What ideas do you think can it be applied to this GUI to make it more effective for real people usage?

Question

I am talking about Google Text Translation User Interface, in Google Language Tools.

I like the fact that you can get translations of text for a lot of languages. However, I think is not so good always to show all options of translation. I believe is preferably to show, in first instance, only the most frequent options for text translation.

Really, it has become very annoying trying to translate from English to spanish, for example. Using the keyboard (E, Tab, then S Key repeatedly), the first three options presented are Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, and finally Spanish...

Another example: from English to French. Using the keyboard again (F key repeatedly) shows Filipino and Finish before French!!!

What sort of ideas do you think can it be applied to this GUI to make it more effective for real people usage?

Answer 1

I think it's probably fine. There are only a little over 30 languages in the list, and close to half of them are pretty common languages, so I don't think it really makes sense to put the common ones first. It's not like a country list where you have to search through 180+ countries to find yours.

The only thing I would probably do is use a cookie to store your last language selection(s).

Answer 2

The simplest way to do what you are asking is to sort by request frequency and then by alpha/numeric. This will put languages where translation requests are most common to the top. It still won't solve your problem perfectly, but it would be an easy improvement, and one that would work better for most people.

Now, if only there were some google employees who came to this website ;-)

Answer 3

I'd try and detect their locale through browser/ISP meta data if I could, then default to that - but most people expect an alphabeticly-ordered list of languages. What if they're looking for Serbian, but after they hit 'S' once they get spanish, with no Serbian in sight? They might assume that there is no Serbian, since it's not where they expect it (before spanish) and leave. That'd be bad.

Answer 4

I would agree with most previous responses, as plain as this page is there is not much you could do upfront, languages should stay sorted alphabetically.

But there are some things that one could do in the background, store last settings or letting you bookmark translation settings.

Don't forget that some browser will let you do multiple letters for shortcuts, e.g. in Firefox you can type 'SP' to get to spanish.

Answer 5

I think the best would be an autocomplete input field similar to the one used for tags on Stack Overflow and the one used for search on Facebook. Each letter you type narrows the field of results down and allows you to easily choose the right one with either the mouse or the arrow keys.

You could also keep track of the most popular ones and sort the results by most frequently used, like Stack Overflow does with their suggested tags.

Answer 6

I've been frustrated with this interface as well. I think it would be a good idea to (a) use cookies to give preference to the languages this user has selected in the past; and (b) to display a limited list (4-8 languages) of the most common languages, with a "more..." option that expands the list.

I really appreciate the fact that a lot of websites and software applications have started using this approach when asking you to specify your time zone. Why display "Mid-Atlantic", "Azores", etc. if you expect 95% of your users to be in (for example) the 5 U.S. time zones.