Language menu is confusing when the user does not read the current language

I agree the flags were a bit of a problem.

Although the menu we have today could be a bit confusing if the instance is set to a language the user does not understand as the word on the menu is in the same not-understandable language.

What about adding some kind of icon in front of it signaling language selection.

See how Wikipedia does it on mobile:

@byeskille great point ! Moved this to a topic of its own in the UX category to get ideas. I like your suggestion a lot but … I also liked the flags and the current display :slight_smile:

For the record, it is possible to see how it currently looks like here: http://source.i18n.securedrop.club/generate, in Arabic for instance:

The language menu is under the SecureDrop icon and the language name is next to a down triangle that suggests this is a menu. But if you don’t read Arabic… it’s difficult to guess.

An easy way of incorporating an icon to that menu would be moving the arrow to the right of the selected language, and add the icon to its left. Like so:

https://imgur.com/bVnMpSu

As a note if we decide to implement this: in the screenshot I added 12px of margin to the left of the selected language, to give the icon some space.

The icon is https://fontawesome.com/v4.7.0/icon/globe/

5 Likes

@saptaks @toast does that look reasonable to you ?

@dachary yes it absolutely does. And I think the globe icon kind of makes sense to me as the language menu icon though the icon officially provided by font-awesome is this

I think a globe icon works, but would recommend a more generic representation that is less North America-centric (Amazon.com has a good example of a generic globe for their language menu).

2 Likes

@huertanix you do have a point. I think we can go for using this svg icon. It seems to have a Creative Commons license so I think we can use it. @belenbarrospena @dachary what do you think? Or we can migrate to font-awesome v5 where the default icon is the generic globe.

2 Likes

I agree @huertanix makes a very good point.

@saptaks my inclination would be to move to font-awesome v5 if that’s not too much work. Mainly to guarantee icon consistency across the application. We don’t want to be chasing icons around when we have to make a change :wink:

1 Like

@belenbarrospena agreed. I will check on it.

@saptaks there are three days until feature freeze. I can propose a pull request to add the globe based on the work you did to upgrade font awesome. Unless you already have something drafted in which case I’d be happy to review it :slight_smile:

Yes. I have it drafted. I will push a PR on top of the font awesome version upgrade.

2 Likes