The bar below the kanji has started turning black for the kanji meaning, this doesn’t look good on an ipad and is another distraction from kanji study, also the white drop shadow on the text is another distraction, catching the eye as the viewing angle changes.
I see a lot of hate and negatively so just want to chime in that these changes appreciated. I like studying, having dinner, and then coming back to session that isn’t timed out. For me personally, I’d like to have context/sentences displayed prominently with every card by default to further reading practice, but there’s a script for that. Killer script for me though is the ConfusionGuesser which would also be nice to have with vanilla WaniKani. Every other script I feel like is just a nice to have and will be fixed or forked and fixed in the near future.
As you say, you collected feedback from script authors several weeks in advance. So you did your due diligence. Some script developers did not.
9 Likes
Why you’d take out the Lesson Summary page of all things is absolutely beyond me
It was good to see how well I did, what I burnt etc
Now just dropping me back to mainpage feels pretty bad
Odd decision.
3 Likes
agreed, this change is the most annoying for me. I liked to use it to skim over what I’d reviewed and also seeing how many items I reviewed was pretty cool. however, the WaniKani Heatmap script works as a sort-of bandaid if you will (you see all the review items you’ve done for the day), and it’s one of the few scripts that haven’t completely broken.
2 Likes
99% of people were here to complain about the update and as soon as we get told there’ll be more updates going forward everyone starts clapping.
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Please email us (hello@wanikani.com) with your setup (device, OS, browser version) so we can help debug.
Thanks so much for explaining this!
You and your team probably have considered this already, but maybe if the “Recent mistakes” offered only the latest mistakes made during the last review (and nothing else) with a summary page before and afterwards, that should be enough for most of us probably 
Keep up the good work!
Thanks!
Not me. I had…other hand motions. Not…polite ones, either.
4 Likes
The outrage comes from a place of habit and change. People come to wanikani every day and do the same thing for months and years. It is very disappointing to come back to do your daily ritual and all your scripts are broken and things are not the way they used to be. Even if it wasn’t the intention, this update is received as change for the sake of change.
I think in the future you need to provide some way to give more time to transition instead of dropping it one day and raising hell. I realize you had a test site to give addon writers time to update, but no one really cares until its forced on them.
I’m not sure what the solution is but I’m sharing my thoughts as a regular user and a developer myself.
As a paid service for daily users, it’s not fair to change so abruptly.
16 Likes
Thank you for the update & explanation @TofuguJenny
I don’t really use additional scripts (on browser/FF) for the learning part, and am having a few for metrics and statistics on the main page, so I’m definitely not complaining about them - none broke.
The minor changes that were done since the rollout are noticeable, and are better for workflow.
Especially the larger meanings part is a big help.
What would also be kinda neat, but is a suggestion only, is having the meaning and the romaji on the same line (or some other condensed form), instead of having to scroll to open one or the other if you want both open.
Let’s just hope we:
- get the Summaries page back
- the enter button gets a revamp from being inconsistent now (enter in review mode, wasd in study mode)
- not having to refresh the page when wanting to do another round of reviews
It was a change and people hate change forced onto them, after having used it a day and after the tweaks, I’m okay with it. ども！
ps: I’m curious what has been planned for the future though, cause it was rather vague.
2 Likes
Hahaha, no. I don´t care what happens in a couple of month or years. You know why? Because I am studying now! Roll it back ASAP! And than you can put up a beta, and gradually add all the missing functions. Nobody will care how long it takes, because we all will have a working product.
This entire post is a big fat slap in the face of us all. Just how a politician would talk. I hope the one that is pushing this through, even though he know by now that the customers are not happy with it, is enjoying himself while looking in the mirror and knowing that he is driving 1000s of people crazy.
19 Likes
I just learned that one feature i thought was removed isn’t the case. I use a black out browser add-on bc all white screens are too difficult to read. Prior version of WK worked with black out add-on, new updated version of WK won’t display the green or red text field response after submitting an answer. It’s being overridden by blackout add-on.
