After a bit of downtime to move the furniture around, we’re back with a new site. You’ll notice things look quite different. We’ll give you a bit of a walkthrough today to show you around.
But before we peer in, a few words about what we’re tying to achieve. We have a lot of complicated stuff going on under the hood, but the objective behind the redesign is to package all these “smarts” into a light experience that is easy to understand. The previous site was cool, but we acknowledge that the learning curve to get into it was pretty steep. For Smart.fm to really take off and impact the way people learn all over the world, it has to be a tool that can easily fit into people’s lifestyles. To achieve this, we’ve introduced Goals, a simple way to make learning content, a lighter learning experience, all embedded within a simpler UI.
Goals
Your Lists are now Goals. Goals are collections of items around a common theme, or goal. Within a Goal, you can group items into Sets, kind of like playlists in iTunes. So you can make a Goal like “Master Survival Spanish” and organize items into sets such as “Greetings”, “Ordering Food”, “Shopping”, etc. You could also use Sets to group content from a book into various chapters. You can even make Goals that have completely different kinds of items in them, such as a “Become a History Buff” goal with sets covering various topics, such as dates and images.
To get started on a Goal, just hit the Start button on the Goal page. You can either study in the page itself or expand the learning experience to full screen. In the drop-down button, you can also launch the other apps: iKnow! (our legacy app for memorizing information), BrainSpeed (a light game built for quick review), Dictation (an app for mastering sentence patterns).
Probably the biggest change you’ll notice is that the learning experience takes place right on the page itself, instead of in a Flash pop-up window. This app went through a round of alpha testing with a select group of users, and now we’re opening it up to beta testing for the whole community. It’s still very early and a little rough around the edges, but you can help us make it better by leaving suggestions in our UserVoice forum.
While we’re testing the new apps, you can still use all the old Flash applications. So lovers of the old iKnow!, don’t freak out! It’s still there, exactly the same as before. We will only replace the learning apps completely when we’re sure that the new Javascript apps are better than the Flash apps in almost every way.
Home
Home is your new learning dashboard. At the top, Smart.fm recommends which Goals to study next, and it also shows other Goals you might like. Underneath your profile image are your study badges and a link to your new progress charts.
(Since shouts now take place inside the stream, the separate shoutbox on the side has been removed.)
Item Creator
Another huge change is the way you build items. Previously all content creation was done inside “listbuilder” mode. We got rid of that entire buggy interface and replaced it with a simple item creator window. Now you’ve got a full screen to build your items, which makes visualizing what you’re doing much easier. Here’s an item I made for learning cat breeds (featuring a pic of my new kitten, Laby-chan).
The cool thing about the new item creator is that is really frees up content creation. Before you were locked inside listbuilder mode inside a list, but the item creation process can now happen outside of any context. Soon you’ll be able to make items anywhere, either on site or in a widgetized version off-site. You could be reading an article in French, see a word you like, quickly pop-up your item creator, drop it in there, and keep on going. This is the direction we’re heading—integrating Smart.fm into the flow of your life, instead of making you bend to ours. (Update: The new item creator is unfortunately quite buggy at this early stage. We’ve got a little post about this here.)
Learn on the Go with the iPhone!
Many of us only really have free time when we’re rocking about town, on the way to work or school or waiting to meet a friend. The missing ingredient in the whole mix so far has been studying on the go. To fill that hole, we’re excited to announce that our iPhone app is launched and waiting for you! What are you waiting for? Grab it here now.
You can access and study all the same content on the iPhone as you can on the site. The proven best way to study, and the best way to use Smart.fm, is to review material often in short bursts. This technique is far more efficient than sitting down at your desk for long but infrequent cramming sessions. To keep hold of information, you need to exposed to it again and again, and now you’ve got the perfect tool for that task.
