A new look, and the three languages we know best

If you've been here before, you'll have noticed the front page looks nothing like it did last week. It used to be black, silver and very serious. It is now marigold, black and loud. This post explains the change, and the bigger decision behind it: Word Exchange Plaza is a free app for English speakers learning Hindi, French and Norwegian, and for now that is the whole list.

What changed

Only the logged-out pages: the homepage, the features section, this blog, the about page and the legal pages. If you sign in, the game is exactly the game you left. Same marquee, same reaction-time clock, same song generator, same leaderboards. Your progress is where it was, with the usual alpha caveat that we may still have to reset it when the underlying data changes.

The old front page did its job, but it did it in monochrome. It read like a page for people who already knew what the plaza was. The new one is built for the person who doesn't: someone who has bounced off the big subscription apps and wants to know, in about four seconds, what this is and whether it costs anything.

So the new page leads with the three languages, in their own colours, in their own scripts. It says free more often than is polite. It keeps the alpha notice front and centre, because content is still being added and we'd rather you knew that before you signed in than after. And it uses the poster look, hard edges, block shadows and big type, because the plaza is a public square and public squares have posters, not brochures.

Why marigold

Our mark has always been a lotus in flame: saffron, coral and blue. The old site ignored all of that and went chrome. The new one takes the warmest colour out of the logo and paints the whole wall with it. Each course then gets one of the remaining colours so you can tell them apart at a glance: coral for Hindi, blue for French, green for Norwegian. You'll see the same three colours on the language cards, the blog tags and the footer.

It is a lot of yellow. That's the point. A free alternative to the loudest apps in the category shouldn't whisper.

Three languages, on purpose

The plaza has, at various points, listed more languages than it does today. Some of those courses were thin. Some of them were being corrected by people who didn't speak the language well enough to catch what was wrong. That's not a course, it's a placeholder with audio.

So we've narrowed the front door to the three languages we can actually teach well:

• Hindi (हिन्दी): the most-spoken language of South Asia, and the one we get the most correction submissions for, which is exactly what a course needs to get good.
• French (Français): the one most English speakers have half-learned once already, and the one where a speaking-first method pays off fastest. Liaison and nasal vowels are mouth problems, not reading problems.
• Norwegian (Norsk): the friendliest Nordic language for English speakers, and the one we have the deepest native audio for.

Every phrase in those three courses is corrected by hand as people play it. That's the whole quality model, and it doesn't scale to a dozen languages with a team this size. Depth in three beats breadth in twelve, at least until the three are genuinely good.

If you started a course that isn't on that list, nothing has been deleted. It's just not on the front page any more, and it won't get new content until the three main courses are further along.

Still growing, in the order you ask

"Three languages" is not "three languages forever". It's "three languages until they're good, then we'll talk". What goes into them next is prioritised by request. The alpha notice on the homepage says that in as many words, and we mean it in the boring, practical sense: the request list is a real list, and the things at the top of it get built first.

Right now that list looks roughly like this:

• Filling out the beginner content in all three courses, with more native audio.
• Starting intermediate levels, so players who finish the beginner loop have somewhere to go.
• Better hands-free confirmation so you never have to look at the screen mid-round.
• A real take on pronunciation feedback.

If you want something on that list moved up, or something added to it, the fastest route is the same as it's always been: play, hit the thing that's missing, and tell us. Live corrections for wrong words, email for everything else.

Free, and staying free

One more thing the new page says louder than the old one did. The plaza is free. Not free-for-now, not free-until-the-hearts-run-out. Every language, every feature, no subscription, no card. It is meant to be an alternative to the paid apps, not a funnel into becoming one. We said as much in the build-in-public post and the redesign is partly there to make sure nobody misses it.

What we'd like from you

Tell us if the new pages are worse. Honestly. If the yellow is too much on your screen, if something is unreadable, if the alpha notice is in the way, if a link goes nowhere. This is a build-in-public project and the front page is now as public as it gets.

And if the three languages on the door happen to be the three you want to learn, step in. It's free, it's spoken, and it gets better every week because people like you tell us what's broken.