Importance of cycling to individual dictionaries?

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.

What about full text search, where you are searching for English words in Chinese dictionaries, or vice versa?

gato said:

What about full text search, where you are searching for English words in Chinese dictionaries, or vice versa?

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In the current design that's handled as another group - by default you have two dictionary groups for English searches, one a regular search of all of your English-Chinese dictionaries and the other a full-text search of all of your Chinese-English ones, and then just one group for Chinese searches. The other three possible combinations (full-text Chinese in Chinese dictionaries, and full-text English and Chinese in English ones) are by default only accessible by a tap-hold or by inserting a # before the search string.

But right now, it cycles through all of your individual dictionaries after cycling through your groups, and we're thinking that if we get rid of that and make it switch between languages we'll end up with something that works just as well (and is perhaps even a bit more intuitive) but eliminates that extra button.

It sounds more complicated than the current design from your description. It sounds like it's going to be less intuitive to use for full text search. Are you able to share some screenshots?

Don't want to be a party pooper, but I like the current behavior exactly as is. Cycling through individual dictionaries is important to me for quick access to example sentences. I do like the combined results screen, and the ability to instantly move from there to cycling through the separate dictionaries. I'm also not keen on the idea (correct me if I'm wrong about what you propose) of accessing specific dictioaries through long-press exclusively. Much much much prefer the ease and directness of cycling through dictionaries, as it is now.

For me, the trouble with combining both E-C and C-E results into a single combined results screen (which is what I guess you're talking about) is that an English word can come up with dozens of entries in C-E dictionaries, of decreasing relevance as you scroll downward.

ADDENDUM: You said "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." I would say that close to 1 out of 10 searches I do are in the "ambiguous" category, especially for numerous Chinese pinyin searches without tone number added. Therefore the 中/英 gets frequent enough use from me.

if i understood it correctly, i must say that i am in line with LantauMan, pinyin searches frequently require the 英中 button...
why not keep the cycling (again totally agree with LantauMan) and put the other functionality to the long press

still not totally sure of which cycling button you are talking, maybe you really shoud provide screenshots. in searches i expect every dict to be searched, when looking at results i want to cycle all (relevant) dicts...

I'm really sorry but to be honest I, too don't really understand most of the description which you have written nor the question itself. It's kind of confusing.

gato said:

It sounds more complicated than the current design from your description. It sounds like it's going to be less intuitive to use for full text search. Are you able to share some screenshots?

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Not really something that be conveyed well by screenshots - basically just imagine our current interface but with no more 中/英 button, and the switch dictionary button now used to cycle between languages as well as between dictionaries. (so you cycle from "search all Chinese dictionaries at once" to "search all English dictionaries at once" with that button)

LantauMan said:

Don't want to be a party pooper, but I like the current behavior exactly as is. Cycling through individual dictionaries is important to me for quick access to example sentences. I do like the combined results screen, and the ability to instantly move from there to cycling through the separate dictionaries. I'm also not keen on the idea (correct me if I'm wrong about what you propose) of accessing specific dictioaries through long-press exclusively. Much much much prefer the ease and directness of cycling through dictionaries, as it is now.

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Ah, important thing to clarify: this would only apply to the search results screen - you would still cycle dictionaries normally when viewing a definition. We're only talking about changing the behavior for searches - *searching* a specific dictionary would now only be accomplished via a long-press by default, viewing alternate definitions in a specific dictionary would work exactly how it does now.

LantauMan said:

For me, the trouble with combining both E-C and C-E results into a single combined results screen (which is what I guess you're talking about) is that an English word can come up with dozens of entries in C-E dictionaries, of decreasing relevance as you scroll downward.

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Again, have to clarify: these would still be two separate screens of results. The difference would be that when you tap on [C], instead of going to ABC/PLC/etc, you'd get [E] to search English-Chinese dictionaries, then another icon (maybe [EC]) to do a full-text search of Chinese-English dictionaries, then back to [C]. And if you were already on [E] or [EC] you'd stay there when you entered a new search, it wouldn't force you back to [C] until you tapped again or until you had a search that only worked in Chinese.

If it was important to you to have one or two individual dictionaries accessible that way too, you could add them, but you wouldn't want too many or else it would take irritatingly many clicks to switch between English and Chinese. But if you were OK with just the dictionary groups then this would require basically the same number of taps (maybe 1 or 2 more) compared to 中/英.

mfcb said:

still not totally sure of which cycling button you are talking, maybe you really shoud provide screenshots. in searches i expect every dict to be searched, when looking at results i want to cycle all (relevant) dicts...

