This week we introduced one of the largest changes to Linguistic since… well, the launch of Linguistic itself.
Say hello to our brand new reading experience.
Let’s break it down step-by-step, shall we?
🔍 A new way to discover
One of the first things you’ll notice about the new experience is that we have moved away from a cramped three-column design for reading articles. As we expanded the features behind the article reader, we realized… we’re running out of room on the page!
Text imports and articles now live within their own dedicated page (which we’ll get to), which allows us to utilize nearly the entire page for browsing collections of foreign text.
You can browse by category in the sidebar, or access two new tabs under “My Stuff”:
- 📚 My Library: all custom text you uploaded via “Read New”
- ⭐ My Stars: all articles that aren’t uploaded by you that you have “starred” (saved) to your learner account
✍🏻 A new editor experience
We also gave our text editor a fresh overhaul! Instead of selecting between “Upload from web” or “Upload custom text” in a dropdown, both import methods now live on a single page. We ditched the modal and made the editor right at home with the rest of the UI.
You can check out the new editor by clicking the shiny new “Read New” button at the top of the sidebar:
📖 A new way to read articles
Perhaps the most notable change in this launch is the new article reader itself, which more seamlessly combines our reader and audio player and features two new insights: top words and vocabulary breakdown.
“Top words” shows you the most frequently used vocabulary words featured in the article, while the vocabulary breakdown displays word percentages categorized according to their proficiency metrics (HSK for Chinese, JLPT for Japanese, and CEFR for English).
To improve our listening experience on mobile, our audio player is now docked to the bottom of the article instead of the sidebar so you can listen to articles on the go.
Lastly, “Quiz Me” is now featured more prominently at the top of the page via a bright green button!
👀 Coming soon
This launch has been several weeks in the making, and we aren’t planning on slowing down! Here’s a peak at what’s next:
- Labeling text uploads by their overall difficulty level
- A more frictionless Learn experience
- User-level proficiency inference & recommended vocabulary / documents
Phew, that was a lot to get through!! Super exciting stuff, though. We’ll see you all next week!