If you read our site blog regularly, or follow us (@SmartfmTeam) on Twitter, you might have heard that we’ve been working hard on some transformative changes to the Smart.fm service.
We have made many changes over the past two years, and while change in and of itself is nothing new – in fact, it’s pretty much a constant – the changes we are rolling out in the near future are different.
Why? Well, the changes are the result of a journey that began at the beginning of the year, when we decided to take a big step back to ask ourselves if we were on the right path. At the time, we knew we were doing some things right, but we also wanted the space to consider more important and fundamental improvements.
So we took a deep breath, digested a lot of critical feedback, and then sought out to re-conceive the user experience. To get a fresh perspective, some key members of the team flew out to San Francisco and spent time teaming up with Adaptive Path (a UI/UX agency) to rethink the UI and user experience. Going into the project, our goal was to create a highly participatory experience that addressed users’ core motivation to learn, create and collaborate, and we wanted this experience to simple and friendly.
We spent a few months with Adaptive Path, starting with high-level abstract principles and working our way down to paths and detailed wireframes.
The implementation of the very first phase of the redesign is finally coming together, and as we get closer to “re-launching” around late October, we are now ready to give you sneak peak at the new Smart.fm.
Simplification
As a group, we felt the Smart.fm site had grown in complexity and features to the detriment of the overall user experience. There’s all kinds of stuff going on, but no clear path to experience it, especially for new users. So when we were making changes, the guiding philosophy was to create a simpler, more intuitive experience. Instead of thinking only about new features, we focused mostly on creating a better experience overall, and this might be one that had less features.
Roughly speaking, the changes we’re working on fall into the following categories:
Lists to Goals
Learning Apps 2.0
New Dashboard / Profile
New My Items
New Explore / Search
Each day this week, we’ll take a look at some of these upcoming changes. Today let’s first look at the transition from Lists to Goals.
Lists to Goals
The centerpiece of the re-thinking of our UX is the introduction of goals as the primary theme of our site.
(For a deep dive into the history of our thinking on this topic, please read the
in-depth post by Alexa from Adaptive Path more about Goals.)
Simply speaking, Goals will provide a way of organizing items and related activity around something users want to achieve. Whereas lists were entirely content-focused, goals are aspirational in nature, and they provide a place for people to form communities around.
On the main tab of a Goal, you’ll see a summary of the content, users and activity in that Goal. Furthermore, the Learning Apps will now be embedded as part of the Goal. This means that you’ll be able to study right from the Goal page. You’ll also be able to pop-out the app into a full screen mode (similar to a YouTube video).
One of the biggest improvements here is that within a Goal you can group items into “sets”. Sets are like topics within a Goal. So for example, if the Goal is “Master Japanese Street Slang”, you could group items into various sets, such as “Male Slang”, “Female Slang”, “Insults”, “Osaka Slang”, etc. Or if the Goal is based around a popular textbook, you could organize items by chapter, section, or theme.
The same Activity Stream that you see on your Home page now will also play a prominent role in goals. The stream will surface relevant user activity and provide a venue for users to engage in threaded discussions. The next steps (not part of the October relaunch) will include using the stream to encourage users to engage in collaborative and/or competitive challenges.
Tomorrow we’ll look at some of the changes that the learning apps are going to undergo…
Could you not wait until January? This relaunch will make life difficult for teachers. We are in the midst of acclimatising our students to smart.fm, and now you’re going to change it. We are working hard to encourage our students to use smart.fm every day, and it’s a struggle. This will make things harder.
Hi Michael,
Sorry–we can’t wait until January. We understand that the relaunch will make life a little tricky for some, especially teachers and students, but change is something that is a necessary part of our evolution.
I can’t wait for the new design.
.
What about the iPhone application too? well, let’s see how works web first
I like the goals thing…seems really cool.
However, I’m a bit concerned when it comes to completely redoing things. I’ve been a user since last December and study every day on the site. I hope the current iKnow app doesn’t change too much, and some of the new changes being proposed in the alpha aren’t a permanent thing but optional with the old style.
Also, as long as I’ve been here, I can’t figure out how to delete items I don’t want to study. For instance, I start a list and study a few items, but I figure I don’t like that list and delete the list to study. It still shows those items as partially studied in my overall items and I can’t get rid of them. I’d like to see a “delete item” feature if possible (unless I’m totally BLIND and it already exists).
