Upon visiting the website, Joe will encounter a screen that prompts him for the language he's studying, the textbook he's using, and the chapter he's studied up to. There will be no registration or login required in this model prior to being able to read sentences. Thus, this interface is efficient for new users, because they don't need to go through the registration process. Because the options presented depend on the previous selections (ie the textbooks displayed in the textbook list depend on the language selected), then the steps are numbered to ensure that users will choose options in that order. The below image shows the textbook selection screen.
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If Joe wants to contribute a sentence, he goes to the home page, and switches to the "contribute" tab. Here, he selects the language of the sentence he'll contribute from a pull-down menu, and enters the sentence itself and its translation in a textbox. Then, he selects any additional grammatical tags that would be used to help users find his sentence, clicks on "add" to add them, then clicks on "contribute sentece" to contribute the sentence. Now, any user who subsequently clicks the "more sentences" option on that type of grammatical tag will have Joe's sentence displayed to them among the list.
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The Vocab In this case, an overlay will appear, highlighting the word, and displaying information about it, including its romanization and meaning. Should Joe decide that he needs to practice a particular grammatical .
When Joe forgets
When Joe
Usability Analysis
Learnability
The per-sentence information gathering process makes heavy use of accordian menus. These are becoming fairly common in web apps, and hence learnability with their usage should not be an issue. The usage of the clicking on a part of a sentence to expand out the accordian menu for that vocab item, however, is somewhat inconsistent with the users' experience of how accordian menus work. Namely, users may not expect accordian menus to expand by themselves if the user clicks elsewhere. Additionally, the highlighting of an item in an accordion menu may not be noticed by the user, because it occurs far from where the focus of the user's attention (the mouse) is. However, this is a tradeoff for internal consistency, as it ensures that no separate popup or hover-over information dialog is needed if the user wants information about some particular word in the sentence - all supplemental information is displayed in the accordian menu.
Another learnability issue is that it may be difficult for the user to know what each of the grammatical tags mean, particularly because differing textbooks may describe different sentence patterns using different terminology.
Efficiency
The initial screen, where the user selects a language, textbook and chapter and can start reading right away, is efficient for new users , because they don't need to go through the registration process. However, it may be less efficient for experienced users, especially if what they have studied differs from a particular textbook and chapter, because they would then have to select in the "known grammar"/"known vocab"/"known kanji" the parts of the language they do or don't know, every time they visit the website again. Using client-side storage to keep track of this information, or implementing an optional login system which stores such information server-side, would help alleviate this issue.
The choice of a selector box for adding grammatical tags to sentences, while easily learnable because all of the grammatical tag types are visible, may be inefficient for users who already know the category the word belongs to. While the grammatical could be sorted alphabetically, a user might know the particular grammatical pattern under a different name from the terminology that is used in this website. Hence, it may make sense to also allow a search box with autocomplete to be used for searching for particular tag types. Optimally, users shouldn't even have to input what types of grammatical structures in a sentence, but this would unfortunately involve complex NLP work for detecting grammatical patterns in sentencesThe sentences will each have below them initially-collapsed folding menus which can be expanded to show the romanization, English translation, vocabulary, or the list of grammatical structures that the sentences uses.