Check out the screencast below to see how it works:
That’s the Good News – the Bad News is that…
…a few things haven’t made their way to the new site yet. The following features are temporarily missing:
- Journals (write, view, search, etc)
- Item search
- Sentence search
- User rankings
We’re really sorry about this. But please don’t worry – we promise we haven’t lost them. We have to fix up some layout issues and they’ll be back very soon. We appreciate your understanding here.
A Smart.fm Public Service Announcement
With such a large release, we expect things to be a bit bumpy this week, and there’s bound to be bugs. We’ll pounce on them quickly, but our strong recommendation is to use the site in Safari or Firefox. It will perform, and look, much better in those two browsers than in Internet Explorer. Please make the web a safer place and trash IE. And don’t forget to tell all your friends about Smart.fm on the iPhone! Because it’s fresh.
i got panicky at first XD,and i’m glad to found out that the journal feature is only temporary out,as i am in athe middle of a conversation.
i guess i have a few things to used to.however i do comment on how the site become more graphical.thank you.
I still prefer iKnow application over new one as this new way to study items is not so effective for me.
I actually use review list to check all words what I study etc.
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This new version looks very, very nice. However, I have problems with private goals: I can’t study them (the waiting animation never stops). But if I set the same goal as public, it works. I also don’t see this goal on the iPhone. Is it a known issue?
Hey, what’s with OpenID on the iPhone client? When I sign in using OpenID there,I get redirected to the web interface in the app and not the native one. I’ve waited all these months for THIS? I’m really ticked over this. Please fix!
/pardon my anger, but not being able to sign in using OpenID really pisses me off!
Hey, just a minor thing but it bugs me nonetheless – it looks like you’ve got the ‘completed’ and ’skill level’ labels the wrong way round under Dictation when you look on anyone’s profile… other than that, looking forward to the updates being fully completed!
Any idea when we might get a user forum? we have had a complete overhaul on the way things are done and no useful way of asking other users for help
@tamagojuu, sorry about the frustration you’re feeling. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t support OpenID login in this version. The button is there to allow you to log in on your phone and set a password so you can then log in to the app.
Apologies for the confusion. We’ll work on getting full OpenID login support in a future version.
Hi 竜宮 あずま,
Sorry, but we can’t give you a timeframe yet. We need to focus on the new site first and then think about the user forum issue.
How are we supposed to figure out how to even USE the new site properly without a user forum to speak to each other?
The new look is nice, Its also nice you moved away from flash. My question is why relaunch without important stuff like journals working? The only negatives thing I can say about smart.fm is: 1.you reinvent yourself every 2 months 2.Every time you do major changes, you only put half the site back together, so users have to wait a month to return to the functionality we are used too.
Good work besides that.
Yeah site should spend maybe even year before another overhaul. So far it looks like they can’t desire how they want to design their site from interface side.
One thing I’d like to ask: Please, PLEASE, bring back the ability to use iKnow, Dictation, and BrainSpeed from the homepage. The fact that you have to go to a separate page for each goal and then go through a drop down menu is very counter-intuitive and makes it much more difficult for the user.
I have spent most of the day trying to figure out how to edit the sentences for private lists (six) I worked on the past few weeks. I can’t. When I first started creating lists back when this was iknow, it took me a week of trial and error to understand how the system works. Everything has changed and there is no step by step instruction on how to do things (I am aware of). I am frustrated with the prospect of taking a week to learn everything by trial and error all over again. I create lists as private and then begin to study them as private so there are a minimum of mistakes before others have to deal with them. I can not find those lists now. They don’t seem to be under collaborated or created lists. I attempted to add sentences and native voices to a list I have as public but have no idea how.
Please put a big flashy button somewhere on the home page with a link to detailed instructions on how to use this site. Please don’t wait until a Youtube user figures everything out and posts a video months down the road
The new site’s great, but I agree, a walkthrough would be nice. As stated above, I can’t find private goals anywhere and I can’t figure out how to use sets among other things.
