2.3 / User Interface Enhancements

We're about to start work on version 2.2 of Pleco for iPhone, and after piling on new modules / major features in 2.1, the main focus of 2.2 is going to be on user interface enhancements - making things more streamlined and logical and dealing with some longstanding annoyances like searches that only match the first few characters.

Most of the enhancements in 2.2 will be things that I've already been discussing for a while - custom toolbars, possibly auto-hiding toolbars in the document reader, embedded definitions in the reader, possibly embedded Char Info on iPad, remembering the last tab / document on startup, reorganized / culled Settings screens, better text selection / the ability to copy out arbitrary parts of entries (current plan for that is to just make the start and end handles draggable once you've tapped on a character to begin highlighting) - but I'm very interested in hearing about other parts of the UI you guys would like to see improved.

So: what bothers you / takes more steps than you think it should in our current iPhone software? How can we make the user interface in it better? The focus should mainly be on things that everyone can use - we don't want to add many more Settings options, though we certainly can / plan to replace some of them with more efficient ways of doing the same thing (e.g. the aforementioned custom toolbars, replacing the bunch of scattered on/off switches that are there now) - so if there's some option that would only be useful for a very particular way of using Pleco, that's probably not going to make it into this release unless there's a case to be made that everybody ought to be using Pleco that way.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

Some thoughts:

A way for the user to set the default flashcard category from the category page. I know there's another way to do it, but it's confusing to new users.

The behavior of the up/down arrows in a dictionary entry display is confusing.

Improved Settings UI -- not sure the best way to rearrange things to make finding the right setting easier. One thought to make picking the right setting easier would be a downloadable pack which would add help for each setting. If the pack is installed, a help button appears for each setting. When pressed, a big popup containing help for that setting appears.

Faster way to add flashcards by hand. I think a lot of beginners will have lists of unrelated vocabulary to enter. It would nice if this was streamlined.

Beyond that,

An enhancement of the reader on the iPad for viewing the text and the translation at the same time, viewing a text and typing up a translation. The reader should also be able to display an image and provide a way to zoom in on and trace a character to look it up.

OCR of Chinese text given a camera picture or a scanned document.

Realtime bidirectional translation of Chinese/English speech.

But I'd settle for an enhanced reader.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

Thanks for starting this thread, Mike. Some thoughts about making the interface more user-friendly.

Reduce the Number of Configurable Settings

- I notice Pleco's settings have gotten increasingly more complex with the version upgrades. Many settings that used to be fixed can now be changed through the settings. While that's good in some cases, one should also be mindful that more options means more complexity. In some cases, it might be better to find a setting that will be fine for most people and eliminate the option to change that setting. There are so many settings, it will take some time to think about which ones are suitable for elimination. When time permits, I'll try to list out some of the configurable settings that I think could be eliminated.
- I don't think it's obvious why Pleco should have a lot more user-configurable settings than something like Stanza or DocsToGo, which are fairly sophisticated software in their own right.


Better Defaults

- Related to reducing the number of configurable settings, in a number of cases, the default settings could be improved.
- For example, I think the current iPhone default dictionary entry and font settings show too few entries per page and have too white space. I have changed the entry format in "Settings->Dictionary->Entry List":
- List layout = Head Pron / Defn (one line of headword plus pronunciation, followed by another line of definition; the default has the pronunciation in a separate line from headword)
- Headword font size = 18. Pronunciation font size = 12. Definition font size = 12.
- See the attached screen shots for a comparison of the default setting with the changed settings above. With the above changes, you increase the number of entries per page from a measly 5 to a much more respectable 8. But even with this change, the number of entries per page is still significantly less than on WM or Palm because the WM/Palm version has a separate panel for the definition and thus can show more headwords per page, whereas the iPhone version displays the definition together with the headwords and pronunciation and therefore can't show as many entries per page, even though the iPhone screen is larger than the screen on most WM or Palm devices.