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Yeah, I really should have stated this more clearly in the first post - you would still be able to cycle all dictionaries when viewing a result, all we're proposing to do is to take away the ability to cycle to individual dictionaries for *search result lists*: we don't really think it's all that useful, and we think by eliminating that we can get rid of 中/英, which both simplifies our interface and (hopefully) reduces the cognitive load of dictionary switching a bit (there'll just be one "show me different results" button instead of two, a change I might to compare to the brilliant Google Chrome idea of merging the search and URL bars into one "i want to go here" bar).

So to summarize:

• No more 中/英 button.
• Switch dictionary button on the search screen now only cycles you between dictionary groups to search, but does so between groups of both languages - [C] to [E] to [EC] (fulltext E search of C dictionaries) then back to [C].
• Tap-hold switch dictionary button still lets you search a specific dictionary.
• Definition screen behavior totally unchanged, this only affects the search screen.

So if you type "ran" and it interprets it as Pinyin but you want English, you tap on the [C] button and it changes to [E] and now you have your English-Chinese results. If you want to then view full-text English results for "ran," you tap on the button one more time and now it's [EC] and showing you those. If you clear the field and then type "tie", it sticks with that search type (as it also would on [C] or [E]), but you can change back to Chinese results by tapping [EC] to turn it back to [C].

讚!
What you propose doesn't seem to reduce functionality while adding to simplicity and decluttering the main search screen.
Also, you haven't disappointed us yet, so it will be good.

I say: Go for it! If nobody likes it, it can still be undone.

Mike, I do have to say that your explanation only confuses me more. I honestly don't understand why you wish to eliminate the 中/英button. I have the oldest, tiniest Android phone you've used for testing--an LG Optimus One--with an eensy-weensy 3.5 inch screen. You'd think I'd be the first one to raise my hand in favor of saving screen real estate. But I LIKE the current layout. The 中/英 in no way crowds anything. The layout makes total sense to me as it is now: the 中/英 button controls the input language, the C/E button controls the output (definition) language. What could be more simple and easy? Trying to somehow combine this into one button actually makes it harder to use.

How many times have I input pinyin for words such as song, long, ping, etc., and Pleco assumes English? In such a case, I don't want to cycle between English and Chinese dictionaries for the definition of the English word "song". No, I want to change it to 中 input, so I can see the various pinyin options. Hence the current 中/英 is absolutely essential.

I know what you're going through. I'm a professional illustrator. If I stare at a drawing long enough, I'll always find something that "needs" tinkering, whether or not it really does. Best remedy for this is to put it away for awhile. I think you're thinking too hard about the UI sometimes.

Please leave the layout alone. It's genius as it is. Yes, genius. If it ain't broke, don't fix.

I also don't like these ideas:

• Switch dictionary button on the search screen now only cycles you between dictionary groups to search, but does so between groups of both languages - [C] to [E] to [EC] (fulltext E search of C dictionaries) then back to [C].
• Tap-hold switch dictionary button still lets you search a specific dictionary.

I've studied my own behavior when searching dictionaries. I find that I hardly ever pay attention to which dictionary is displaying; I'm only looking for explanations and examples I like. Hence, pressing the C/E button to cycle through individual dictionaries is way more useful than the long-tap. In fact, if you change the behavior to the above proposal, it actually DEGRADES Pleco's usability for me. I don't want to have to tap-hold each time I want to cycle to the next dictionary. That slows me down and is annoying.

Again, the current behavior is ideal. I can see adding tap-hold for those who regularly have a favorite dictionary. On the other hand, you already have settings for the order in which dictionaries cycle, and which one comes up first.

Once more, if it ain't broke, please don't fix. So far, only a few of us have responded. The one positive response is "Yeah, why not?" which is not a resounding note of approval.

Thanks for the feedback.

LantauMan said:

How many times have I input pinyin for words such as song, long, ping, etc., and Pleco assumes English? In such a case, I don't want to cycle between English and Chinese dictionaries for the definition of the English word "song". No, I want to change it to 中 input, so I can see the various pinyin options. Hence the current 中/英 is absolutely essential.

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The idea here is that you tap on the other button instead (maybe twice instead of once) but you get the same result - you're not cycling through a bunch of dictionaries, you're cycling through one or two dictionary groups. The ability to see lists of results from specific dictionaries (results that will also show up in the merged result list anyway) seems like it might not all that important to most people, not important enough to justify keeping it a tap rather than a tap-hold action.

LantauMan said:

I've studied my own behavior when searching dictionaries. I find that I hardly ever pay attention to which dictionary is displaying; I'm only looking for explanations and examples I like. Hence, pressing the C/E button to cycle through individual dictionaries is way more useful than the long-tap. In fact, if you change the behavior to the above proposal, it actually DEGRADES Pleco's usability for me. I don't want to have to tap-hold each time I want to cycle to the next dictionary. That slows me down and is annoying.