I just figured out sets, apparently you have to do this:
-Go to list overview page
-Go to ‘items’ tab
-Click ‘add set’
There also doesn’t seem to be a way to delete lists, or edit the language it’s in. It asked me “This list is for people who speak…” so i thought, well I’m using it to LEARN Chinese and i speak English, so let’s roll with English. Apparently it was asking for the language the list was teaching. Then it randomly changed to Chinese Traditional for no apparent reason.
I just tried creating a Japanese item, and for some reason it wouldn’t let me edit any the initial text after i changed the language from English to Japanese.
Yeah… I have to say, you guys went with a lot of pretty colors and very little functionality… Why do you insist on putting your devs (with long work hours) and users (with long hours trying to relearn how to use the site) through this? So far, all I can say is:
1) yes, it looks pretty
2) the way conversations are organized is better, i.e. with the ability to respond right there
3) item creation does not seem to work very well. If you click on Create New Item, it tells your item is ‘English for…’. Why is it English for? I am adding an item to the list that was always Japanese–>English. You click on the dropdown, the available languages aren’t even in alphabetical order.
4) As others pointed out, creating a goal for people who speak language English and want to learn, say, Chinese, means quite the opposite.
5) Many of us thought that goals would allow us to group lists. Instead, apparently lists are now goals. And you can make sets. This new system doesn’t seem to be ‘backwards compatible’ with the stuff that’s already been created and organized.
I understand there bound to be bugs right after a huge release like this, but really. It’s like the list/item creation wasn’t even tested.
Good jobs and thanks for the work here.
I only have one problem: it seems that private lists (created by myself) won’t show up in the My Goals section? I hope they are fine somewhere else (not gone forever).
Yes, as others have already asked, where are the lists that were set to private? I had several very elaborate lists (sorry, goals) that I had spent many hours working meticulously on over the weekend, and they don’t seem to be accessible at present. I would appreciate it if this glitch could promptly be rectified so I can resume working on them.
Thank you kindly.
Has the ability to un-follow gone? If not, where is it…
Where did all the kanji study stuff go for the Japanese Core series? Kanji was what I had the most trouble with and now all I can see are tiny little characters.
Thanks for updating the site tho, it does look very nice.
The app seems to freeze whenever I get an answer wrong. Think I’ll be using the old smartfm to be honest…
I too really hope that the private lists we made haven’t vanished off the face of the earth… By the feel of it you’re making the whole studying experience more individual and private anyway, even with the twitter facade, so please give those lists/goals back! I’m gonna miss the old listbuilder…. I didn’t find it so buggy as to be a total pain.
And I’m curious as to whether we’re forced to keep revising items that we have already completed with this new system? I know that a lot of people find it useful (and I would too, if I had time to spend doing that here… I loved iKnow for learning new words, and then I would use Anki for revision) But I liked being able to switch finished lists to “goal mode” so that I wouldn’t be distracted by revision being the “most urgent”.
We apologize for the confusion about private lists (which are now private goals). Rest assured, they have not been lost. A bug is preventing them from being displayed. We will work on this issue soon and update everyone as soon as it is fixed. Thanks for your patience.
Also if could report all the problems you’re having with the new site in the UserVoice forum we can process them more quickly.
The bug forum is here: http://feedback.smart.fm/pages/30122-report-bugs
Thanks, everyone.
I have a question about the new system for building lists. It seems extremely restrictive. How much of its intended functionality is actually enabled thus far?
I wasted a couple hours of time today trying to figure it out, and in the end managed to rather cumbersomely add a couple of items and then use the trash can icon to dispose of them. Couldn’t add sentences; couldn’t re-arrange the list order in any way; couldn’t edit the item in any way; couldn’t cross-reference the item to see if it was already on any of my other lists; etc., etc. I am hesitant to report bugs as yet, because I’m unsure if a lot of the functionality that should already be there, has not been enabled yet.
The previous list-builder was a remarkably powerful utility. It was so fast and intuitive and worked well in conjunction with many of the other functions built into the site. I could build massive elaborate lists with ease in a very short time. There was so much open-ended versatility with it, despite a few bugs. I hope you can somehow regain all that with the new system but at present, it is really lacking in functionality and flexibility.