Better defaults and less settings are the two most important principles that I can think of in making the user interface more user-friendly. If I have time, I'll try to add some more thoughts and talk about some more specifics.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

The larger font size might be because of the larger contact area for a finger versus a stylus.

But I suppose if that needed remedying, maybe there could be a drag and zoom feature?

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

I just found out about the upgrade now - you should really send out an e-mail announcement about it, I think a lot of people (including me) were waiting for it very eagerly. I am just playing around with flashcards, have not used it on Pleco on any other platform, so I'll need some time to see how it works.

It didn't perfectly import my file of added words that Pleco had generated. This was probably because I changed format in the middle, adding the translations. They were then imported as headwords, which made the whole file quite useless. I had about 2400 entries, but I decided to delete them all and start over - partly because of this error, and partly because it's too long ago – obscure words from Jin Yong novels won't stick unless I repeat them immediately after having learnt them.

Which brings me to an issue when switching between flashcards and the reader. I am still experimenting with my work flow, but I think I'd like to maybe read for half an hour, and then go to the flashcard section and review all the new words I added during that section, before continuing to read. I have only added words for one day so far, so I am not sure if that will be easy to do (repeat only the words I've added today for example). But the other issue is that I wish the reader would remember where I was. It does remember my position inside individual text files, but it doesn't remember which text file that was open. It would be nice if when I left the reader, and came back to it, it looked exactly the same. If I want to choose another text file, it's easy enough, but I spend most of my time reading the same long novel.

Another thing I thought would be coming with this upgrade, but cannot see anywhere, is the option to import your own dictionary. This is quite a high priority for me, so I hope this becomes possible soon!

Otherwise, very exciting, and I am going to go back to reading Jin Yong regularly now, something I shelved for a while, waiting for this update. Great work!

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

Thanks!

character - see my latest comments in the Flashcard thread on the default category switch idea.

How specifically do you find the up / down arrows confusing? Is it just the whole-dictionary versus list-of-search-results distinction? We may drop that whole notion of List and Results mode, actually - waste of a button when all people want is search results - so if anybody wants to speak up for it, now is definitely the time. (in E-C searches we would simply show a list of all of the words that started with the term entered, and with the 1-char for 1-char thing we'd replace that with a feature that searched for all words that matched that character AND its pronunciation when you tapped on the >)

Inline help is a big no-no per Apple's UI guidelines, but if it was an optional download they might not notice / care - definitely need to reorganize the settings, anyway, but the best time to do that is when we're dropping / redesigning a lot of the features they enable anyway.

What do you have in mind for adding flashcards faster by hand? With the tap-hold-list option, it seems like we've already got this just about minimized in terms of number of steps required - is the problem that you'd rather have simple buttons to tap on to add results to flashcards or is there something else lacking in the current UI?

Split-screen translation is definitely a neat idea for iPad, though it's going to be tough to outdo Wenlin for that.

gato - I'd certainly be interested to see that list; there are a bunch of things that are probably superfluous on iPhone due to performance improvements, a lot of the handwriting / search delay options for example. (though we'd probably want at least some sort of delay-before-search thing for regular 3G users)

On the entry list default font settings, the size / whitespace were actually both very deliberate design decisions; we wanted to make items easy to tap on and easy to parse instantly, the extra fraction of a second it takes to find the start of the Pinyin part is something we wanted to avoid. And with something as long as a Chengyu you can end up with text getting cut off. (variable-height list items are a MASSIVE performance hit on iPhone, so there's no way we can do those anytime soon)

You can have a separate panel for the definition if you want - that's actually the default in landscape orientation (tilt your display to the left and you'll see it, very Palm/WM-like and with lots of lines per page). We stick with the one list by default in portrait orientation because things can get to be too cramped otherwise - go to Settings / Dictionary / Overall Interface and turn "Show Definition" on under "Portrait Screen Layout" along with setting its "Location" to Left or Right and you'll end up with something very similar to what you had on Palm. (and now you see why we have so many options....)

