps weren’t taken to avoid frustration on both sides. I think a lot of it has to do with a Chinese culture of avoiding direct blame, and being used to putting up with things, especially in the name of progress. My friend says the city is small and people don’t really know how to run a bus service. I countered that it’s pretty easy to put up a piece of paper with the new stops.
I know Ken did his darnedest to prepare us, but I don’t think he expected this many things to go astray. He’s not publically blaming anyone, in fact I doubt he would privately either. He’s probably very Chinese in this way.
But for the quality and service level to go up, many new things have to be put in place, and at the root of it is the problem that nobody has said outloud that a lot of things went wrong with the upgrade. In previous work, I remember telling senior exectutives that our goal was to have things break when we did our practice runs, and practice cutovers. I bet all the smaller practice cutovers at Cpod went flawlessly, until the big day.
Many many things went wrong, and the team did not know how to do a top-notch upgrade. Too many rather large items went astray. Missing data should be show stoppers. Data sets can definitely be subjected to quality assurance. Missing data typically results in a rollback. I doubt Cpod had a rollback plan in place.
Actually, one could argue it’s not necessary, this data isn’t life threatening or financial, and maybe it may be better that some of my own comments go poof to the wind. But nobody, none of the Cpod riders expected quite so much change and things to go wrong.
But I do believe the development team knew. If Cpod wants to avoid this in the future, trial-cutovers need to be done, and staff must be willing to admit and identify mistakes, and especially areas of uncertainty. I can only conclude from the symptoms that too many of the developers on Cpod’s team were afraid to do that.
If they are willing to do this, then lots of little signs and notices can be put up, and a lot of frustration would be avoided. Imagine having been able to say “With the V3 upgrade a number of items won’t be working or in place right away: They include imports of comments from the advanced site or Saturday show, parts of the Pinyin chart, etc., etc.”
If the work culture or their own culture or whatever expectations were properly set, Cpod could have proactively told the riders to expect many glitches and a period of instability.
We all realize we’re in that period now, but it was a rollercoaster getting here.
There’s a difference between buggy and having lots of things go wrong. Wrong being things like major pieces of data not being imported, or major service items like the pinyin chart audio not working, or loss of previous functionality.
Just a there are various signs that can be put on a bus, for example a notice that bus stops will be changing; another that while people are digging posts, the bus is going to take another route; and maybe one more post identifying the new stop.
Well, I think my bus analogy is losing a bit of steam, and I feel very Singaporean-like in bringing up the need for all these signs. Things do run like a fine-tuned clock there though.
At the end of the day, I guess I can’t really say that at US 12 cents that I’m not getting my money’s worth with that bus ride.
I wish I could have expressed all that in about 1,000 less words, my post certainly went long. I really appreciate being able to make a comment like this to Cpod.
Let me throw in a Tiger Woods anecdote. At least twice in his life he changed his swing while he was at the top of his game. I quote from an article in Golf Digest:
‘After seven years and 142 tournaments in a row, Tiger Woods finally joined the ranks of mortal golfers when he missed the cut at the Byron Nelson Championship May 13, 2005. Golf pundits argue that changing his swing is to blame. Tiger defends his decision stating “I felt like I could get better. People thought it was asinine for me to change my swing after I won the Masters by 12 shots. … Why would you want to change that? Well, I thought I could become better.”
Ken Carroll
Lantian,
great post. You said what I wasn’t able to say without getting harsh. I’ve also been thinking about cultural differences of being professional. I was wondering if my - german - standards were over the top…
Ken,
Tiger was not paid by his audience.
Lantian,
Thanks for a great posting!
I liked earlier version a lot; being order-obsessed, I found it quite simple to keep track of my learning with old lesson numbering. It helped much with iPod playlists and in keeping PDFs readily organized. It was easy to jump back to those lessons I found necessary for progress. On contrary to conception that CPod lessons need not be/are not chronological, there have been several “lesson threads” that helped with memorizing situations and colloquialisms in them: Lili he Zhang Liang; Peter the Canadian Businessman.
Nevertheless, standing means falling behind. The day you feel satisfied with your performance, you start to fail. No omelett without breaking the eggs….
