Universal Language Selector Mobile

This page outlines an interaction design work flow to improve the user experience of selecting a known language from a laundry list of unknown languages on a mobile device.

See also: Universal Language Selector

Status

 * Initially proposed during the Mediawiki Pune hackathon by user:Planemad with inputs from Alolita, user:Logicwiki, user:yuvipanda and Tomasz Finc. Initial feedback was positive. Community discussion and improvement pending.

The Problem

 * A user cannot easily switch to a language of choice if the interface is of a foreign language
 * The language selection list currently has 250+ languages with no logical ordering
 * Mobile devices have significantly less screen space and cannot accommodate large amounts of information

Proposal1 - user:planemad

 * (1) Two letter language code shows the currently selected language, clicking calls the language selector callout
 * (2) Alert bar that shows the user currently selected language based on location/phone settings and matched to a country. The flag will help a foreign user identify it as an interaction point for regional customization. Clicking the bar will take the user to the language settings page (5). If a user navigates to another page, it can be assumed he is comfortable with the set language. He can later change the language if needed by clicking on (1)


 * (3) Language selector callout activated by clicking (1)
 * (4) Initial list of 2 languages chosen based on detected settings (1 global + 1 regional) displayed in their native scripts. Other language option will take the user to the language settings page (5)


 * (5) Set to detected location of the user or from phone settings. In most cases there will be no need to change this
 * (6) Primary/interface language selected based on the most common language used in the selected country. If the person is a non native speaker of the language, there is a good chance that he will atleast have reading knowledge of the country's primary technical language.
 * (7) Initial list of 2 secondary languages for the country selected. This ensures a very high probability that he will identify atleast one of the languages from (6)+(7) if the correct country is chosen.


 * (8) Country selector allows user to select multiple countries of his interest. A linguist may be from Israel, but may also be interested in Indic languages


 * (9) Updated settings page showing list of selected countries. The interface language may be updated based on the most popular technical language among the countries selected. If only Israel was chosen, the interface language should have switched to Hebrew


 * (10) The user can pick only one interface language from a list of most common languages in the countries selected. It can be assumed that this is a one time setting for a particular user and there would be no reason for him to change from a language he is most comfortable with.


 * (11) Page with Hebrew selected as the interface language


 * (12) The secondary language selector allows the user to select any other language he is interested/literate in. The list needs to show only the languages from the countries chosen. There may be an additional option to have a complete listing of all supported languages, the requirement for that will need to be investigated.


 * (13) The language selector callout is now updated with the user defined settings. The interface language always remains the first in the list followed by all other languages of the user's interest. At any time a new language can be added.

Caveats

 * This design assumes that a user would be able to atleast identify the flag of the country he belongs or familiar with. If he cant, a person with no knowledge of the initial interface language may never be able to pick his/her language.
 * A comprehensive database of languages used for every country is needed, which may not currently exist.
 * The purpose of this interface is to eliminate unrecognized/irrelevant languages for the user from a language selection list. How the language selection impacts searching/input/content has not been worked on.