挪威森林 - announcement email is forthcoming, I was hoping to wait until we had the tutorials up but it's been too many days now and I think we have to pull the trigger on it regardless.

Not sure what happened with those Wordlist files - could you possibly email the file to me (if you didn't delete it the file itself along with deleting its contents from your database?) I just tried alternating definitions / not here and it seemed to work fine.

Remembering the last document in the reader is definitely on our to-do list; only reason it isn't there already is that we're worried it might introduce bugs (lot of other things happening on startup / when switching into a tab), but with 2.2 we'll be doing another external beta test (and not one with flashcard-related time pressure on it) so we can easily add it for that. We've thought about adding the option to save / easily perform customizable card searches, kind of like "filters" in an email client - you'd set up a search for something like "added today" or "last answered incorrectly within the last 24 hours" and there'd be a big friendly button for that search somewhere (Search Cards? top level of Organize?) which you could tap on to quickly review cards that met those criteria.

User dictionary imports are supported in 2.1, though they've gotten very little attention - see http://www.pleco.com/ipmanual/dict.html#userdict for all the details.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

I like having control over a lot of settings, even if it is confusing at first. Perhaps to make Pleco less overwhelming to newcomers, you can have a "simple" and "advanced" settings option to keep everyone happy.

Also, to make learning what settings do more easy to understand, perhaps you could add a hyperlink from the settings that point to the place in the user manual explaining what they control. :arrow: Holding a tap over a setting should have a popup with the link to the instruction manual section about that setting.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

Thanks for pointing out how to get the split-screen view working. I've attached a screen shot. It works quite well. I don't think the entries are too small for tapping. I think this is much better for a dictionary, for which real estate (either on paper or on screen) is always at a premium, than the current default of only listing 5 entries per page.



The settings that enable the split-screen view actually brings up a problem that I have noticed: There are often too many settings for just one "feature". Instead of a simple toggle to turn "split screen" on and off, there are four settings of "Show definition", "Location", "smaller" and "Keep during input". Why not just make an educated guess at what would work better for most users for the "location", "smaller" and "keep during input" for the user (I have it at location = left, smaller = off, and keep during input = off)? Another example where I see merging is possible is in the font size settings. Instead of asking for font size numbers, it would be more user-friendly to let user choose between small, medium, large, and extra large. Or you could do something similar to what Stanza does, which is to show a sample text and a slider/toggle for changing the font size. And I think having separate font size settings for headword, pronunciation, and definition is overkill, IMHO. I think you should just play Big Brother and decide the relative size between these texts for us, so that the font size toggle will change all the text at the same time.

MERGING and ELIMINATING SETTINGS

Both merging of settings and elimination of unlikely to be used ones will make the settings more usable for the average user. I appreciate the flexibility all the settings gives to the users, but we have to keep in mind the trade-off between flexibility and complexity. Though many regulars on this forum are programmers (I used to be one myself), it's probably safe to say that most Pleco users are not Linux hackers. There are simply way too many settings right now, probably over 200 if you go through all the panels. Just on the face of it, I think it's too much for a dictionary-reader-flashcard program. Pleco is in danger of becoming the Emacs of the dictionary world -- powerful but with a steeping learning curve.

ADVANCED SETTINGS

While I would suggest taking a hard look at every configurable setting to see if it's really needed, I also echo the suggestion of hiding the more obscure settings in an advanced settings panel. You could have just most likely to be 5 or so settings in each of "General", "Dictionary", "Reader", and "Flashcards" settings panel and hide the rest in Advanced Settings.