I think adjusting to new way of CPodding just requires some effort. After all, it is your own desire to look and find that drives your learning. I still think CPod is the best site in this field.
Lastly, one kind request:
Ken, could you add to lesson tabs one saying “SaturdayShow”: although not strictly language lessons, SatShows have been extra candy for weekend. I have many non-chinese-learning friends who after hearing my iPod content have been following SatShows just because they are cool, hip and edgy…. also that creepy copy-guy thinks so …:-))
Yours,
Antti
Ken, your post summarises all of the issues that I raised and it is comforting to know that they are being worked on. I only hope that this post serves to reassure others that the ChinesePod team are listening and that contrary to some suggestions do value their users. Thanks for your work so far.
When the launch of V3 settles down. It would be nice to see some discussion with regards to the future direction of ChinesePod and online vs. off-line learning. I’d be interested (and I’m sure I’m not alone) in hearing how the team feels about this balance. I’m sure some users do all their learning online, others download the material and learn off-line and those like myself chop and change between the two. Designing for such variety must be a nightmare.
Thanks for V3.
Bill … I’ve seen blunt messages and (perhaps) a bit of hyperbole here and there — but I haven’t seen anyone really suggest that CPOD doesn’t value its customers. We know better. Probably more than most casual users. We talk to these people behind the scenes, we know first hand that they work overtime, they bend over backwards providing extra frills (like the Forum & Wiki) that they certainly aren’t obligated to provide. We’re acutely aware of the passion that they have for teaching. Keep in mind, many of the harshest critics are here every day plugging away. They contribute significantly to the Forum, Wiki and Blogs. That doesn’t describe someone who doesn’t care. They want to see CPOD succeed. If they question the judgment of some decision or fret about the direction something is taking, it’s probably best to understand that they’re doing it in the tradition of the loyal opposition — we all want to get to the same destination, but some of us have different ideas about the best route to take. And that’s a good thing. It’s a healthy thing. On one hand, it allows pent-up frustration to be vented and on the other it often produces good ideas that didn’t occur to the powers-that-be.
I’m a fairly new ChinesePod user. I was very impressed with ChinesePod when I first discovered it and I’ve since paid for a full year long membership. I don’t have time to provide the level of detail in my critique that other users have offered but I just want to say that I have found the changes that you have made to be very frustrating. The site is no longer intuitive to navigate and use. And, at the moment of this writting, unresponsive - it’s taking about 3 to 4 minutes for each page to come up. So, I’m sorry to say that I’m fed up at this point. If, hypothetically, I had just discovered ChinesePod today (even if it was responding normally) I doubt that I would be impressed. In fact I doubt I would be inspired to explore the site for more than a few moments. I know you’re trying to take a long term view but I’m wondering if maybe you’re changing too much too fast.
Lantian,
great post! Do not think that you used too many words - anything shorter would have lost on diplomacy.
Anne,
I agree very much with you. Maybe because I come from the same German qualtiy expectations.
Concerning current communication by CPod: I am very well satisfied with answers to topics they mention.
I am less so with the topics not picked up.
I have a very personal frustration as well as I gave a lot of feedback early April on SpanishSense, acting as a volunteer guinea pig. But some of my biggest topics have never been answered and I find them identically in CPod V3:
* the only 10 vocab items per page plus the non-usability of navigation if you have several dozen pages
* no answer to the question how to subscribe to the pure-dialogue-mp3s. This special new feature turns out to be pretty cumbersome for me, as it is even missing the text description in its ID3-tag. So I have to manually copy that over, too - but here I fall in the glitch as the Apple iTunes designers have not foreseen to provide the same description as for a “real podcast” and CPod has not foreseen to make them “real podcasts”.
In general I think complaint is very understandable if people have found a way of working they loved and now some new UI tries to force them to change/to drop it. It is a compatibility issue.
Hi,
The lesson text used to be included in the mp3 files, but it is absent from the last few lessons I’ve downloaded. I’ve noticed the same thing on SpanishSense. Is it always going to be this way from now on?
Thanks!
