My problem with removing the summary is that previously, I was using it for writing practice. Every time I completed reviews, afterwards I would look over the summary to see kanji I reviewed, and practice writing them. I’ve been keeping up a notebook where I practice writing kanji since I first started using this program, and I’m very disappointed that I can’t see which kanji I just reviewed anymore. It totally messes up my routine. 
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I don’t think the API is affected in any way, Flaming Durtles works perfectly still (crabigator be praised)
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Praise him, that app is now the real official WK interface to me now until further notice.
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Regarding changes
Whenever there’s a change to any website there’s a group of people who hate it and a those who like it or have no problems with it. The people who don’t like it tend to be more vocal, as someone who is satisfied won’t have much to say. This means that even though there is a whole lot of negative feedback, it doesn’t mean that a majority of people don’t like it.
I have seen this happen on many websites over many years and in most cases, after people got used to the newer versions they would never have wanted to go back to the older ones.
Userscripts
It was inevitable that userscripts that aren’t maintained will stop working at some point when the website changes. I see Wanikani has been trying their best over the years to avoid trouble for script writers, but at some point they need to be able to move forwards. Script developers will need to work to update their scripts.
My impressions and feedback
As a developer, I’m glad that they’re doing server-side rendering. I don’t like websites that build the page on the client side. Client-side rendered pages end up being slower, more prone to errors and it’s much harder to make scripts and extensions work on them.
I like how fast and responsive reviews are now. I don’t have any lessons so I can’t test those. To me the general design looks slightly better.
I have no issue with a border making it clear where the input is. It’s not completely obvious to someone new to Wanikani that the large blank space is a text field. Making it solid black works for accessibility but might be a bit excessive, a really dark color or grey should be good enough.
The review pages are a little small on my 1080 monitor, so I would suggest increasing the font size for larger monitors.
I’m not very bothered by the summary page missing, but I will say that it’s a negative. I think it’s helpful to have an overview of what was reviewed right after finishing.
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It might be worth mentioning that the only reason session timeouts were an issue to me was because they’d mess up the summary page.
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Improving the mobile experience was obviously a major focus. It’s much more useable on iPhone/iPad now. Of course if you’re mostly using desktop or a third party app, these enhancements would not be apparent and you’re mostly just experiencing the broken user scripts (as they might with any update, which will be fixed in time).
I appreciate the native mobile improvements, but do hope the desktop experience is tweaked to take a bit more advantage of the extra space.
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I can always appreciate a good UI update! In general, good work! I do have some issues with it, unfortunately, so I’ll outline them here.
I think there’s only one really significant issue for me. Clicking a kanji/radical in a lesson now opens the page for that topic in the same tab instead of in a new tab. This is a bit disruptive, in my opinion. I know it doesn’t lose my lesson progress (now that I’ve tried it), but this is counter to typical UX and it feels bad. If you’ve got a form or whatever in progress, you intuitively expect clicking on something to not take you out of that activity.
These are less of an issue for me but they are bothering me nonetheless:
- There are no longer dots at the bottom of lessons to visually display your progress through a set. It’s not hard to figure out just by reading, but they were a nice convenience and I don’t really understand why they’re gone.
- The lack of a summary page means I can’t easily tell how items have changed since the last review. I often go through them pretty quickly in the review itself and then check over how things went in the summary. I also really liked having the percentage to tell me how well I did in that review.
- The text entry box now has a blue outline around it in Firefox which looks pretty out of place. Minor annoyance.
- Changing hotkeys is rough. It would be nice if those were configurable so I don’t have to change my routine, but I’ll get used to it.
- The removal of the lessons complete counter is a bit odd to me. I found it really useful for saying “I want to do 15 lessons today, and so I’ll stop when it says 15.” Now I have to remember (surprisingly hard when moving through lessons) or remember how many lessons were available and subtract the current number left. My guess is there are technical challenges relating to how resuming lessons works now, but it would be nice if you could find a way to restore it.
Now for the things I DO like:
- THANK GOODNESS for keeping the keyboard open on mobile. No matter how many times I did reviews on mobile, my thumb would always reach for the enter key on the keyboard.
- The new, deeper colors for the rank change while in reviews are great. There were times when I flew by them so quickly I couldn’t figure out if I’d just seen red or green (especially when they were fading in over a purple background).
- The feedback color is no longer animated after pressing enter (…it was animated before, right?). It has a better feel to it this way.
- I like the new font used in the UI. I don’t know if the kanji display has changed font to be consistent across platforms yet. Honestly though I kind of like it being inconsistent so I learn different ways the kanji can be represented.
Edit: by the way, does WaniKani do any user acceptance testing on the UI? I think it probably would have been really helpful to select some folks to test the UI before the big rollout and collect feedback before poking the hornet nest with a sledge hammer.
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Having just used the site again the lack of transitionary pages between activities (lessons → quiz) (dashboard → reviews) (post review summary → dashboard) is really starting to bother me more than it should. Everything just kind of feels disruptive, like I’ve been rudely shoved into a pop quiz for stuff I was calmly contemplating a few moments ago.
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I think everything you stated is pretty indicative of the need to reconsider the update. The UI is subjectively much worse than what it was before. While you may be right, the vast majority of WK users might be fine, WK is deeply what it is because of the users partaking in the forums and creating the 3rd party plugins to supplement the gaps in WK’s product. To then entirely destroy those plugins for many users and require the 3rd party devs that make WK significantly, and IMHO subjectively better than the base product, to rush to fix their addons is a bit of a headscratcher. I don’t see very many positive comments about this update, and even the positive statements are coming with caveats. Surely the backend is better, but the UI? The UI is substantially worse than what it was <24 hours ago.