DEFAULTS

On the topic of better defaults, I don't have a list right now, but one thing I would strongly recommend as a default is going directly into the reader whenever the user has copied some text into the pasteboard and then opened up Pleco. This option is currently under General Settings->Insert Pasteboard and roughly mimic the "instant access" feature available in WM and Palm. I think many users would be interested in using this for looking up text in SMS or whatnot, but don't know how to set it up (toggling on these features should be obvious; one shouldn't have to read the 200 pages of the manual or follow every thread on this forum religiously like some of us do). Again, you could combine the three settings into one toggle (could be called "Pasteboard Lookup") and use something sensible for the other two related but currently separate settings. I use "only if changed = on" and "use reader if length > 0".

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

gato said:

Reduce the Number of Configurable Settings

Click to expand...

Perhaps another way to reduce complexity would be to make a desktop application for designing a complex profile, etc. If you worked out a configuration file with all the settings (somewhat like firefox?), and then left most of the as only available to the advanced user via file editing on the desktop, etc....

If it got popular as a separate "settings file" it could even be something that we could exchange (or portions of the file), etc.

Also, a documented and single settings file could open the door for someone to write something on the desktop, with integrated help (stealing from your online manual, or just linking to it), etc. :shock:

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

nihao pengyou said:

I like having control over a lot of settings, even if it is confusing at first. Perhaps to make Pleco less overwhelming to newcomers, you can have a "simple" and "advanced" settings option to keep everyone happy.

Click to expand...

I also like having control over settings, even though it is quite daunting at first. I like the ideas put forward by nihao pengyou and others on this forum about how to deal with the complexity.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

Charles said:

nihao pengyou said:

I like having control over a lot of settings, even if it is confusing at first. Perhaps to make Pleco less overwhelming to newcomers, you can have a "simple" and "advanced" settings option to keep everyone happy.

Click to expand...

I also like having control over settings, even though it is quite daunting at first. I like the ideas put forward by nihao pengyou and others on this forum about how to deal with the complexity.

Click to expand...

I second (third?) this about continuing to provide the full range of options.

The thing that you have to bear in mind is that Pleco is relatively expensive (at least compared to the other dictionaries on the appstore), so the kinds of people who will buy it are more likely to be fairly advanced users (not of computers, but of dictionaries/flashcards etc). I would say that these kinds of users are exactly the sort of people who want/need quite a lot of control over how Pleco works for them, as they will be using it in many different ways and in situations which might not have even been thought of by the authors of the software.

I guess I'm a fairly heavy user at the moment (probably up to 2 hours a day - every day - on flashcards, plus probably 10-20 dictionary lookups most days). It has taken me quite a while to get to the optimum settings for my way of using it. If I hadn't been able to configure Pleco to fit in with my way of doing things, then I would likely have dropped it long ago.

A simple/advanced setting option, combined with sensible defaults and clear explanations of what each option does would seem to be the best way forward to cater for the widest range users.

Ben

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

I know I’ve mentioned this idea before, but I would still like to be able to set “Exit button everywhere” to ON and also have the information on the number of search results at the top of the page when viewing dictionary entries. I understand that the problem with this is the limited amount of space along the top of the screen, particularly if the number of results is something like "153821 of 197191". In this case, the other buttons (Back, ▲, ▼ and X) would get squeezed. But you could do it by making the top bar 2 lines in portrait mode and putting the "153821 of 197191” on the second line. There is no shortage of space on the screen when viewing dictionary entries as long as “Show definition” is set to OFF, so this should not be a problem. In landscape mode, as long as “Show definition” is set to OFF, there is plenty of room to put all the information and boxes and arrows on a single line at the top.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

Hi Gato,

Thanks for posting the screen shot and details of setting up the split screen view. It looks really cool.
I also needed to set the
Dictionary->Entry List (C-E) ->List Layout to Head Pron

To get mine looking like that - and to change the font sizes as well.

I am in favour of having lot's of settings/configurability though. From these forums I have picked up quite a few tweaks from people on how they use pleco, which has improved my use of pleco and chinese studies a lot.