Anne,
I’m not trying to draw too much from the anecdote, but Tiger risked his reputation, his future, and his prize money, in order to improve. He also gets paid by corporate sponsors who weren’t happy about his decision, so he risked that, too. For me, the point is that he felt it was the right thing to do, so he did it.
Lantian,
You’ve been providing some tremendously insightful stuff recently (including on the Praxis blog). I don’t have time right now to do your posts justice with a considered response, but I definitely have been reading ‘em and taking ideas on board!
Ken Carroll
re: Ken, quite a departure from what I run up against on a daily basis in the corporate world. In my environment they even have the nerve to call it “prudent risk-taking”, quite an oxymoron really…
you’re really 2.zeroing the whole thing, constantly innovating, releasing early, challenging us and yes, taking big risks. Well, some releases are better than others and I have a few grips of my own with the new site, logo etc. but I’ll work around it. It keeps us all on our toes and hey, whatever the comments, your 500 podcasts and support material are still an amazing, unmatched resource and still growing.
The new site has a nicer, more open look but I am having major problems with just about every dimension of the site:
1. The mp3 files no longer download smoothly
2. 25% of the time the regular lesson button will not launch today’s lesson, so I’ve not been able to do my daily lesson at all on several days
3. Finding the older lessons is now more difficult–you have to click on “explore” which launches extremely slowly–takes my computer close to 30 seconds to 60 seconds to launch the screen
4. The Concentration game, which I used to use extensively, is far less functional because a) the dark gray “Wrong” banner is a huge distraction and makes it difficult to see the word one has chosen beneath the opaque banner; and b) because the cards seem to flip faster, making it impossible to see where one went wrong (although the cards may just seem to flip faster because of the annoying Wrong banner).
5. The exercises are now far less functional because you don’t get graded for each answer but instead are told only that you got 9/10 right. Ok, but I don’t have all day to go back and vary my answers to figure out which one is wrong. The permutations of possible answers is very large!
6. The vocabulary matching exercise for the daily lesson no longer works–the line does not appear linking words and so you can’t use this function either.
7. the Contact button is now weird. My email “to” address field shows “chinesepodchinesepod”–have no idea whether you are getting my emails
8. audio function on flashcards no longer works
9. flashcards used to sort randomly (I think)–now they always come up in the same order. So can’t really use that function either.
Hope you can fix these issues quickly. I miss my smoothly functioning Chinesepod. Daryl
Click click click. Click click. Wait. More clicks. Click. Wait. I’m sorry, but that’s all seem to be doing with ChinesePod these days. The pages SEEM to be taking forever to load, although I suspect that’s just an illusion brought on by needing to open new pages a lot more often. I don’t have the greatest of internet connections, but it’s never seemed painfully slow until the past few days.
What I typically do with ChinesePod, or used to do: iTunes takes care of the podcasts. Sometimes I’d drop in for a quick look at postings on podcasts I’d recently listened to; I’d scan the “Recent postings”, or whatever it was called, in that lovely lower corner. Nothing in a podcast i was interested in, fine, bye. In and out in 10 seconds if nothing was of interest. Now… log in. Click on “Connect with others.” Click on “All Conversations”. Try to remember when I’d most recently looked at said conversation. And so on. In and out in 5-6 minutes if there’s nothing of interest.
Once or twice a week I’d spend more time and, to be blunt, hoover out the useful material for me. I’d copy the PDF into a text format, do the same with the expansion vocab and the sentences, do the same with any useful vocab/ grammar points in the discussion. Once in the text file I’d convert it all to Traditional characters. Navigating to all these places was easy: in Safari (Firefox would work equally well), I’d Command click on all the recent podcasts, and each would open up in a new wonderful tab. This was done from the first page! Now, I need to log in. Wait. Then click on lessons. Wait. Then do the Control click on each of Newbie, Elementary, Intermediate, and Upper Intermediate–because I look at all of those levels. Then, within each level, click AGAIN and wait for however many lessons are relevant. Yes, I can find them all there, but it takes A LOT longer.
For me these are really serious usability issues–material that was easy to get is now a pain. I think the problems I’ve spoken about above are very easy to remedy: add something to the Discussions that indicates how many postings are new to you (enough websites do this that hopefully it’s not TOO difficult); and, instead of just listing Today’s lesson, list the past week’s worth of podcasts. (Personally I’d prefer having the recent postings and the recent podcast links all on the same page, but apparently that’s not the way sites are designed now.)
