BeeSpoke Summer Updates!
Since our soft launch at the end of May, we’ve gotten great feedback from users about the course content and the feel of the app. We’ve been working hard on some quality-of-life updates, as well as several new features that we’re excited to share.
Let’s start with what’s immediately in the pipeline:
Ten New Units for All Courses
The biggest update is that we’re doubling all the units of our current courses. Every domain in every language will now have 20 units, getting into more intermediate-level content like tenses and aspects. We are currently QAing the content, and we expect the new units to be ready within the next month or so. If you find any problems with the content, let us know by pressing the flag during an activity. And if you have a particular domain you’d like to see, let us know!
New Stats Page + Weekly Streaks
The next big update is a new Stats page, which brings together the existing stats from the Settings screen and the word count from the Dictionary. This stats page includes number of words learned, number of Explore sessions you’ve done, and the total number of activities you’ve done. There are bronze, silver, and gold levels for these stats to celebrate your learning achievements!
We are also going to test out weekly streaks. We aren’t a fan of gamification for the sake of engagement, but we realize that people want to be able to track their progress and have some extra motivation. Instead of doing daily streaks, we want people to have the flexibility of an entire week to get some learning in. If you do 26 activities per week (about 3 lessons, or 1 unit), then you’ve hit your goal for that week. These activities don’t have to be from a single unit, you can mix and match from different units and domains.
Dictionary Update
We’ve added a new Mastery feature to each new vocabulary word that you encounter. Based on the concept of spaced repetition, you’ll be able to see which words you’ve mastered and which you might want to strengthen. This mastery is based on the number of times you’ve seen the word and when you’ve last seen it. In the future, we will add some more activities around mastery specifically.
In-App Notifications
We’re testing out in-app notifications for announcements and new features, accessible from the top right of the Home screen. We don’t expect a lot of notifications, but we might send out a few to test with folks in this early phase.
Misc Quality of Life Updates
On setup, added a button to take the user directly to the settings page to select a language
Added a “blank” to language selection- this was throwing people off since “English” was being shown but not actually selected.
Moved Basics courses to new drop-down menu on the Home screen, hopefully it’s more obvious they exist now!
Added a “Jump Back In” button on the bottom card of the Home screen, which lets you go directly to the next lesson in that course.
Added a grammar explanation to the start of every 2nd lesson of each unit, showing the grammar focus for that unit. We found that people were still feeling like they were jumping in too quickly, and we hope these explanations can ease people into it. You can access the explanation again from the top right of the activity.
Home screen progress bar now correctly shows progress in that course
With these updates, we hope that the learning experience is smoother and more helpful for you as a learner. We have lots more planned down the road, including major graphical updates and new types of learning activities. And of course, once we streamline our course pipeline, we’ll be bringing you new domains and new languages (high priority ones now are German and Mandarin).
Keep giving us feedback! Tell us what you love and hate! You can email us at info@beespokeapp.com, or use our Google Form
