Editor List and Entry Scrolling Improvements

For new users on Language Forge I’m noticing that they struggle with all the scrolling they have to do. When they are looking at an entry, they first have the scrollable list of words on the left side which seems to always go off the bottom edge of the page for every user’s screen that I have seen. We could improve the user experience greatly if they could immediately see the bottom arrow on this word list so they could scroll the as many words as they like. Can this be configured to only go to the bottom of the viewable screen regardless of their screen resolution or zoom factor? Second, they have the main scroll bar on the right side because the amount of fields usually is so many that they don’t fit on the page. When they scroll down the page using this main scroll bar, they no longer see the list of words. This means, they lose the context of where they are in their list of words, that they can’t see which headword they are working on so they easily forget what the bottom meaning fields apply to, and they can’t quickly click on another word in the list. It would be nice if the list of words would perhaps move down the page as the scroll down with the main scroll bar. Having such a floating list, would always show them where they are and allow for quicker navigation.

Hi Ron,

Thank you for this feedback. I think there are several things at play in your summary that are contributing to user frustration.

We’ve been planning on changing the scrolling list for a while now, but the implementation cost is significant (which is why it is slow in coming). Our new design includes a scrollable list of a set of entries, one list per exemplar character. One can browse the dictionary list by clicking on the vertical exemplar tabset and then scrolling through the entries under that exemplar. If the number of entries under a single exemplar is large (say 300+) we will probably page that list with a horizontal pager for performance reasons.

I want to try and summarize your feature request to make sure I understand what you are saying:

You would suggest a layout change of the application so that

  • The list of words is always visible and scrollable (and that scrollbars are always visible)
  • The dictionary headword and entry form is always visible

Does this sound right?

The redesign with exemplars sounds helpful. As far as your summary. Bullet 1: yes. Bullet 2 I’m not sure what you mean by entry from is always visible, but seeing the headword somewhere all the time would be nice.

“entry form” my own made-up word for this:

I think you really only need to see the headword to know what entry you are working on, not the whole preview of the dictionary entry. That could save you some screen real estate because if there are examples or multiple senses, the entry preview could be several lines long.

Ron

This is only a bandaid for what is needed, but I have resized the word list so that it fits vertically on most screens. Here is the github issue (now closed). It’s deployed so at least that won’t be as annoying for your users. Use F5 or Ctrl-F5 to get the changes. Thanks.