Hi all,
I wanted to share a short video that illustrates some ideas for the user experience improvement of the Translate extension. The video is available at http://youtu.be/xKfaLyJE4ow?hd=1 (links to different language-specific versions of the prototypes are available at the video description)
Arun and I are organizing usability testing sessions these weeks. Anybody can volunteer for participation in the usability tests at http://goo.gl/E5dvO The only requirement is to speak more than one language, but no previous experience with translation is required.
Feel free to provide any comment on the prototype, or join the testing sessions.
Pau
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Pau Giner pginer@wikimedia.org wrote:
I wanted to share a short video that illustrates some ideas for the user experience improvement of the Translate extension. The video is available at http://youtu.be/xKfaLyJE4ow?hd=1 (links to different language-specific versions of the prototypes are available at the video description)
It's really gratifying to see this kind of comprehensive prototyping; thank you for that, Pau and Arun.
The current design/UX efforts seem heavily focused on the message localization use case, vs. the page translation use case. For example, if you translate https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_June_2012 using Special:Translate, currently the interface gives you a full view of the entire text of the page you're translating. In the proposed UI, those paragraphs would be abbreviated to a one-line representation. Indeed it seems like we should increasingly move away from terminology like "messages" and the message-centric view for page translation.
What's the current thinking of improving the workflow for page translation, or preventing usability regressions in that area?
Thanks for the comments, Erik.
The purpose of the video was to show initial ideas to the community to start getting feedback from the beginning. Since translation involves a repetitive workflow and any minimal change may affect its fluency, we think it is better communicated with movement than with static images.
However, the video just covers part of the scope for the UX improvements planned for translation tools. Some relevant scenarios are still missing and we are working on them, these scenarios include translator sign-up, searching for translations, proofreading and also page translation.
Both proofreading and page translation have some aspects in common that make it challenging from an interaction design perspective: for these scenarios, compared to message-based translations, users want to read (and compare versions) in a wider-than-paragraph scope (ideally with final formatting), but act on a smaller scope (translating sentence by sentence). In addition, concepts such as message description do not apply, and suggestions may have an even reduced scope since previous translations of the same exact sentence are probably lacking (but spelling-suggestion-like completion for parts of the sentence may be helpful for speed and quality).
We are preparing UI concepts that support the above ideas, and we'll be sharing them as early as possible.
Pau
On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 8:56 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Pau Giner pginer@wikimedia.org wrote:
I wanted to share a short video that illustrates some ideas for the user experience improvement of the Translate extension. The video is available at http://youtu.be/xKfaLyJE4ow?hd=1 (links to different language-specific versions of the prototypes are available at
the
video description)
It's really gratifying to see this kind of comprehensive prototyping; thank you for that, Pau and Arun.
The current design/UX efforts seem heavily focused on the message localization use case, vs. the page translation use case. For example, if you translate https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_June_2012 using Special:Translate, currently the interface gives you a full view of the entire text of the page you're translating. In the proposed UI, those paragraphs would be abbreviated to a one-line representation. Indeed it seems like we should increasingly move away from terminology like "messages" and the message-centric view for page translation.
What's the current thinking of improving the workflow for page translation, or preventing usability regressions in that area?
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Today we started testing a prototype for page translation and proofreading. The prototype is available in several languages:
- Finnish: http://goo.gl/Li9oJ#side-fi - French: http://goo.gl/Li9oJ#side-fr - Hebrew: http://goo.gl/Li9oJ#side-he - Malayalam: http://goo.gl/Li9oJ#side-ml - Russian: http://goo.gl/Li9oJ#side-ru - Spanish: http://goo.gl/Li9oJ#side-es
The prototype allows to complete the remaining translation, proofread (validate that translated text corresponds to the original) and edit translations to correct some typos added to the translations. Many interaction details are lacking from the prototype, but we were mainly interested in testing layout aspects that were hard to test with our former version.
Feel free to provide any feedback.
Pau
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Pau Giner pginer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thanks for the comments, Erik.
The purpose of the video was to show initial ideas to the community to start getting feedback from the beginning. Since translation involves a repetitive workflow and any minimal change may affect its fluency, we think it is better communicated with movement than with static images.
However, the video just covers part of the scope for the UX improvements planned for translation tools. Some relevant scenarios are still missing and we are working on them, these scenarios include translator sign-up, searching for translations, proofreading and also page translation.
Both proofreading and page translation have some aspects in common that make it challenging from an interaction design perspective: for these scenarios, compared to message-based translations, users want to read (and compare versions) in a wider-than-paragraph scope (ideally with final formatting), but act on a smaller scope (translating sentence by sentence). In addition, concepts such as message description do not apply, and suggestions may have an even reduced scope since previous translations of the same exact sentence are probably lacking (but spelling-suggestion-like completion for parts of the sentence may be helpful for speed and quality).
We are preparing UI concepts that support the above ideas, and we'll be sharing them as early as possible.
Pau
On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 8:56 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Pau Giner pginer@wikimedia.org wrote:
I wanted to share a short video that illustrates some ideas for the user experience improvement of the Translate extension. The video is available at http://youtu.be/xKfaLyJE4ow?hd=1 (links to different language-specific versions of the prototypes are available at
the
video description)
It's really gratifying to see this kind of comprehensive prototyping; thank you for that, Pau and Arun.
The current design/UX efforts seem heavily focused on the message localization use case, vs. the page translation use case. For example, if you translate https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_June_2012 using Special:Translate, currently the interface gives you a full view of the entire text of the page you're translating. In the proposed UI, those paragraphs would be abbreviated to a one-line representation. Indeed it seems like we should increasingly move away from terminology like "messages" and the message-centric view for page translation.
What's the current thinking of improving the workflow for page translation, or preventing usability regressions in that area?
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
-- Pau Giner Interaction Designer Wikimedia Foundation