Hi guys,

This is a request for feedback. I've been following this board for a while, and have stolen my better usability ideas from some of you, so if you visit perhaps you'll notice the inspiration for certain parts of our interface coming from your site.

Anyway, my company is Popup Chinese (http://popupchinese.com) , an online language instruction service. We provide daily mandarin lessons, videos and test-prep services through the Internet. These lessons are loose modules that can consist of an audio podcast, manually annotated texts (mouseover foreign words for popups with english definitions, pronunciation information, grammar explanations, etc.), quizzes and more. The site also has the standard array of study tools like flashcards.

There's already a profitable marketplace for language podcasting services, and a traditional market that is horrible at teaching language effectively. We believe in online learning, but also believe that content isn't a smart play. So it isn't really the lessons aspect of the service that we're looking for feedback on. What makes Popup Chinese somewhat special is that it's designed as an open platform. The site includes all of the content creation tools necessary for third parties to make and publish professional lessons, along with sophisticated backend NLP tools that simplify text annotation and editing. Users can subscribe to each other's content, and syndicate their materials through RSS.

Basically, we are trying to be a hosted WordPress for the online language instruction market, encouraging the creation and sharing of learning objects around an open platform while developing ways for content creators to be compensated for their work. The challenge is that no-one else is doing this, and there aren't any obvious principles for balancing the radically different interests of content publishers and consumers. We need to make the content creation functionality as powerful and easy to use as possible, but not make the advanced functionality obvious to first time visitors who may be scared off by it, or perceive our own content as lower quality due to the presence of third-party content on the site. Our response to this dilemmas has been to "hide functionality in plain sight".

And here's where you come in.... we have a growing community of learners and are launching iteratively to identify problems and fix them before a more public launch. Because we aren't doing much marketing until we leave beta, we are mostly getting feedback from users who are already good at Chinese. They love the product but do not constitute the majority of the market (Absolute Beginners). So it would be tremendously helpful for us to have feedback on how the site feels and behaves to people who are completely new to Chinese. Is it obvious how to use the site? Can you find appropriate learning content? What problems do you run into in the process?

That's the intro spiel. Thanks for getting this far.

If you have some time to lend a hand, you can get full premium access by visiting http://popupchinese.com/voucher and entering the voucher number 2008AOYUN. This voucher is an open invitation while we are still in beta, so if you know anyone who is studying Chinese, feel free to pass it along to them as well. We are pretty sure they will thank you for it.

I should probably mention that the system is designed to support instruction from any language into any language (we can roll it out in other languages very quickly at low cost if there was a profitable market to be served), and the A.I. elements of the annotation/dictionary service are self-learning. Our business model is currently freemium, although we're hoping to eventually make the entire service free of charge and monetize through other channels. We have a strategy for doing this in Chinese, but I'd be interested to hear from people working on related or complementary projects, especially in other languages. I estimate our costs at less than 1/10th of current competitors, and - who knows - perhaps there is someone here who can help us get Popup Hindi off the ground.

Thanks for your time,

--david