We have an application in which we create tests. These tests are created in a certain language (can be anything). In a phase of the test's process, it has to be translated so all languages we offer are covered (going from french-german to more exotic things like Chinese-Swedish --- we're a European office).
We've come up with a few ideas of ourselves, but no idea seems to solve the issues we keep having. These thoughts are the base for our design:
- at all time, we need to see the source test (the test we translate from) and the destination language (the test we're creating).
- We'd like to contain the amount of "pop-up" screens to a minimum, as that creates extra clicking and it draws the user from it's current view.
- The test interface should not rearranged (a part of the test is a screen that consists of a table, so x-columns and x-rows, this is the widest part of the test). The reason is that the user must see the original arrangement because it's important in the translation process.
A few designs we came up with:
- Split our screen in half, with the source test to the left, and our destination test to be translated on the right. We provide some sort of preview (alot of the data has to be processed before the actual test can be seen) is then provided in a pop-up so it can be dragged onto a secundary screen. The problem here is that 2 tests on 1 screen might be an issue as not all data can be seen (the cells auto-scale and become too small to see the content).
- Break the flow of the cells in our test and put them all vertically (so top-bottom). We'd rather not do this as that makes it hard for our users to see which cell goes where in the original table (I put it here anyway to indicate we covered this idea too).
- Use 1 main content area, and put A1 and A1 (source and destination) next to eachother, but use different colors to indicate their source (fe the source test gets green and the destination test gets yellow) so say we have 5 columns, then we'd have 5 green-yellow pairs next to eachother on 1 line. Compared to solution 1, this saves a lot of margin spacings and gridsplitter space. Disadvantage is that we merge both tests into 1 big screen.
- Use 1 screen for the input and put the source test on a pop-up so the user can put that onto a second screen. We provide some sort of togglebutton, so the user can switch between source test and preview mode on their pop-up, to save them from having multiple pop-ups open.
As far as user profile goes, this tool is intended for internal use only so we know the user has access to an external monitor, so we should actually make use of that one. Also, our users are non IT, so the solution should be Ux-proof, we don't want a learning curve.
Any thought on this matter are greatly appreciated, whether it is criticism on our proposed solutions or a proposol on how it might be done better.