But you guys are doing an AWESOME job…I’ve never been motivated to learn a language to this extent until I came here. I’ve learned so much in doing so. Thank you.
I think change is ongoing and ever important. Without changing the way things work it will become stale and the most important part of learning a new language is having motivation, which change will bring.
The comments that students will have a hard time if the site is changed… I am sorry to say but life changes constantly and we all adapt to it, learning a new language is the same. If you can’t push through the changes it tosses at you there isn’t much hope of learning.
Thank you for constantly seeking to improve the service. I too believe that change is inevitable for improvement.
We’ll just have to relearn how to use the site, but that shouldn’t be a huge problem if the new version is well designed.
I love smartfm and the constant innovation it goes through, thank you
I like the idea of relaunching the site with new features! Sweeeet! But I want to ask, will we be able to change our screen names? Or will we have to start all over
btw, I don’t think the change will be that difficult. Students should be able to adapt. If they can figure out how to do half the things they do on myspace,facebook,and other sites, I’m sure smartfm’s new features won’t throw a monkey wrench into the works.
Smart.fm is awesome!
^^v
I hope that “Urgent Items” will now aggregate the top items to be studied out of all sets, rather than aggregate the top items to be studied out of a particular set. At least give us the option. This is my biggest gripe about the site.
I agree with others, keep the changes coming!!
Other than that, thanks Smart.fm for an awesome site to learn!
I definitely like the Goal-oriented idea. Very interesting.
Regarding the Activity Stream playing a big role, though… Are we going to get a customizable filter for the Stream with this new update, or at least the later one that you mention? I know you say that “relevant” information will be coming through the stream, but everyone’s definition of “relevant” is, of course, a little bit different.
I do like what I’m seeing so far, though. I’ll be looking forward to the rest of the posts.
All looks very promising. One perhaps stupid question, this ‘relaunch’ wont delete list progress, will it?
Smart.fm has been relaunched before (from iknow.org I believe) and progress was never lost. So nah, probably not.
The “goals” look interesting.
Thanks a lot for the pre-launch information and description.
I’m looking forward to tomorrows post.
When it becomes possible to challange each other in a goal (as described by Alexa) will it then also be possible to see the time spent on creating lists in your progress view?
I am looking forward to the relaunch and hope to see a site that becomes even more effective for learners. I’m still not sure what these “Goals” are and how they actually relate to learners. I guess we’ll find out…..
I don’t see any major problems with this, but just don’t turn away from the “content” too much, replacing it with something that makes us “aspire”. There are dreams, wishes and aspirations, and then there is perseverance and hard work. I’m here to learn!
@mdcruz88,
The new My Items area is going to do exactly what you ask for. You’ll be able to see the most urgent items across ALL your items, not just a list, and then study them right there. So you’ll be able to launch a session that covers different kinds of items, such as Spanish items and Japanese items and image items.
We’re not going to release this the day of the relaunch, as we don’t want to handle too many new variables at the same time from a performance perspective, but we’ll release the ability to study across all your items shortly thereafter, as long as everything else is humming along nicely!
@elsiemarley,
No need to worry–the focus will still be on getting all that content into your head!
@killeralgae,
The relaunch won’t change any of your current progress. You’ll still have all your same item progress and everything else you’ve done.
I had some problems launching the Alpha tester both on Safari and Firefox (it kept telling me it only works on Safari and Firefox even though I was using those) but the times I was able to use it, I liked what I saw. I think it will be a very nice improvement to the site when it gets implemented.
@russ
Me thinks me likes the sounds of yer tunes. Cookies for all.
I can’t wait to try everything out. Sounds interesting. May take some time to get used to it, but oh well, that’s life.
@russ
Good! Because I really do love this site ^_^ I think I spend 80% of my internet time studying here. Thanks to all of you at Cerego for making it in the first place.
I’m sure everyone on the team is feverishly actually developing the relaunch, but “late October” is coming up pretty quickly.
Any preview details available? I’m sure I’m not the only one who is curious to see the new goodies…
Does the announced downtime on November 2 mean that the relaunch is on for that day? I’d still love to see a preview. Even more, I’d love to have a preview for my students.