(I’d still like numbers as well–for the way I study I NEED numbers. Yeah, I can keep counting–that’s what I’m doing for now–but it just adds to the hassle. I can understand and accept the need to recalibrate the numbering system, but to just do without… I’m not even sure how people study that way, but more power to you I guess. And I DO NOT do the lessons chronologically–well, I do for the lowest three levels because I keep up with them; the Upper Intermediate and Advanced I get to based on how interesting and/ or relevant the topic is to me. I simply need the numbers for filing.)
A key point: last summer I recommended ChinesePod to some family friends. They’ve retired and tooking a Chinese class a while back. Right now, I’d probably only recommend ChinesePod to someone who’s quite tech-savvy and is willing to spend lots of time clicking through pages.
Repeating what I most desire: a list of the recent podcasts, not just today’s, on that first page we see after we log in. That way I’ll only have to go through that Lessons Page once or twice a month.
Thanks very much for continuing to produce top-notch material, and for adding wonderful things like the dialog-only podcast, and the traditional PDF that now seems to be available through iTunes only… just let me access it easily again.
Daryl,
re: 5., entirely agree, would be much more effective to know which one is wrong.
re: 6., it took me a while to figure it out, it does work but you have to click a circle and drag the line to the other side. that works, but you can’t erase / override it if you realize you made a mistake, gotta re-load the whole exercise, quite annoying
As both an engineer and a product manager I’ve been through many product releases including major generational changes. I agree with Ken’s underlying motives for change but I think CPod probably needs to recognize that their product release process could have benefited from some very basic product management practices. Three areas could have used more focus - usability verification, quality assurance (the bug finding and fixing process), and product transition (smoothly moving existing and new users to the new product). It seems they could probably have taken even another six months if necessary to get it right. On my major contentions I think CPod has enough of a user community between subscribers, contributers and partners that they could have done a really solid usability proof of concept before locking down the features and as I mentioned in another post they could have done what has become very common on the internet, running the new version of their site in parallel with the old version to give users an option to try it, get used to it, and provide feedback on it, while giving themselves more time to wring out the bugs. One thing our company does anytime we make structural changes affecting existing users is to create migration tools to automate moving of the user’s data, etc. into the new structure. These things are all basic product management 101. I’m sure they’ll learn that from this experience.
I prefer to download the lesson MP3 directly from the website and then load onto my player of choice (not iTunes), since I don’t want to have to run yet another piece of software.
In v2, I was able to RSS subscribe to a page where the day’s new lesson was posted. These RSS alerts would be emailed to me. So my email inbox would contain individual emails that served as my pointers to individual lessons. In one click I could go downloaded the lessons and grab the PDF, after which I would delete the corresponding RSS announcement.
I see no way in V3 to subscribe to the page for the latest lesson. Am I missing something?
Thanks,
Andy
Still not working:
- Copy Paste from PDF to other file formats (Word, etc.)
- Vocabulary/Word Lists Export to XML/CSV
Result is garbled, somewhere on their transition, characters and pinyin obviously have to face UNICODE-less or UNICODE-unfriendly environments, thereby losing their identity.
Seems I’m the only one to point to the faulty export behaviour, but the PDF has been known for over week now.
Keep it up … thanks
[QUOTE]
I know it is very hard to resist chronology because we have been conditioned by years of traditional studying to follow textbooks from page 1 all the way through the end, so ‘pick and choose’ can be stressfull.
[/QUOTE]
It’s so frustrating, isn’t it, when after all those HUNDREDS of well-intentioned lines from various frustrated users trying their level best to get through to CPOD just how poorly V3 supports “picking and choosing” cf V2, one has to read (unintentially) smarmy and condescending reactions like this?
It really makes me think that the CPOD team does not — or will not ever — “geddit”. Thank goodness I’m only a Basic subscriber.
