Thread:Talk:Universal Language Selector/Autocompleting form

Guillaume Paumier & I came up with a different design for a universal language picker widget, back in 2010:

http://www.gpaumier.org/blog/628_universal-language-picker/

TL;DR: autocomplete field that knows about every possible way to represent a language.

i.e. Collect the list of all possible languages, all possible ways of typing them, and all translations of those languages that we have available. Hide this monster list behind an autocomplete text field that makes an API call to the server. Order autocompleted entries by number of speakers of this language. The end.

So, if you wanted to get to Chinese, you could begin by typing 'ch', or the Chinese characters, or the *Japanese* name for Chinese, maybe even the ISO 639 code 'zh', for those die hard Wikipedians who do it like that.

This autocomplete field can be hidden behind an icon. I would not suggest using a 'world' icon as that is already overused for Wikipedian things. Perhaps an small icon with two word balloons, to indicate different ways of speaking. Like this except simplified. http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-25079242/stock-vector-speech-balloon-symbol.html

The design that you have currently -- using a combination of geography and langauge popularity -- is attractive, and we considered something just like that, but rejected it. I worry that it will be too complicated to use in practice, and depends on a knowledge of geography. Also it may not help you find your language if the current interface language is not one that you understand. When I think of switching a language, I don't think about geography and countries.

(Also, you probably know this already, but flags are rarely a good idea for any interface involving languages, that tries to address the whole world. It sort of works in Europe but in other parts of the world you may even be taking a political side to an argument just by including a flag).

Of course all of these ideas could be combined -- multiple approaches are possible. Still I would like to test the usability of the simplest possible thing, an autocomplete text field. Maybe with shortcuts to the really popular languages.