User:Planemad/Work/log

16-18

 * Getting started on translation workflows. Familiarizing myself with the features of translatewiki and the mediawiki translate extension
 * Questions in my mind before I dive in: what do people refer to for technical vocabulary in their language? can a person fluent in only one language contribute?
 * like any wiki, as a newcomer I am lost. If only there was a shiny button that said 'start here' and gave a nice overview about what is where and how the wiki is organised.
 * and also a dictionary to lookup commonly used jargons - "The primary language doubles as your interface language on this wiki and as default target language for translations", "assistant language" . I want to translate from english to tamil, I have no clue how to set this up.
 * There is only 1 layer of message grouping, why not Projects>Message groups?
 * Finally! Help in the corner.
 * There lacks a priority metric for language and projects that would tempt me to make an effort to translate a very highly used and important message.
 * Translation starts from here. It only looks intimidating from here onwards
 * Unexplained tabs - what is proofread and translate? and when do I use it?
 * Verdict: There are just too many tables, action buttons, hidden interactions, cryptic messages and colors for me to make sense of it. This is a complex interface with a steep learning curve that would appeal more to technologists rather than linguists who should have been the focus.
 * Will need to observe an experienced translator using the interface to figure out quick fixes and improvements. It does feel like the mediawiki framework is a limitation to implementing a more optimized interface.


 * Attending my first sprint meeting and getting a hang of how things will be working. Agile requires quantifying work, but how do you quantify design work? I have never measured my wok on any scale before.
 * So far so good, I'm tasked with just enough to keep me busy for the next two weeks.
 * Sprint goal: Usability study of the existing mediawiki translate extension running in translatewiki, Mockups of the Universal Language Selector


 * Reviewing a UI proposal for improving the translatewiki workflow
 * Proposal is essentially another level of nested tabs which makes it a lot easier to drill down to a specific project or language.
 * Functionality wise, an improvement over current methods, but will definitely add to the visual clutter and confusion on how to navigate the site. Two levels of tabs is not a good idea.
 * Overall, while the idea itself is good, it doesn't work when placed into the site with a lot of other tabs and controls. Further simplification with a holistic view and removing redundant UI controls is needed.
 * Looking at a high level information architecture restructuring. Time for whiteboard sketching time.
 * I can suggest a bunch of quick fixes, but is it more worthwhile to work towards a long-term vision that will require major software changes?


 * Diving into translatewiki, having a look at ui bugs filled and support feedback
 * Liquid threads is a bit of a pain to navigate around and find things. If there was a little filter that would remove messages with less than X replies, I would be seeing a lot more important topics. And ofcourse, a filter by date range. There's a lot of feedback in support, but virtually inaccessible forever.
 * feedback: users want to translate into multiple related languages at once (english, simple-english)
 * 36006 a warning if a user accidently closes or leaves a translation task so that data is not lost
 * 18721 hide irrelevant languages from the user
 * It seems a little strange that you can translation editor becomes a popup when you click the link, or opens inline in the table when you double click. Is there a reason for both to be there? which one is more effective?
 * The inline editor has the advantage of being in context and quicker to step through messages. If it could be invoked in a single click, it would become even faster! if the controls are switched, and people get used to the inline editor, the popup can be discarded alltogether
 * I'm trying to come up with rules for a site interaction diagram that can describe any site's workflow and user tasks visually. I haven't seen any existing one that is good. Will really help developers and designers understand how the site actually works and how the user interacts with it.

http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/planemad