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So you prefer to search for them that way, rather than tapping on the particular word that you're interested in and then tapping on the button to flip between dictionaries for that? Examples don't even appear in the result list unless you're doing a full-text search, so it seems like you're mainly doing this for explanations - do you find that more efficient than looking for them on the individual definition screen? Why?

LantauMan said:

I know what you're going through. I'm a professional illustrator. If I stare at a drawing long enough, I'll always find something that "needs" tinkering, whether or not it really does. Best remedy for this is to put it away for awhile. I think you're thinking too hard about the UI sometimes.

Click to expand...

It's actually more than tinkering, and I ought to be more specific about the issue that prompted me to look at eliminating 中/英, which is this: basically, after going back and forth on the subject for the past year or so I'm feeling like I'd like to move us to a Facebook-style side menu bar. As we add more features it starts to seem like a better and better fit, and it also makes it really easy to accommodate multiple simultaneous "sessions" in the screens in which that would be useful (mainly the reader and flashcards at the moment, but other planned things in the future as well).

However, in order to do that, we need a big "menu" button at the top left corner of the screen, which is going to get really cramped if we put it next to the 中/英 button. (even more so on iOS) We could modify the concept a bit and put that menu on the right side instead, but aside from complicating the metaphor, it would still need to be wider than the button that's there now and then it would end up cluttering the [C]/[E] button instead.

So if we accept that having a large menu button accessible while the search bar is open is a good idea, and if we want to keep it out of the input method bar (which would make it harder to reach and cause it to annoyingly jump around depending on what you were doing), then we're left with a strong incentive to remove one of those two search-bar-adjacent buttons in order to make space for it.

The alternatives would seem to be a) preserving the status quo, which I'll admit hasn't really produced many complaints on Android but has produced quite a few on iOS (where the button is at the bottom right corner of the screen because we really can't squeeze it into the search bar there) and will likely generate more complaints on both platforms in the future as we roll out more features and the menu gets longer and longer, or b) adding the menu button anyway and accepting the idea of an overcrowded search bar.

Mike, I've said all I need to say. In reply to your last post: yes, I prefer the current setup, hands-down. And, as you say, you haven't really received complaints about it.

Your further explanation of how you'd combine it all into a single button still sounds confusing and more time-consuming to me. To repeat: the ability to cycle through dictionary definitions with a single tap to proceed to the next one, is far preferable than doing it in two steps (long-tap, then choose dictionary). Also, the idea of a double-tap (or whatever) on the combined button to switch between 中英 will open up many opportunities for errors and frustration.

Much of the time I'm using Pleco live in action during tutoring sessions or even conversations or watching movies. I find myself rapidly cycling through those dictionaries, quickly scanning for what I need (often a usage example), and I'm usually able to keep up with what's going on. It's indescribable what a difference that has made to my Chinese usage and learning. Slowing down the cycling to that two-step process breaks the fluidity of that process.

As for wanting to model the UI after Facebook, that gets a big WTF from me. I find navigating Facebook to be far less intuitive than the current Pleco UI. Anyway, I fail to find a Menu button in Facebook. Maybe because I'm still on the old interface?

Anyway, it seems like it's just me chiming in here. Be nice if some others voiced their opinions.

LantauMan said:

Your further explanation of how you'd combine it all into a single button still sounds confusing and more time-consuming to me. To repeat: the ability to cycle through dictionary definitions with a single tap to proceed to the next one, is far preferable than doing it in two steps (long-tap, then choose dictionary). Also, the idea of a double-tap (or whatever) on the combined button to switch between 中英 will open up many opportunities for errors and frustration.

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Well it's not that it's a double tap, it's that there are now three states that button might be in: "search all Chinese-English dictionaries for a Chinese word," "search all English-Chinese dictionaries for an English word," and "search all Chinese-English dictionaries full-text for an English word." And you're tapping on that button to alternate between those states. As opposed to the current system, where you go from "search all Chinese-English dictionaries for a Chinese word" to searching various individual Chinese dictionaries for that word and then back to "search all Chinese-English dictionaries for a Chinese word."

I'm trying to figure out how likely it is that somebody would still want to display a list of search results from a specific dictionary, and why - it seems like if you're seeing a combined list of all dictionaries' results, the ability to view them from a single dictionary becomes less important, when you can very easily get any particular dictionary's take on a word from the definition screen.

LantauMan said:

Much of the time I'm using Pleco live in action during tutoring sessions or even conversations or watching movies. I find myself rapidly cycling through those dictionaries, quickly scanning for what I need (often a usage example), and I'm usually able to keep up with what's going on. It's indescribable what a difference that has made to my Chinese usage and learning. Slowing down the cycling to that two-step process breaks the fluidity of that process.

