Reviews 2.0 Released!

It’s time! The official release of Reviews 2.0.

This feature update includes much more than just a revamp to the Reviews system! Check it out below!

Note for Beta testers:

If you have already been following the Reviews 2.0 Beta and its threads, you can probably skip this post, as it mainly just announces the new features of the Reviews 2.0 Beta again


:dart: Purpose

The classic Reviews system has been around since I signed up for Bunpro circa 2018. It is battle-hardened, and people know and love it.

It is perhaps the most accessed feature of Bunpro, it covers a lot of functionality and is the single part of the site you interact with every day.

However, with age, it has also become very difficult to update and improve. And even to this day, it’s still haunted by bugs that have evaded the team time and time again. It was overdue for a facelift!

The new Review system is faster, simpler, and more user-friendly than Reviews 1.0 was, without making any compromises.


:sparkles: Update Overview

New Reviews experience

The features covered in the Reviews 2.0 update were coded and designed from scratch. With a fresh start, we have implemented new and existing features!

Redesigned quizzing experience

Experience a smoother and faster reviewing experience

answering a Cloze-style Vocab question

answering a Flashcard-style Grammar question

clicking the exit button, and then clicking the Wrap-up button

Revamped alternate-answer system

answering a Cloze-style Grammar question, toggling between alts using buttons, as well as clicking on the dots

Visual Customizability

With new window width/height restriction options, and theme options directly within the Reviews quiz, it’s never been easier and faster to customize your Reviews experience.

opening the menu, switching between all 4 possible size combination

changing the theme accent directly within the styling menu

Keyboard Shortcut modal

We’ve added a new Keyboard Shortcut screen directly within the Reviews quiz, so you always know what hotkeys are available to you.

Summary Page

The Summary page has also been redone.

  • You can now access it any time to view the details for your last session.
  • You can also view all session data from the last 24 hours
  • Sort correct / incorrect answers using the selector on the right

toggling answers

Cram Missed items

You can now cram your missed (incorrect) items directly from the Summary screen!

going through the Cram Missed items modal and starting a Cram session

New Grammar / Vocab pages

While well-known painpoints like the notes being too large will be addressed in a future update, we want to test this newer and more modern design for Bunpro.

Not too much is new here in terms of functionality, but much like the theme for this update, interactions should be faster, and you should get much more feedback on if your actions have been successful or not.

Going between Grammar Points is much faster now

With the new system, switching between pages no longer requires a page-refresh, so transitioning between Grammar Points should be much faster

transition between 2

New interactive Review Type menu

A while back we added support for Cloze (fill-in-the-blanks) support for Vocab questions, and recently we also added Flashcard-input support for Grammar questions. With the new types of Review-styles available, we also have added a new menu to choose your preferred Review Type.

howing Review Type menu opening and choosing styles

Persistent Audio Preferences

Now your audio preferences (found in the new audio menu – Male vs Female, Slow Playback) persist across sessions.

The new Reader

Previously, clicking on text with a Grammar/Vocab popout would simultaneously open the popout and toggle the furigana on/off.
To address this, we’ve created a new pop-out tooltip for rich text.

It can do the following:

Show/hide Furigana

Displays all the possible readings for the selected word, and remembers your choice of whether or not you’d like to keep displaying that reading

of showhide furigana function

Show Grammar/Vocab inside a sentence

Shows you any Grammar/Vocab inside a sentence or word.
It also allows you to click on an item to visit that item’s page.

GIF of clicking on GP

Add to Reviews / Manage Progress directly within the Reader

Now you can perform all the familiar Review actions on a Grammar/Vocab item, all within the Reader

adding a GP to Reviews

As a bit of a caveat, it’s worth mentioning that currently only a subset of our content is Reader-enabled. We are currently manually adding Vocabs/Grammar points to words to make them Reader-enabled. As time goes on, more and more of our content will be useable with the Reader!

Other stuff

With this update there are a few minor quality-of-life things we were able to implement:

Open the Language-menu from the footer

You can now instantly change the language directly from the footer

user changing language from EN to JA

Changes to any setting now instantly takes effect

Any of your account settings that you change will now instantly take effect instantly, even across tabs!

user changing Hide English mode in one tab, and it taking effect


🤓 BTS updates & tech details for devs

Along with the noticeable features mentioned above, here are some more stuff we’ve implemented some other QoL/BTS changes while we were at it:

  • SEO Improvements across the board
    • New swanky OG image – share us and check it out!
    • Dynamic OG images coming soon
  • A range of accessibility improvements over the original site

Our stack:

  • React /w NextJS
  • Typescript
  • Tailwind for styling
  • Vitest for Unit Tests
  • Hosting /w Vercel
  • Legacy to new site cutover achieved with NextJS dynamic rewrite

:mantelpiece_clock: What will happen to the old system?

As it’s getting close to the JLPT, we’ve decided to keep the old Reviews system accessible for the time being.

It can be accessed using the URL prefix ‘/old/’.
So, for Reviews for example, /study becomes /old/study.

Full list of old links

This legacy system will not be updated, and will eventually be removed.