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I think the biggest point of contention here is the fact that there are userscripts that add significant functionality that a very big chunk of the userbase considers mandatory for the site to even be worth using.
What dev team sees the kind of adoption scripts like Lightning Mode and Double Check and doesn’t consider that maybe it’s a sign that these should be features baked into the official product instead of relying on benevolent users to keep them working?
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Maybe I’ll have to go check out the mobile update then. I try to exclusively do my reviews and what not on my laptop because of how much I hated mobile WK lol. Will have to give it a go and see what improvements were made on that front.
so i’ve done several sets of reviews over the day, and am unsure how i feel about this update.
- the black box was initially jarring but i’ve gotten used to it now.
- the general review layout has a lot more empty space than normal and it makes everything feel kind of small. i’m sure it looks a lot better on mobile, but on desktop it just looks kind of sad and out of date.
- the change in the item info (showing all of it smaller, and to the left) makes finding the answer i’m looking for when i’ve got something wrong unnecessarily more difficult. this might be something i get used to over time, but it feels like that amount of information should be optional
- i do miss the summary at the end of reviews (less so for lessons), and as someone who doesn’t use the extra study feature, it definitely doesn’t do the same job.
- the colours are definitely different and feel harsher. i don’t really have a problem with this, but it does have the overall effect of looking a bit cheaper (and, as others have pointed out, potential issues with accessiblity).
- the left-alignment of everything is taking some getting used to. can’t say if it’s good or bad everywhere, might take a little longer to come to that conclusion, but it does make comparing kanji to the vocab term (and radicals to kanji) in lessons slightly more awkward cos they’re not central and aligned underneath the actual term anymore. i suspect this is more of a me problem than a wider issue.
overall don’t think it was a bad update, as such, but there are definitely places it could be improved, imo.
i think that’s everything i wanted to say. thanks to all the devs working hard on this, same to the script mods who are working to get their scripts back up and running (we appreciate all of you), and sorry this thread has gotten so heated.
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Exactly.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the update is that bad, but this one thin is seriously hard to grasp. Why was it so necessary to remove the feature (rev&lesson summaries) that gives you immediate and precise feedback that you can view right upon re-entering reviews?
For the sake of what? So that people who speedrun the whole thing, bulldozing levels in 8 days can now bulldoze them in 7.9?
Readability seems fine to me, now the waiting game begins before scripts work again.
Bring the red bull/coffee/tea/whatever works to script devs!
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I would be surprised if more than 10-20% of users use scripts at all, TBH. Have they ever shared metrics?
Oh no. I agree with you. I feel very similar. Just wanted to point out that all the work WK put into the update doesn’t need to be thrown away, which is how I read your comment (maybe incorrectly)
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I don’t know how you define backend, but I don’t think the API changed, which a lot of the userscripts do use, but isn’t the reason they are all broken. And if the API did change in a breaking manner, then Flaming Durtles is broken. I haven’t used Flaming Durtles yet today, but I’d think that would be pretty catastrophic.
The userscripts broke because they rely upon DOM elements and stylesheet properties in the frontend, on the browser, and that has apparently been completely reworked.
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The only data I can offer is that I was referred to WK by a friend who used it and shared with me his long list of userscripts that he strongly advised I used “in order to make it not suck”
I have no doubts there are many others like me. I’ve never known a WK without these scripts and their features.
Also, even if it were 10-20%, that is in fact a big chunk. An extremely non-negligible share of users.
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I’m dropping in again to say thank you to everyone for your feedback. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, we appreciate it very much and we’ll be using it to help us make improvements. I’ll also be posting a more detailed update as a new post tomorrow, as I think that anything I post here is likely to get lost.
But in the meantime, I wanted to let you know that your feedback is not falling on deaf ears.
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I think the people you are talking about here making up a substantial piece of the WK community. I won’t be surprised if you scroll through to find people who are first-time posting about how bad this update is. I am by no means active in the forums, and this update was genuinely bad enough for me to enter the fray here. Almost nothing about this update was an improvement, and the consensus is, in fact, sweepingly negative here.
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Hi there,
guess i´m also gonna give my 2 cents here. I really cba to read through 650+ answers, so i apologize, if this is a duplicate. Anyway, as for the most part i really don´t mind the changes, of which are some slightly to the better and ssome slightly to the worse than before. However, there are 2 points i am bothered by:
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The removal of the summary page. While it is true that the extra study has some overlap, those are still 2 seperate things. After my reviews i opened all my mistakes in new tabs and went through them 1 by 1 again. Of course this works with extra study aswell, but to get to the kanji page i´d have to go an unnessecary detour compared to how it was before. I also sometimes just picked some of the items i got right and went over them again. Having such an overview is definetely something i will miss and would like to have back.
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The mobile version did not work for me at all. It did not convert romaji to kana when i was asked for reading. Hitting enter did not work with the little arrow on the right, but only with “return” on the keyboard and even then, although going to the next review item, it did not register the former one. So, even though i tried several times, the counter for correct answers stayed at 0 after getting meaning and reading right. Furtermore it was really slow and the keyboard did not stay out as stated above.
Alright, that´s about it. It still hasn´t been a day since release so some starting difficulties are normal i guess, but nevertheless i hope that everything will be running smoothly again, soon.
All the best,
Tim
1 Like