I would suggest something like pleco doing a monthly newsletter or article with tip's and tricks.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

Honestly, I really only have two pet peeves that rate important enough for me to even mention at the moment:

the font used for stroke order look ups and choose stroke order flashcard settings. It's not the font in it's own right, but the combination of thin strokes, thick serifs, that make it a pain to click on in flashcard stroke order testing. And the general fonty "artistic-ness" (think of the incorrect way it displays the 辵 radical in 道，这，达，etc.) When looking up how to write charcters is bad form. Yes I know the main font doesn't render them correctly either, but it's more important - I'm thinking especially for self- learners - for the stroke order font to get this right.

My other peeve, although annoying IMO is much less important. That is that while I can set a default category to add
flashcards via dictionary lookup, I can't choose to put certain words
in another category on the spot. I have to add the card, switch to flashcard mode, tap organize cards, tap on tmy
set default category, tap edit, scroll to the very bottom where the new cars is, choose it, tap move card, and finally
choose the category I want the card in. Annoying! I know you don't want to add new settings... but I give a +1 for
customizable Pleco. I personally don't care if it's buried 12 layers deep in the settings, but I also know having a window pop up asking where to put the new card EVERY time you add one would get annoying to some people... But I utilize multiple categories, so it would be a welcome pop-up for me...

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

KristeneC said:

Honestly, I really only have two pet peeves that rate important enough for me to even mention at the moment:

the font used for stroke order look ups and choose stroke order flashcard settings.

. . . while I can set a default category to add flashcards via dictionary lookup, I can't choose to put certain words in another category on the spot. I have to add the card, switch to flashcard mode, tap organize cards, tap on tmy set default category, tap edit, scroll to the very bottom where the new cars is, choose it, tap move card, and finally choose the category I want the card in.

Click to expand...

I also don't particularly like the font on the stroke-order diagrams. It would be nice to have an option to choose from a few different fonts for this.

I think your second issue is solvable in flashcard settings. If you set "Card Categories/Always prompt for cat" to ON, you will always be prompted to choose a flashcard category when you add a flashcard.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

nihao pengyou - an "advanced" option is certainly a possibility, but some settings are rarely-used enough that we'd rather just dump them altogether and not be stuck constantly re-testing them / updating them to accommodate other changes we make. So a good rough target might be to present 1/3 of our current settings as "basic," 1/3 as "advanced," and drop the remaining 1/3.

Integrated help would definitely be a plus, though as I said Apple tends to frown upon it.

gato - most of those settings for split-screen have significant numbers of people that use them, though, or at least they seem to. "Show definition" certainly might be better if it were renamed to "enable split-screen," say, and there's a case to be made for killing "smaller," but "keep during input" is new in 2.1 and a very important thing to have on iPad (on which it's enabled by default) since otherwise you're looking at a needlessly giant list of text. We could make it an iPad-only option, but a number of people have indicated that they miss it from Palm/WM - one user even said that its absence on iPhone made the iPhone software completely unusable for him. "location" needs left and right to accommodate left-handed users; I suppose we could wrap all of those up in a "lefty mode," but based on our Palm/WM experience at least it seems like often left-handed users will prefer to keep some parts of the UI in their default state depending on how exactly they tend to hold their handheld when they're using Pleco.

We've also had a couple of requests for adding the ability to change font size in pronunciation in definition screens (where it's currently stuck at whatever the size of definition text is), so I'm not inclined to kill that option. Though I do like your predefined ratio idea - maybe we have a "simple mode" setting where you just make the font size small / medium / large, and an "advanced mode" one where you can precisely tweak each font size. There are really two types of culling we need to do: kill rarely-used but difficult-to-support options to reduce future update / maintenance time, and kill OR relegate to "advanced mode" options that are very easy to support but too obscure / numerous / confusing to be useful for most people.