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I'm still wondering if I just haven't explained this clearly - you understand that this change would only affect the list of search results, right? You could still cycle through definition dictionaries with a single tap just as you do now: the only dictionary switch button which is being altered by this proposal is the one next to the search bar. So if you've tapped on a word in order to cycle through definitions / examples for it, that behavior doesn't change in the slightest.

LantauMan said:

As for wanting to model the UI after Facebook, that gets a big WTF from me. I find navigating Facebook to be far less intuitive than the current Pleco UI. Anyway, I fail to find a Menu button in Facebook. Maybe because I'm still on the old interface?

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The menu button I'm talking about is this one, which for the most part has been very well received.

LantauMan said:

Anyway, it seems like it's just me chiming in here. Be nice if some others voiced their opinions.

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Probably the time of day - I'm sure there'll be more responses in a day or two.

read through most of the discussion and my conclusion is, i wont miss the 中英 button.

most searches i do in real hanzi, not in pinyin, and a few in english. as i stated earlier, i dont want to search a single dict, i want the results from all of them and when i open the definition of what i searched, i cycle through all the dicts...

I would say it's a good idea...

Speaking of useless buttons, why is there a onscreen menu button when every android phone has a menu button?

mikelove said:

I'm trying to figure out how likely it is that somebody would still want to display a list of search results from a specific dictionary, and why - it seems like if you're seeing a combined list of all dictionaries' results, the ability to view them from a single dictionary becomes less important, when you can very easily get any particular dictionary's take on a word from the definition screen.

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There are 2 dictionaries which I very often want to see alone: one is HDD/DHD because I want to look up German entries, one is my own user dictionary with chinese and japanese words in one dictionary.

scykei said:

I'm really sorry but to be honest I, too don't really understand most of the description which you have written nor the question itself. It's kind of confusing.

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That is my impression too. As far as the 英 button and the dictionary selection button are concerned, I do not even understand why the buttons switch without beeing tapped - I like computer programs that do what they are told and do not act without being asked. Cycling through the dictionaries is one of the remnants of the old fashioned WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), and I like it.

skripp said:

Speaking of useless buttons, why is there a onscreen menu button when every android phone has a menu button?

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They don't - as of Android 4.0 those are optional, and most manufacturers have stopped including them in newer phones.

Your app can request that the system put a software menu button in the black bar at the bottom of the screen, but that's very tough to find (prior to our adding our own menu button, "I can't find the menu button" was far and away our most popular Android tech support question), and some manufacturers (<cough>HTC<cough>) don't display that button and assign it to some awkward and difficult-to-discover hardware button combination instead.

HW60 said:

There are 2 dictionaries which I very often want to see alone: one is HDD/DHD because I want to look up German entries, one is my own user dictionary with chinese and japanese words in one dictionary.

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Makes sense - this is why there'd still be the option to keep individual dictionaries cycle-able. But wouldn't you usually get results from those dictionaries anyway just because they'd be the only dictionary that matched a particular Japanese or German search term?

HW60 said:

That is my impression too. As far as the 英 button and the dictionary selection button are concerned, I do not even understand why the buttons switch without beeing tapped - I like computer programs that do what they are told and do not act without being asked. Cycling through the dictionaries is one of the remnants of the old fashioned WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), and I like it.

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Fair enough, but you have to admit that's becoming less and less the norm (e.g. with the aforementioned merged URL/search bar in Chrome); if you enter something that's obviously English or Chinese, the software should be intelligent enough to accommodate that without you having to explicitly tell it what language this is.

I think this is something people will need to try for real in order to get the gist of it, so we'll try to work it into another Android update in a few weeks as an off-by-default option and get some feedback on it before we decide whether or not to turn it on by default - I'm feeling like for the vast majority of users this will probably be a good thing, though, and if it generates relatively few complaints on Android we can even consider making it the only option on iOS.

mikelove said:

HW60 said:

Cycling through the dictionaries is one of the remnants of the old fashioned WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), and I like it.

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Fair enough, but you have to admit that's becoming less and less the norm

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If you google WYSIWYG, you get lots of hits for the last 24 hours. The problem for software like Pleco is the increasing complexity. At the same time the manual is of no help, because nobody will ever read it, as you can see when you have a look at some of the less complicated questions in the forum. When Microsoft invented the ribbons, they added a software soon after to help users to find the buttons they knew in the old office, but not in the ribbon office. Pleco's settings are not far away from Microsoft's ribbons as far as complexity is concerned. Therefore WYSIWYG is so important - I do not always want to ask a question in the forum if I want to change one of the settings and do not find it.