Also, about the java app, I was surprised that many of the very obvious bugs that were present during the alpha testing, have not been cleaned up before the beta.
Gotta say that the new web interface appears to be a big step back in usability.
It seems to be slower, I am spending more time waiting for ajax’ified windows popping. Adding items to a list is a total pain now and the new iKnow replacement fonts are hard to read (especially when kanji are bolded).
Sorry to be so negative but I have to say that this appears to be a “Ooooh, look what shiny Web2.0 things we can do” redesign rather than an actual improvement for the users.
Hi RurouniJones,
There are some performance issues today, and the site has been slow at times. These issues are being sorted out now. I think you’ll find site speed will soon be the same as before.
I prefer the old iKnow(Flash) app.
I don’t think the new java app is effective enough. Each session ends too quick and easy?
Plus, it is still very much buggy and laggy.
As many of you have pointed out, there are serious issues with the new item creation process. I address this point in another post here:
http://blog.smart.fm/2009/11/04/content-creation-problems/
The new site is quite nice, but I am bit disappointed that neither the embedded or full-screen modes do not seem to work on Opera (it gets stuck at loading). I know that you do not support it, but it is still my preferred browser.
I believe if you need help fixing it, the folks at Opera will gladly help (http://my.opera.com/community/openweb/).
Sending high fives seems to work, but one doesn’t get any kind of feedback whether it was sent or not, without reloading the page.
Also, it isn’t immediately apparent that the search box, is actually a search box.
I’m glad i’m not the only one who that that. Does the word SEARCH not actually show up for anyone else either? The only time i ever saw it was when i accidentally clicked on it
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Hi Russ,
Looking at this “We need to focus on the new site first and then think about the user forum issue.” I really have to wonder what happened after all the discussion after each previous change. Is the strategy to always leave users and their concerns as the last priority working?
I find it really hard to believe that a group of very competent developers can’t set up a discussion forum. Though UserVoice is a very pretty system for reporting bugs, it lacks basic features of other bug trackers and is certainly not a user forum for discussion and support. Users on Smart.fm have consistently supported each other with help, so why discard that resource? We’ve been providing help and support for free!
Still don’t understand why the old Forum was deleted despite all the useful info there. I’m left thinking that Smart.fm doesn’t really want a user forum. Is this blog and it’s comments where you really want the user discussion to take place? There isn’t anywhere else that I can see.
Oh, and some edit functionality would help too.
“its comments” not “it’s”
Need more coffee.
Hi Ted,
Of course setting up a forum is not that difficult. But small teams such as ours must address issues in terms of priority, and the learning apps and content creation are currently the first priorities. Also there are many options to consider, even for a small thing like forums.
First things first, and then we will turn our attention back to this issue.
The many options being?
At the moment a completely bare-bones forum with a single section that says “User forums” would suffice. If setting it up isn’t that difficult, what options are there?
Alternatively, if users set up our own forum, would you provide a link to it in the site? Several of us have been discussing the idea, since we find it vital, one of the few reasons we have not done it already is because we lack a decent way of getting users to sign up…
Maybe if you set one up, everyone could just post a link in their shoutbox and pass them around. Whatever you post in your shoutbox ends up broadcast on your smart.fm homepage and everyone else’s home page who’s following you. People who are followed by tons of people would easily spread the word, and if those followers would also post the link in their shoutbox, it wouldn’t be long before everyone knows. You could also post links as responses to these blogs. If there’s a will, there’s a way.
Anything is better than nothing, therefore the temporary external user forum can be found here:
http://z6.invisionfree.com/smartfm_users/index.php?
I have to say I really miss the feature of clicking on an item in the content list and opening a popup with the sentences. Also I don’t like very much the fact that I can’t select and copy items. This is really a gap as I like to copy items and sentences and paste them on Anki. =(