おはこんばんにちは！ (this is a greeting that combines good morning, good afternoon, and good evening into one, you'll hear it often in YouTube videos)
A little over a week ago we introduced Review Sets for everyone to use. Review sets are intended to be a way for you to get practice with whatever content you like as much as you like without affecting the progression system. After we launched the feature, we received a lot of feedback (thank you!) around integrating the feature into your study routines. While the essence was there in the initial launch, there were some friction areas between being able to add to review sets while studying other content. We've remedied that!
Announcing new and improved Review Sets!
This update makes it so that you can dynamically add content to your review sets while you are studying without needing to worry about any sort of 'draft/publish' status. We've also streamlined the sharing process.
The first thing you will notice when you visit your review sets is that the "Study" and "Create" tabs are now gone. We've consolidated everything into a single area to reduce confusion and unnecessary UI. There are now icons shown next to each review set so that you can quickly understand the sharing status of a review set. The meaning of these icons is shown on the page and are as follows:
In addition to the icons, there is also a link button next to the "Start" button. Clicking on this copies a link to share that review set with others. If the review set is not yet shared (such as the "Grammar Sentences" review set in the image above), it will automatically be shared and the link will be copied. The link that you copy will always point to the correct place, which means you no-longer have to update the link you share with others if you update the review set.
When you look at a specific review set that you have created, you will now notice a "Share Review Set" area. You can share the review set with others by simply toggling the switch. If you would like to stop sharing the review set at any time, just switch it off. You may notice "The latest version is 1, published 10 days ago" in the sharing area. We'll talk more about what this means in the "Behavior Changes" section below, but for now let's keep exploring how the interface has changed.
We have simplified the options that you have when managing your own review sets. Now you can either save changes to it or delete it. No more worrying about creating drafts, or publishing review sets, or anything like that!
Let's go ahead and check out a review set that you are studying that someone else made:
As you can see, we've also simplified this menu to try and reduce confusion. When you delete a review set that you are studying that someone else made, it simply removes it from your list of review sets. You can always re-add it by going to the link that was shared with you originally. You can also see the version of the review set that you are looking at. This is part of our new versioning system that provides stability to those who are studying review sets that others have shared while also giving the creators unrestricted access to the set. This can be a bit confusing to understand, so let's go ahead and get into the behavior changes that we've made.
When we first launched review sets, there was a particular flow that you had to go through in order to use them. This flow was as follows:
If you wanted to then add new content to that review set, rename it, or re-arrange the content that was already in it, the flow was as follows:
This is way too many steps for anyone to actually want to use this feature. During development, we missed this because we were thinking of the feature from a content creation POV rather than as a dynamic study assist POV. We have completely re-worked things to make it easier for people to add and study content as they wish. Additionally, taking this new approach, our original use-case is still applicable, so now the review sets just do even more and can cover an even wider set of use cases.
The new flow for creating a review set and studying it is as follows:
If you want to add new content to a review set that you've already made, the flow is as follows:
As you can see, we have removed the concept of drafts and publishing. Now you simply create a review set and then choose whether or not to share it via a link. Let's explore that along with some screenshots to check it out.
When you are looking at a review set you've created, you will now see a "Share Review Set" toggle. By simply toggling this on, you make it so that the review set can be shared with others.
Once you toggle the switch on, you will notice that the system automatically creates a "Version 1" for you and generates a shareable link. An icon also appears which you can click to quickly copy the link to share the review set with others. You may also notice that the "Share new version" button is disabled. Once you make any changes to the content of the review set (name, description, materials, cards, ordering, unit names), you will be allowed to share another version, as seen in the GIF below:
Now you may be wondering, what are versions and how does the system manage them? You can think of a version as a snapshot of your review set at that point in time. As you share new versions, the old versions are maintained in the background so that people who were reviewing them can continue to do so without any interruptions. The system will notify anyone who is studying your review set when a new version is available to them and they will be able to upgrade to the new version immediately. We want to mention that these versions have no bearing on you as the creator of the review set. You are always free to make changes and review the set at any time. Let's see what this looks like from the perspective of someone reviewing a set that has an upgrade:
While looking at the review set, you will see a banner that informs you that a new version is available. You can click to go to the new version where you can then choose to upgrade to the latest version:
Note that you do not have to upgrade if you do not want to, however we recommend that you continue to upgrade your review sets to the latest version that the creator has published. You are also able to make copies of any version of a review set, in case you find something that you like but want to change slightly to suit your personal needs better.
We think these changes made to the review sets makes them much easier to use and share with others. We're excited to hear the feedback regarding these changes so that we can continue to adjust this feature over time.
In addition to improved review sets, we also introduced another feature last week: Lesson Search!
You will now notice a magnifying glass icon in the navigation for NativShark. If you haven't clicked it yet, you should definitely give it a try!
With this, you can now search across all of our lessons (including sentences within those lessons) to find detailed explanations for those pesky grammar points you keep forgetting or quickly go back to reference something that you saw in the past (or to look up information you've never seen before!).
You can toggle the lesson summary directly from the results view if you just need a quick refresher, or you can jump straight to the lesson. This search will get better the more and more people use it, so please check it out! Also, if you have any searches that return the wrong results, or you think a certain lesson should be higher for that search term, let us know in the forum post in our Discord! We can make fine-grained changes to the results to make sure it gets people exactly what they are looking for.
As a quick note, you can use this search to find any lessons in our system whether you have studied them yet or not in your core path. Additionally, once you've clicked in to a lesson, you can add any of the sentences in there to a review set so this search doubles as a way to find both lessons and lesson grammar sentences for adding to review sets.
That's all for today. Let us know what you think about the changes we've made by joining our Discord community, see you again soon with more updates in the future!
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