Grammar Guide - Presentation not User-Friendly
alexlexilu
June 09, 2010 at 01:34 PM posted in General DiscussionI would like to see a more user friendly index to this grammar guide. Entries should be sorted alphabetically (with pinyin). It would be awesome to have an index right from the grammar guide page to all the entries. Sometimes I dont know what category the word belongs to, and I don't necessarily care to read all that stuff and have to click 2 or 3 times before I get to the index. Once there, entries are entered randomly so it's hard to see if what I am looking for is there... OK I can use the search on page but that's not user friendly. Most grammar books have this kind of index at the end... unless CPod's grammar guide becomes more user friendly... I doubt that a lot of people will use it... and all that time you put into it won't be worth it. It takes too long to find if you have an entry or not in the guide.... Please think of having a button on each lesson page, on the dashboard or on the top somewhere that would take us there directly or add grammar guide to the search drop down menu. The guide is awesome, and when it links to lessons it will be great... but its presentation is not user-friendly at all so many won't take advantage of it.
catherinem
June 10, 2010 at 06:29 AM
I agree with you, alexlexilu. I believe the next step (after creating all the content) is organizing it in a meaningful way. We do feel that linking lessons to content is an important first step. This is something that has been done. The tech. team is in the process of making all grammar tags visible (they will be on the left hand sidebar of each lesson, under topic and function tags). The team has thus far tagged over 700 lessons, and continues to tag each day.
As for next steps, we plan to continue adding to the content of the guide, and will also be imposing organizational structure on areas like Adverbs to make it more user friendly.
alexlexilu
June 10, 2010 at 03:07 PMThanks. Once you do that, please KEEP IN MIND that we don't always know which category a word belongs to (adverb or preposition for eg) so please offer a general index with all entries where we dont have to go in the word cateory, and then click 2 more times to get there. I often waht to look up how to use a word without being in a lesson.
For exemple, if I want to find how to use 一直 in a sentence, I would go to search at the top and enter it then choose glossary (because lesson will only take me to a lesson where the word is in the title - which is almost never the case cuz the titles rarely contain characters except for advanced). I get this: http://chinesepod.com/tools/glossary/entry/一直
which contains examples of sentences but no explanation until I maybe listen to a lesson. But I want something quick so I would like to be able to search the grammar guide instead.
So... if the option was there to search in it, it would be great... or if there was a button on the dashboard that would take me directly to the grammar guide index, and there I could find right away YIZHI in alphabetical order, that would work too! And it should be bilingual (index or search) For eg, the same search should work if I was trying to know how to say INSTEAD in Chinese and I wanted to look at the grammar guide.
What I mean is it should be quick and efficient to get there, and not all searches are done from a lesson. I often have to write/speak Chinese outside CPod and I would love to use your guide because it is really well made. But if it takes me 5 mins to find what I want, or if I have to listen to a lesson to know, I most likely wont do it. I would probably continue using my little grammar book that I have instead, but I'd rather use CPod cuz I could then find new lessons that would teach me more about it, I could bookmark them and study them later.
Anyway, I TOTALLY understand that you are not there yet and I appreciate your response. I know you will eventually come up with something. I just wanted to make sure that you understood how the users might use your guide, so that when you do organize it, you can come up with something that fits our needs. I think the fact that it will be linked to lessons is AWESOME!! Its a good first step.
I am soo happy that you are revamping this guide cuz I really want to use it, but up to now it was too user-unfriendly for me.
Thanks!!!