I am not sure if it a BIG Bug or a design feature with a bug but the Exercises don’t respond well. I like the expanded version of erercises in V3 but the feed back is buggy, often doesn’t work and I prefer the option of instant feed of “BLING!” and “Oh Oh”
It is nice we can select Hanzi, Tradtional or pinyin for the exersices but its missing the line connnecting the character to its meaning.
Auntie,
Your quote came from another user, not from a ChinesePod employee. We do not condescend to learners as you suggest.
You made your point clear that the new navigation is unacceptable to you. Sorry about that.
Ken Carroll
@Hans, “Seems I’m the only one to point to the faulty export behaviour, but the PDF has been known for over week now.”
There’s a link at the bottom of every PDF pointing to a text-friendly version of the file online. It is an extra click, but that’s the best we can do in the short run. Apologies for the inconvenience.
correction re: vocabulary matching exercise - you *can* erase your answers by simply clicking on the corresponding line
Tom, you have perfectly summarized what has happenend with this V3-switch!
In the “Study” tab, bellow “Today’s lesson”, please add “Most recent lessons” listing the 5 next most recent lessons.
I liked V2’s chronological simplicity. Why? Because when I missed a couple days of lessons, I could easily catch up.
Cheers.
Quick one - sorry if this is the wrong place or has been answered elsewhere (I looked, honest!).
The ability to create gadgets on our blogs that point to lessons seems to be gone/broken/withdrawn. What’s the plan there, I wonder?
Hi Brendan,
A major v3 change was to move all mp3 hosting to Amazon’s S3 service. This solved the reliability issues that our previous hosting arrangements had, which had caused interrupted access, but it also means that all the old syndicated player links are no longer valid. We are continuing to provide a syndicated player however, and this can be found on every lesson page on the left hand side, below the direct download links. The link is called ‘Add to your blog/site’. The good news is, now that we have moved to S3, these new links are permanent.
Regards
Steve
Steve and all the bug creators and killers at CPod. Its Friday I know its been a tough week constantly changing the dirty diapers on our new baby. Have a beer and relax things are getting better. I know I will have one shortly and I haven’t gone what you guys are going through this week.
It could be worse. RIM (Blackberry) didn’t fully test their software and when it crashed it made all the news.
Mike in Jubei
Starting to get adjusted and finding V3 to be fine, nay, better, as the bugs are addressed. Still wondering when “erase all” functionality will be added, and the final piece falls into place. Seriously though!
But the ability to ‘explore’ vocab is probably the coolest idea possible. Such a good feature. You all deserve a pat on the back for that one.
Even when you fix all of the website site bugs and navigation problems what will be left standing is a website that is less user friendly and a response time that is so slow ( it takes forever to get around the site because of all of the extra software coding that was added..) V3 is a step backwards, nobody waits for pages to download anymore, they get bored and move on…….
Steve,
Great - thanks. I missed that one. Very interesting to see you using S3 as I’ve encountered it directly in my other life as a software engineer. Good choice.
Ken,
Been a Cpod user from early days and I would say that for the long time users of the site in general, to take Lantian’s analogy a bit further; were moving to the exit door because were not as comfy on the bus as we used to be (even if it does have a new more powerful V12 engine). We don’t really know even where the bus is going any more but there is’nt any other on this route right now.
As long as the core podcasts continue at their historically high caliber I’ll hang in there.
PRE-POST QUAKE - There was a time before the Great Taiwan Quake and Asia Internet outage where I was pretty much able to watch YouTube and even could download U.S. national news.
Those days are gone.
I’ve grown wary of waiting for any further improvements, maybe after the 2008 Olympics places besides Beijing and Shanghai will gain some attention.
So anyway, this is just another repetitive post about my hope that one day Cpod will put it’s content on some internal China servers.
Steve mentioned, “Steve@ChinesePod Apr 20th, 2007 at 9:44 am
A major v3 change was to move all mp3 hosting to Amazon’s S3 service. This solved the reliability issues that our previous hosting arrangements had, which had caused interrupted access,”
I just hope that whoever needs to know at Cpod, knows that RELIABILITY and DOWNLOAD-SPEED-WITHIN-CHINA are two very different things technically.
