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User experience test

Test performed by gillux on the 10/03/2020.

User background

  • Nationality: Brazilian
  • Languages: Portuguese (native) and many other languages
  • Job: private teacher of English/Spanish/Portuguese (and teaching computers to kids)
  • Age: 33

R. was born in Brazil and now lives in Rio de Janeiro. He was first introduced to Tatoeba about 6 years ago by Shishir. He and Shishir used to study languages together on another website, but that website was bought by a company who "just wanted to make more money".

On Tatoeba, R. translates from English/French/Spanish to Portuguese, studies language on his own. From about 2017, R. started to add languages using Tatoeba’s Github. He is currently corpus maintainer and taking care of new language requests. His has a list of 74 languages on his profile page and he is "working on making it bigger and bigger everyday".

R. is very happy and enthusiastic about Tatoeba because it allows him to study languages, talk to people, ask for help and contribute Portuguese sentences of various type (formal, informal…).

R. doesn’t teach in a school because schools in Brazil don’t pay so much. Instead, he gives private classes on Skype, in the student’s home, at the library… R. loves his job.

R. praises Tatoeba because it doesn’t consist of robot added sentences, but sentences added and proofread by real people, every single day. Mistakes eventually get corrected because people are looking and commenting.

R. introduces Tatoeba to his students by explaining they have to study languages using real life sentences, not word by word or using definitions. Not using theories but in practice. "Sentences are of high quality, they get proofread all the time, people work really hard on this, with so many languages to study."

About the quality of sentences contributed by native speakers: "Not being a native doesn’t mean your sentence is bad. And the opposite is true: I sometimes commit mistakes in Portuguese too." "Being a native of not is not important, what’s important is whether you have the knowledge, whether you can speak the language."

Test

The test was performed remotely using Jitsi Meet and desktop sharing, but the desktop sharing was not working most of the time.

  • OS: Windows
  • Browser: Chrome
  • Instructions: I asked R. to show me how he uses Tatoeba as a corpus maintainer, as a language learner and as teacher.

Using Tatoeba as a corpus maintainer

My profile

  • R. goes to his profile where he keeps important links in his profile description.
  • He clicks on the link @change

Sentences tagged as @change

  • ...
  • R. clicks on "My ratings" from the user menu.

My ratings

Identified problems

  • Tatoeba doesn’t match the user needs:

  • Usability problems:

  • Feeling problems:

Actions