Now that our Android revamp has been up for a month-and-a-half or so and we're trying to nail down the last few bits of UI for its iOS equivalent, a design question has come up that we could use some feedback on:
How important is the ability to cycle to individual dictionaries during searches (rather than just dictionary groups)?
Basically, we'd very much like to get rid of the 中/英 button - it's a big button in a prominent location that's totally unnecessary whenever you're entering a search that isn't ambiguous. And we think that the dictionary switch button is a very logical replacement for it - for ambiguous searches it would cycle through all of your Chinese groups, then all of your English ones, then back to Chinese. We'd need to change the icon slightly - would need to tell you what language you were searching too (can't have [C] mean both English full-text searches and Chinese ones) - and it would probably also help to have some sort of indicator telling you that there were results available in the other language, but basically we think this would go a long way towards simplifying and streamlining our UI without really taking away any functionality.
We would keep individual dictionaries accessible through a tap-hold of the button, and you could also re-enable any or all of them if you wanted, so all we would really be doing is automatically turning on the "skip with button" option for all of your individual dictionaries and then adding this extra bit of cycling through dictionary groups of the opposite language on an ambiguous search. We would probably also retain the option to bring back the 中/英 button for people who prefer it, though the positioning might be a bit more awkward.
How important is the ability to cycle to individual dictionaries during searches (rather than just dictionary groups)?
Basically, we'd very much like to get rid of the 中/英 button - it's a big button in a prominent location that's totally unnecessary whenever you're entering a search that isn't ambiguous. And we think that the dictionary switch button is a very logical replacement for it - for ambiguous searches it would cycle through all of your Chinese groups, then all of your English ones, then back to Chinese. We'd need to change the icon slightly - would need to tell you what language you were searching too (can't have [C] mean both English full-text searches and Chinese ones) - and it would probably also help to have some sort of indicator telling you that there were results available in the other language, but basically we think this would go a long way towards simplifying and streamlining our UI without really taking away any functionality.
We would keep individual dictionaries accessible through a tap-hold of the button, and you could also re-enable any or all of them if you wanted, so all we would really be doing is automatically turning on the "skip with button" option for all of your individual dictionaries and then adding this extra bit of cycling through dictionary groups of the opposite language on an ambiguous search. We would probably also retain the option to bring back the 中/英 button for people who prefer it, though the positioning might be a bit more awkward.