I know at least two of us in China (Matt in Qiongching) have to click download and then go do other stuff all day before we get our Cpod content. http://extra.chinesepod.com/2007/04/21/周六46-the-saturday-show-for-april-21-2007/#comments
If someone at Cpod has the cahonas to say, sorry guys — it’s a business decision and not practical for us right now, I’ll be happy to get off my high-horse and smell the roses.
Hi
Not that there aren’t enough comments going around, but I really feel the original home page was a great starting place to browse: see what the hot topics are, see all of the recent lessons at a glance, and to catch any interesting forum conversations. Maybe to download the pdf for a lesson out of my level, but happens to be an interesting topic. As a basic subscriber, now I just want to download the pdfs and the mp3s and not spend time rooting around the website. Well, I guess that is better for my Chinese.
Anyway, hang in there guys….
I have been using the Windows OS my whole life and am quite comfortable with it. I use a mac. Why? It is easier. Things take a little less time. V3 requires too much thought.
It wasn’t tested enough. There was a time when testing when on behind the scenes and now end uses have become beta testers.
There is real promise here. It is too much to expect your end users to do your work for you which is what you do by releasing a product before it is ready. Nothing is 100% but this is so far from that as to not being worthy of an argument.
I am a premium subscriber. I take private lessons. Aggie rocks! I adore your service and plan to subscribe to the Spanish one as well. I have a job which is quite demanding and at some point I will wake up and realize it isn’t worth the hassle and cancel my membership. I don’t want to.
I don’t mind being a beta tester because then I can go back to the thing that works but now that thing I know is gone and I am stuck with someone unfamiliar and buggy. I am not making specific comments because I think that there are too many comments already and adding more is just going to add to the confusion.
Please really think out what you are doing. Get someone who doesn’t know Chinesepod, hasn’t used Chinesepod and put him in front of a computer running it and see how he learns it and where he gets confused. Then do it with 10 individuals. Watch how people learn and learn from them to make the more useful.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Respectfully,
Walter
Walter,
I can assure you that we have done what you suggest and that we will continue to do so.
Ken Carroll
Is there any reason you guys suddenly switched from diacritical pinyin to numbered pinyin in the “Exercise” sections? It’s small, unannounced (as far as I can tell) changes like this that are most frustrating. I can deal with numbered pinyin in small doses (like forum comments), but give me a whole page of’em and my eyes glaze over. It might as well be in hexidecimal notation. I’m sure I’m not alone (just as I’m sure a few people prefer numbers).
Would it be a major hassle to at least provide both?
Lantian - it’s cojones …
Just testing blog …
Okay this is after my first impressions of V3. Now I’ve gotten a chance to “explore” it a bit more.
Conclusion: Nice idea, but needs a LOT of work.
If you’re going to make a system that is completely counter-intuitive then you need to provide good documentation. I can find no such documentation.
My main problem:
Is there a feature with version three where I can:
1.)Checkmark the levels of podcasts that I want to listen to.
2.)Then when i open up the chinesepod website, i get a list of recent podcasts in the levels that i like.
3.) I can then listen to the podcasts or read the pdfs.
If there is a feature like this it’s not obvious how to use it. Can someone please outline the process? I tried scheduled lessons, but it seems you have to go through the lessons, find the ones you like, then drag them to the calendar.
This of course is of no use for my purposes.
If there isn’t a feature like this, well i think you guys are missing the point.
RE: I still love ChinesePod even though it’s become harder to use
I’m snorkeling at the surface, admiring the colourful corals and fishes that make up ChinesePod. “V3 is coming, V3 is coming”. Not sure what that is, hope it doesn’t bite. Suddenly I’m hit by a huge wave, and find myself tumbling over. I’m feeling disoriented. What’s going on? I feel rather annoyed.
I leave my nice comfortable iTunes environment, and look up ChinesePod to find out what’s going on. Whoa! What’s this? What’s going on? How do I get back to the corals and fishes I once knew.
It’s a new animal that I’m confronted with. I wrestle and I struggle with this creature, trying to master it. Alas, it does not do what I want it to do. The situation is dire. I’m losing the fight. I surrender. I meekly do what it tells me to do.
Then I discover The Resistance. There’s a group of rebels who are not giving up without a fight. It gives me hope. What’s going to happen next?