:loudspeaker: Shoutouts

A big thanks to the users that gave feedback, positive or negative, on Reviews 2.0. It went through many iterations to get to where it is today, and we couldn’t say thank you enough!
Here are the contributors, in no particular order:

@HotAirGun, @Talos, @Superpnut, @Sidgr, @Marcus.W, @bunnypro, @simias, @hexashadow13, @Slysoft, @suchifa, @Redglare, @if_at_first, @Tulip, @walter, @ahewgill, @kelth, @Scottd, @kammy_23, @Asriel, @SenorNope, @driscoll, @snime, @Marcus, @melisma, @Kioshen, @chicharron, @TobyOne, @VegasVed, @MC_2018, @Mapletree, @CursedKitsune, @ejw, @Bang, @nuflows, @zeno777, @ThisIsntTheWay


The end (not quite)

With Reviews published, we’re going to continue to monitor for bugs and other feedback.
We’ll also pivot our focus to some other overhauls of a similar style to this one. The next being an overhaul to the Dashboard.

Watch this space!

67 Likes

Nice!

5 Likes

Yayy! One of my favorite things about bunpro is the furigana toggle, it makes me rely on the kanji but also if i dont know the reading I can leave it on

6 Likes

I think this is one of the biggest updates we’ve ever done. A lot of what you see here had @veritas_nz and myself running around, iterating, reading feedback, reading feedback again, reworking flows, you name it.

We even created an entirely new design system (I’m sure you’ve been seeing drops and bits of it here and there) which gets improved and worked on every day.

Reviews are an extremely important and very personal part of Bunpro. It’s easily where most users spend most of their time.

We wanted to make sure we could streamline and modernize the experience without forgoing any previous functionality, while also providing a canvas and foundation for us to keep improving and adding to the experience: Like better responsive design (even if you use a small phone, portrait or landscaped tablet, or smartfridge!), better customizeability and letting you study the way you want right out of the box.

(Don’t quote me on that smartfridge one, though it’d be awesome to see)

I still think Reviews, and Bunpro, can improve a lot but man am I proud of how far we’ve come. We’re always listening to you and your feedback, and we’re always looking to be the very best we can be for you.

And lastly, I want to go on record to thank @veritas_nz for smashing it out of the park with the community threads and putting up with my crazy design ideas, and @Jake for giving us the time and trust (almost literal free reign!) to handle the update. And of course, every single one of you that helped out during the Beta, that use and recommend Bunpro, that allow us to ultimately be here. Thank you everyone!

13 Likes

Hello!

I’m probably just missing it, but I’m currently using the site on my phone and I can’t figure out how to continue to the next review when I get an answer wrong.

What do I press to continue? :sweat_smile:

6 Likes

Hi there! Good feedback.

Currently you press the red ‘x’ to the right of your input.
Kind of confusing, and we’re currently rethinking how to both display non-color based feedback (e.g. using checks and crosses) while also making the next button as clear as possible

3 Likes

Excuse me?

CleanShot 2023-06-08 at 08.59.46@2x

5 Likes

Thank you for the quick reply. My phone is currently showing in black and white (happens automatically at night) so it was easy to miss :sweat_smile:

Also, regarding the furigana toggle - when I click on a word I am unfamiliar with to toggle the furigana, it closes the keyboard as well as scrolls down the page. It’s manageable but a little bit irritating as it’s makes it harder to complete the reviews in a timely manner.

But beyond that, the update is great! Both functionality-wise and design wise. Thank for all your hard work! :blush:

2 Likes

Wow! I haven’t used Bunpro in a while, this is a huge update!
Right now the only thing I don’t really like is that the text fades in and out when you submit an answer and go to the next card; I’d rather there be no transition. Is there an option for that?

4 Likes

What did you enter?? :joy: :thinking:

1 Like

:joy: :joy: :joy:

2 Likes

Yeah we’ll rethink the way we provide the correct/incorrect feedback for mobile users such as yourself. Thanks for the feedback!

I can’t replicate that exact furigana/scroll bug on my iPhone.
What exactly are you seeing? And what OS/browser are you using?

1 Like

Yeah we’ve had a few comments regarding this animation…
It’s mostly there to help hide some janky display transitions between questions.

Are you mostly unhappy with how slow it is?

Maybe we can put a poll up asking what people think. Could also add a ‘disable animations’ option to one of the menus.

3 Likes

I’m loving this change for reviews, but it seems like it may have broken the learn tab. I was doing new grammar today without issue, but after the update I’m getting this error when opening /learn:

Unexpected token '<', "<!DOCTYPE "... is not valid JSON

update: the old link in the original post works fine for me, so that should get me by for now. Thanks for the hard work from everyone!

2 Likes

This link doesn’t work: https://bunpro.jp/old/study

2 Likes

These are the most beautiful release notes I’ve ever seen! Thank you so much for all the amazing changes ya’ll have been working on and the continued transparency ya’ll took every step of the way. Looking forward to what comes next!! :partying_face:

4 Likes

You should be able to access https://bunpro.jp/old/reviews

2 Likes

Fixed the link! Sorry about that

1 Like

Thank you, however this link just hangs at “Loading reviews!” for me. :frowning:

2 Likes

DM’ed you!

1 Like