While I appreciate how hard the team has worked on this UI update, I think that the new UI for the page for each level, as well as the page for each character, vocab, and radical is clearly a step in the wrong direction.
Here is a side by side of new vs. old, and where I think things went wrong:
On the old version:
–The contiguous blocks of color highlight the large white characters.
–The primary visual emphasis was on the strokes of the characters, with a much diminished emphasis on the readings and meanings. This had the advantage that you could read the characters very easily and quiz yourself informally because the readings/meanings were so much smaller.
On the new version:
–The primary visual emphasis is on the little colored squares bounding the radicals, kanji, and vocab. Immediately when I look at this page, I see blocks of colors, NOT characters. This seriously diminishes the usefulness of the page.
–The characters are tiny!! We shouldn’t have to zoom in all the way just to see the very thing we’re supposed to be learning!!
–Second, as someone else here has pointed out, equal visual emphasis is given to the character forms and the readings/meanings, making it nearly impossible to quiz yourself informally on the pages for each level.
On the old version:
–The heading character was somewhat small. Not ideal, but not too bad.
–The “found in kanji” was nice and big. Important info, and there’s strong visual contrast allowing us to see the characters.
In the new version:
–The header character is EVEN SMALLER. And it is very small in its bounding box, drawing more attention to the little blue block of color than to the character that I’m supposed to be learning.
–Even worse, the “found in characters” are tiny
–In “found in characters”, more visual emphasis is given to whether I’ve unlocked the character than to the form of the character. Big step back!
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I’m glad that people are enjoying the customization of the dashboard, but the changes to the heart of the program, the pages for each level and character have taken a few big step backs in my estimation. At a bare minimum, I hope that we’re given some choice to revert our display back to the old version. These pages were essentially perfect and there was no need to change. I really prefer to stay on WaniKani than having to look elsewhere for learning kanji.
Thanks for your consideration. This is my first time posting here, and I wish it were for a happier reason.