1 Like
Even most of the update do not make sense to me I can get used to them, but most unpleasant change is removal of the summary page after review - that was very useful to see what exactly you failed as a summary. Really cannot understand how removing it can contribute to better UX. Also additional information page showing explanation of the expression or kanji during review session in case of mistake is just overcrowded with the information now, instead of more cleaner previous design.
In general all these changes made usability worse, not better as it was probably intended. Hopefully you will not continue this way, otherwise your generally very good service may become not worth money asked for it
3 Likes
Sorry but I find the excuse behind ‘refactoring a lot of code’ unacceptable. I work on software (mobile games) and we also need to do big updates on a project considered ‘legacy’ (old) with lots of need of code refactor.
The main concerns that you can see in comments (mine as well), are topics like completely removing a feature; Summary Page. This is not a code issue, this is a product/design decision from which I’m completely baffled, seemed like whomever is the product owner doesn’t know/use their product at all.
All the other UI changes > that’s part for the View, and again, not related to code refactoring which likely happens on the Models of your project.
The only piece that I imagine getting very affected by this might be user scripts integrations, of which you need to be super careful since the Wanikani community use them extensively. You should have a proper contingency plan.
I love this website and I’ve always praised and recommend it to other, but here some big mistakes where made, which can happen as we are not perfect. But truly, I’m feeling very close to ask for a refund of my lifetime membership right now, this is very frustrating.
I advice you to roll back to the previous version (or bring back key stuff if this is not an option due to migrations or other reasons) and try again later to ship this update in a different manner: probably by phases and carefully, checking your data metrics and the community feedback.
23 Likes
I think we’re at the point of deminishing returns with negativity now.
They know they messed up. No company sees a customer response like this and thinks they did everything right.
And it has cost them A LOT of customer good-will and probably a chunk of free word of mouth marketing. I got the impression WK enjoyed the status of “no-brainer” recommendation previously. I think that’s dented. No company wants to lose that (edit: not that it’s totally lost, for the sake of some perspective, just dented)
They know by now exactly what everyone wants and exactly why people are mad. Nothing else is going to make that any clearer to them. They’re going to do what they are going to do now. Good or bad, we’ll see.
I have actually been a dev on at least two platform refactors that have gone pretty much exactly like this. So pot kettle black and all that 
22 Likes
I wish people would stop being so hostile. Just wait for a little bit. Scripts will be repaired and features will be added.
I would never advocate rolling back on any serious software project. The purpose of rollback is specifically for if the software is not working on the target environment as it was in the testing environment.
22 Likes
Yup.
In this echo chamber of a thread:
Shrill and self-righteous demands claiming to represent every user, because that’s a great way to make friends and influence people.
15 Likes
I want to add one more voice lamenting the end of Summary pages. I found it immensely useful after every review to through my missed items one-by-one, revisiting the page for each one whose reading or meaning mnemonic needed refreshing.
I also found the Summary page useful for the new vocabulary. After going through the vocab the first time, I would go to the summary before my first review of the new material and go through all the ones I couldn’t recall. I found this simple act greatly sped up my on-boarding of kanji & vocab.
I think restoring the Summary pages would be immensely welcome to the current user set.
If something about the Summary page is simply unworkable with the new UI, maybe the “Recent Mistakes” and “Recent Lessons” sections could display a list of the items rather than making us work through them all one by one?
7 Likes
Since the other thread died, I would like to ask here since it is kinda relevant. The dynamic forum tab was removed by a static, boring and ugly “Go to Forum” tab, and this was something “temporary” and they would implement something new. But after two months we had no feedback nor a change, despite everything clearly getting a change now. So what happened? At least tell us “We are still actively working on it” or “We genuinely don’t care lol, it will stay this way” or something, so we know the future plans. WaniKani has a problem of being vague about the future, especially for paying customers and active users this is worrisome.
14 Likes
Same for me with Safari 14.5.1 on IPhone.
I just can’t use Wanikani website anymore, nothing works : no hiragana ou katakana when I write an answer either in reviews or lessons.
Hope there will be an update very soon because i’m getting late with my reviews.