Thanks Oleh. But the "English" field is not necessarily English. It will be Latin based characters which MAY be English but could also be French or German or some other Latin based character set. What would you call that if you had to put a label on it? And what would you call the Local Language if you had to put a label on that as well?
Susie Robson ________________________________ From: Oleh Kovalchuke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 3:56 PM To: Susie Robson Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Terminology issues This is an opinionated suggestion. 1. Use three column format: Label | Input fields in local language | Input fields in English or, better yet, use two column format with labels in local language and in English on top of the respective fields. 2. Set tab order to tab through all the local language fields first, then through the English fields. -- Oleh Kovalchuke Interaction Design is design of time http://www.tangospring.com/IxDtopicWhatIsInteractionDesign.htm On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Susie Robson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: I need a little help/advice on a terminology issue. Background: I work in our Business Applications Usability department and we have many internal applications that we use within the company, across the globe. We are working on a Local Language project that will focus on our employees in the offices in China, Japan, and Korea (CJK). This project will focus only on Contact and Account information. We will be asking our employees in CJK to enter Customer Contact and Account information in their Local Language into these applications, as usual, but we will also be requiring them to enter the Customer Contact and Account information in Latin characters as well. This will require a bit of redesign for some of the screens/forms in these apps. This will also mean that they have 2 blocks of fields to work with, in what I'm calling Local Language and Latin Language. And, it means that they will be toggling their keyboards back and forth between languages quite a bit. But that's a separate issue. Local Language means any language for anyone: English, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, etc. This will be the primary area on each application that everyone will work on. Latin Language means Latin characters such as English, German, French. We need to distinguish which fields are for which language, which may (possibly) be a parenthetical label. Such as: First Name: Last Name: First Name (Latin): Last Name (Latin): Company Name: Company Name (Latin): Keep in mind that the above is not our proposed design but is used only for show here. The terms Local Language and Latin Language are not the best terms, especially if we have to label fields. Does anyone do anything similar to this? How did you handle it? If you didn't do it but have an opinion or some expertise, I'd love to hear it. And, most importantly, if I didn't make any sense explaining this, please ask for clarification. At this point, we don't know if everyone in the company will see all the fields or if we make this permissions-based and only CJK sees all the fields. Thanks in advance. If anyone is interested in the summary, let me know in case I forget to post it here. Susie Robson ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