Making the pasteboard reader option enabled by default worries me a bit - we've already had a few people write after turning it on by accident to complain that they keep having their search screwed up / being taken to a separate screen when they don't want to be.

stephanhodges - not really crazy about that desktop configuration idea; it makes it even harder for people to find / access rare settings but still leaves us stuck with having to support / regression-test them. But modular settings files are definitely something we want to add, once people have gone to the trouble of finding / configuring all of these things they really don't like losing them.

ben_gb - the expensive->advanced argument is a fair point, though we've also got a whole lot of customers who pay $15 for the handwriting recognizer add-on and are otherwise quite satisfied with the free version. Intensity of use has always been the biggest reason in my mind to offer all of these options - little inconveniences tend to turn into big inconveniences when you're spending several hours a day in the same app.

Charles - actually, if we follow through on our plans to kill "dict mode" and do everything with search results (no view-all-200000-entries-in-a-single-list mode anymore), the numbers involved would get small enough that it might become considerably easier to squeeze them in.

Though "exit btn everywhere" is an excellent example of an option that should probably be on by default, or even no longer be optional - ignoring the loss of the number count for the moment, does anybody find that that option's relocation of the ▲▼ buttons to the middle of the screen makes things significantly worse ergonomics-wise?

taijidan - interesting idea about the newsletter; a wiki (which stephanhodges was pushing for years ago) should finally be forthcoming with our pending website redesign, so that would be another place for both us and our users to post particularly interesting sets of settings.

KristeneC - the sizes of those thin / thick strokes at least are actually extremely easy to customize since the stroke outlines are generated programmatically; there are constant values for heng / shu widths that we could even make adjustable via a preferences setting, though the defaults probably ought to be thicker to better match the iPhone's built-in font. (once iPhone OS 4.0 comes out we should be able to offer the option to replace that with your own custom-uploaded one)

With the category add, though, you don't even need to follow Charles' suggestion and have that prompt show up every time you add a card; just tap-hold on the + button when you want to add a card to a different category and a popup list will appear to allow you to select one.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

I am not sure if this has been mentioned before. When there is an alternative character in the definition screen and you change dictionary, pleco only looks up the first word. For instance looking up 迂/紆回 in ABC, then I switch to PLC and it only shows 迂 NOT 迂/紆回 anymore. It's not exactly a major problem, but can be quite annoying.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

Don't think anybody's mentioned that before (apologies if so) - should be easy to fix in the 2.1.1 bug-fix update. Thanks!

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

I concur with the idea that simplifying the number, variety, and flexibility of user settings / preferences is something you should aim towards. Find a happy medium between comprehensively customizable on the one hand, and restrictively controlling on the other.

I often go digging through to preferences to try to adjust a few things, am met with a daunting array of choices, and then just back out. I know this is a judgement that software designers are always making, balancing pros and cons. Since there's no single ideal, and many users have different requirements, and different levels of technical competence and confidence. But I would put myself into a fairly confident middle level of user: I do like to mess with preferences, and customize the hell out of whatever software I'm using. But the software should be presenting its configuration options in a way that makes the choices relatively transparent, makes the consequences of your choices clear, and focuses the user on modifying parameters that really should make a difference. I like lots of choice. But I also like software to do some kind of preliminary triage, if you will: to make some decisions for me about which choices I'm offered (don't just open up everything: there is, I'm sure, a smaller subset of experts/engineers who like this, and thrive on it, but I'd suspect that that doesn't apply to most of us), and then encourage me to make my own choices. As Pleco for iPhone is now configured, I'm often concerned that I'm somehow "missing out on" the best set of options/settings/modifications, when I do go in and try to customize. So I end a customization session feeling unconfident about what I've done, and about what I've left undone.

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

I understand the philosophy behind this, but I'm a bit unclear on how we'd go about implementing some of it in Pleco on iPhone - it seems like this is mostly covered by the "expert mode" idea (or perhaps by an alternative version of that that would have, say, an "Expert Settings" button at the bottom of each panel to go into an additional panel with more settings), but how do we make the consequences of users' choices clearer in a mobile UI?