Things will never be the same again. I understand that. I’m realistic, but hopeful. The good people in ChinesePod are gracious. Master Ken seems to be listening. Little John (Big John?) and friends are working hard. Don’t give up. Great things lie ahead, they tell us.
They’ll look after us, I tell myself. I’m happy again. Maybe I’m changing. Maybe I’m adapting. But what about those who have difficulty adapting? Will they be left behind?
I still love ChinesePod.
Hi CP
I downloaded the Pinyin chart, the ”xing” it’s not working.
“ling” in the Pinyin chart is also not working properly. 3rd tone doesn’t work, 4th plays 3rd, and 1st-4th plays 4th.
Has anyone reported flaky audio behavior on some of the flashcard entries. Seems like 95% of mine work fine — but sometimes the system barfs on expressions with word breaks (ex: hao ba), which is curious since they work perfectly well under the Vocabulary Tab (and I assume Flashcards & Vocabulary point to the same .mp3 files.
Is it possible that the Flashcard interface chokes on spaces (and might require underscores on some systems)?
A little more feedback on V3. I’m mostly very happy with it, there is one important section that I think needs a lot of work with regards to usability: Vocabulary.
* Tagging is really important for managing vocab, but I can only tag one item at a time (and sometimes it takes a very long time to even open up the tag field for editing).
* The vocab page in general is *extremely* slow - getting to a point which is frustrating. The pagination scheme makes this worse - I can’t choose to show everything on one page, and it takes forever to move pages. Is this because of demand on your system, or is there some kind of architectural bottleneck?
For me, the vocab section is crucial. It’s effectively the revision section - the place where I go to remind myself not only of the words I’ve learned, but to get memories of the dialogs themselves triggered.
One more thing - this is a suggestion rather than a complaint: It would be great if the status of vocab items could be changed to ‘learned’. This would prevent me using those words during tests, but would still allow me to keep track of my progress and get a view on how many words/characters I can now recognize. (I could manage this myself with tags if they weren’t so bleedin’ slow
)I emailed a similar suggestion wrt ’studied’ lessons - I think they should remain on the calendar but just change colour, again in order to help me build up a picture of my progress. In general I think a next step forward for Chinesepod would be to help students build up an almost statistical view of how they are getting on. I find it a great incentive.
To finish on a positive note: I’m really happy that I’ve finally started to use the premium services, and I trust you guys to iron out the wrinkles and continue to deliver an excellent program.
Ooops. I forgot another one about tagging. It’s easy to fix but very frustrating, so this is low-hanging fruit guys
When I click Add Tag, the screen focus should go to the newly opened text field. It doesn’t, which gives me another click that I have to do. If I have to do a lot of these (and I do), then it just builds up the bad chemicals in my brain over time. And there isn’t a whole lot of space up there for bad chemicals…
Don’t mean to whine, but I have to second Brendan’s observation. I really can’t use the Vocab section at all due to the speed. Would it be worth trying to clean out all of my vocab and start over? I think I have about 700 words that transferred over and maybe this mass of vocab is bogging it down. At this point, I probably don’t need all of it, but it’s hard just to get in there to make a change.
Please see my post in the Traditional Chinese Add-in blog about my troubles with the lesson PDFs in general ever since the change to simplified-only PDFs… for some reason my Symbian 60 phone’s Acrobat Reader shows a blank document now. Anyone experience this?
-Rich
Ken and Co,
It would be really great to know what the timetable for the next series of fixes is - above all the vocab list speed problem. It would be comforting to know that this problem 1) has been recognized as a serious one, 2) has been identified in terms of its cause, and 3) has a scheduled fix roll-out date.
The problem only seems to be getting worse with every vocab item I add, and is now at the point where I have to avoid using the vocab section entirely.
On a general note, have you guys considered using a ticket-management system to allow users to raise issues and remain informed of bugs on the system?
Thanks,
Brendan.
Brendan and TJ,
I checked the vocab issue this morning. The problems are apparently being caused by pagination issues on the backend database. The tech team is looking into it.
Thanks for the update Trevelyan. Looking forward to the fix!
Thanks for sharing
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links: