Now who will update the Wanikani Breeze for the new update? I need a dark theme.
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The person maintaining Breeze Dark has already said theyāll update it as soon as they can (maybe even today). Watch for changes in the Breeze Dark thread.
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I am trying to figure out what exactly is bothersome about the new UI layout for Lessons and Reviews (outside of āthis is different, rrr!ā), so I can provide helpful feedback. For one, my eyes (and hands!) are having to work a LOT more than they used to, and not just because Iām trying to find the new location of information. Everything is soā¦ spaced out. Look how large the section header is on the item info!
I get the sense this might have been a visual hierarchy decision? But I feel the hierarchy can be established without the headers eating so much screen real estate.
By contrast, hereās a screencap I yanked off the forums of the old format:
Everything nice and tight, my eye barely has to move at all from where it was to the information I need. Hierarchy is clear.
Additionally, itās very weird to me that I have access to sections (Reading, Meaning, Context, etc.) which arenāt related to the current questionā¦ If I get the reading wrong, now I can also look up the meaning, even if I havenāt gotten that question yet? Itās been a long olā time since Iāve done web dev, but arenāt there āhideā properties for styling of elements? Perhaps something like that could be used to show only relevant information and save space. Or, if possible for the page to do so, detect which question type it is and simply donāt pull in the non-relevant sections. It doesnāt appear the page is reloading between questions, so perhaps not. [EDIT: wait, what am I talking aboutā¦ Showing only relevant info is how it worked before, of course itās possible!]
Having to scroll a whole half a screen or more to get back to the kanji/vocab, input space and next buttons if I input something wrong isā¦ not a great experience. Except in cases where the user specifically requests an auto-scroll/jump (such as by clicking an item in a table of contents), auto-scroll is a huge annoyance.
Looking at the Review screen: consider where the userās eyes are when the scroll happens. Theyāll be on the answer space, right? Thatās a good distance down the page height. So when a user gets a meaning wrong and you open both Meaning and Context and scroll so Meaning is at the top of the page (where their eyes arenāt), their eyes are going to be on the Context portion, not Meaning, when theyāre probably looking for Meaning first. It actually would have been better if you hadnāt scrolled, because Meaning wouldāve been close to where the eyeballs are pointed already!
Also, rather presumptuous to assume the user WANTS to be scrolled to that information. Perhaps Iām remembering incorrectly, but didnāt I have to choose to expand item info in the past? Couldāve been a userscript feature or I just didnāt notice because it wasnāt so disruptive. Most of the time I get something wrong itās either: typo, I know the correct meaning but my English fails me in that moment, or momentary brain fart and I immediately realize my mistake. I do NOT want to be yanked away from the flow!
If I completely blow it on an item, Iāll be more interested in revisiting it outside the context of the Review, when I can take more time to look over the itemās page and absorb the information. Like, yāknow, when I get to the Review Summary page and I can click on the item toā¦ Oh. Right. WELP.
I donāt think Iāve seen this mentioned elsewhere, so maybe Iām in the minority here, butā¦ I really, REALLY donāt like that Levels, Radicals, Kanji, Vocabulary are now an additional click to get to on the dashboard. Why are you making me do more work for something which was previously surfaced and wasnāt causing a space issue in the first place? UI misstep, for sure. Wellā¦ unless youāre on mobile, I guess. This is why sites have different style structures for mobile vs desktop.
Echoing others in that I also miss the āare you ready to quiz?ā prompt. I do like to double-check beforehand to make sure Iāve absorbed all the items in a set before moving forward, sometimes I jump back and forth, and sometimes I donāt realize Iāve hit the end of the set.
As a final note: I feel two weeks is not sufficient heads up for userscript writers (or for a beta only mentioned on community forums, for that matter). They have lives; this is a hobby, not something they get paid to do. Some of them may not have even seen the information in that two weeks (in fact, I know that to be the case because a scripter said as such earlier in the thread.) Bless these userscript creators who mobilized under such short notice, gave up their weekends, etc., but that ideally wouldnāt have been necessary. And I echo a lot of the opinions here that user scripts are, unfortunately, a LOT of what makes WaniKani worthwhile. Using WK today has been a PITA.
Putting WaniKani on vacation mode and waiting to see how things evolve in the coming days, I think. As much as I like(d) the WK system and all the work it did for me, Kanji Study has SRS now, and Iāve already imported all the WK kanji into itā¦ And Kanji Study has a built-in dictionary that shows the most common words for any given kanji at the top of the dictionary section, which honestly might be better than WKās mash of vocab. Not that it matters to WK, they already have my money, but this update is forcing me to consider if Iām using my study time as efficiently as I could be. And also what Iāll recommend to people in the future.
Reminding myself to be patient here, but also having some real second-guessing-myself feelings about getting Lifetime at the end of last year. Iām just two months away from my first trip to Japan and was trying to cram; this timing kinda sucks for me. Ah well.
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Like many already said, the summary page after reviews was really important.
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Conclusion after hanging out in this thread on and off today:
I think what Iād like to see from WK is an official surveyāsent via email, not in a forum post where plenty of users wonāt see itāregarding what we want from updates. Iām picturing a āhow much would you like to see/how important to you is X featureā with like a 1-5 ranking system.
Something like that feels like a good way for the folks running this show to get a solid idea of what features need to make it into vanilla, particularly things weāve been using scripts to do for years. Our redo/ignore buttons, dark mode, autocommit, reorders, etc.
That, followed by actual open beta for changes, where users can provide feedback before everything is decided, not just āwe made the new version available for 2 weeks so people could work on their scriptsā, that is not the same.
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At this point I donāt think itās unreasonable to ask for some kind of update from the Tofugu team considering the majority of people replying are royally pissed off. What are you guys going to do, if anything? It is hard to tolerate such inaction with no communication, itās been nearly 12 houurs.
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Honestly hugely bummed by the removal of the summary page, which was a huge motivation for me to keep studying, as well as a quick overview of terms that I need to practice more. I really hope the summary page gets brought back, or at least have it on a separate page along with past summaries (an idea I really like).
Iām very happy about the better mobile functionality, but please bring back my summary pages!!!
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People have different thresholds for frustration. Personally I would have stopped using wanikani and used a different method/app had I not been able to implement undo and lesson reordering with third party tools so in that sense I consider the stock website unusable.
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As a matter of fact, itās just been updated! Reviews now work again and the colours are mostly back to dark mode - a few things left to fix but the most important part is fixes 
And theyāre apparently working on the lessons pages now
Maintaining two separate versions of a website is a burden, I certainly understand why theyād want to unify everything as much as possible. Iām sure a compromise will be found.
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A perfectly valid opinion, however I donāt think we should be complaining about this update based on a few scripts which will probably be updated within less than a week. Should they implement some of those things natively? Very probably, but thatās a separate topic to this update. There are definitely a few other issues with this update though (for example losing the summary page, perma-breaking some types of scripts such as voice randomization, etc), Iām not disagreeing on that! At the end of the day though it does also have some improvements, both in the UI and backend (such as making it easier for style scripts).
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I really would like to see the review summary come back, even if as only an option. I really like being able to quickly look at all kanji/radicals/vocab mistakes Ive made in the last session all in one place to just quick review before starting the next review session. I donāt think the extra study recent mistakes section can achieve that as efficiently as the review summary did.
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The blue border around the text box is surprisingly distracting
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So we all want the review summary page back asap.
What was the logic behind the decision to remove this? 
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Yeah I think some of the backlash is a bit extreme, but also I understand that when you have a well established routine itās frustrating to wake up and realize that suddenly you functionally canāt do you reviews the way youāre used to.
It could also all have been avoided had they implemented a temporary switch to opt out of the redesign while the issues are being ironed outā¦
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Totally agree with you.
Iāve always keeped track of the mistake from my sessions and I used to do it from the āreview summaryā.
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Careful sampling opinions using these threads, people who are fine with the changes are not hanging here. I personally never cared for the summary page, although it certainly wasnāt a negative either. I would just click through without paying much attention.
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Thank you for this write up, I was struggling to put into words why I didnāt like the new info menu during reviews
Usually I just want to quickly check synonyms, not load a full, way too long thing complete with radicals and context sentences (I feel those are nice but should be an extra click away since itās so long)
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As much as I like(d) the WK system and all the work it did for me, Kanji Study has SRS now, and Iāve already imported all the WK kanji into itā¦
Can you link me to Kanji Study? Canāt find the tool youāre talking about
Kanji Study is an android app (I found it very well done for writing practice), you can check this thread for interesting inputs about it.
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