UX Design

Overview

This page provides a description of DAILP’s user experience (UX) design process and accomplishments. Multiple versions of the DAILP software have been reviewed by community members to understand their specific requirements and language practices, allow for many representations to be included, and improve the software according to user needs while following a decolonial design framework.

Decolonial Design Framework

DAILP’s UX research and design are based on a decolonial framework that respects historical and cultural practices, plurality of knowledge, and supports collective participation in translating documents. Cherokee speakers and community members collaboratively translate materials to serve their intergenerational language learning activities. Community members have outlined desired features for the reading and translating environments for DAILP. They’ve reviewed each feature for ergonomics and clarity. They’ve suggested changes along the way.

Audience & User Profiles

DAILP’s reading environment includes the digital edited collections that community members have translated. It has seven different key user groups, each with their own reasons for using the site:

• Language learners: reading comprehension, translation exercises, and audio listening
• Scholars and researchers: linguistic, cultural, and historical analysis
• Language experts: language knowledge, cultural knowledge, pronunciation insights
• Translators: practicing the language through translation, searching lexical entries
• Language teachers: adapting material for classroom exercises
• Transcribers: transcription, searching for spelling variations
• Editors: review contributions and suggest comments, select documents to translate, and write front matter

DAILP’s translation interface has all of these users and also includes:

• Administrators: Invite users to build collections, assign roles, publish collections, lead translation teams, and manage all aspects of the translation team’s workflows.

Creating and referencing user profiles while developing the site allows DAILP to build empathy for its users and design a translation interface that is valuable from their unique perspectives. This allows the site to be evaluated quickly against desired features shared among this variety of users.

The contents of the DAILP reading environment are organized based on the highest priority user groups important to language persistence: learners, teachers, and translators. These essential community members were strongly encouraged to collaborate in the design of the translation interface.

Different groups of users, particularly language learners, are familiar with different ways of Cherokee romanization and are more comfortable with differing levels of detail. Thus, DAILP was made to allow for automatic conversion into a variety of formats based on a user’s preference. Elements that must adapt to user purpose and preference are Cherokee description (romanization) style, tone and vowel length information, and deep morphological information:

• DAILP supports 3 different romanization styles that appeal to first-language and second-language Cherokee learners as well as language scholars;
• More advanced language learners may select to view only the Cherokee syllabary and free translation, omitting potentially complicating information;
• Intermediate learners and language scholars can view detailed word-parts to better engage with grammatical information

The translation interface also allows audio recordings to be uploaded, as users emphasize the need to hear spoken information to better learn, teach, transcribe, and reclaim the language.

Interface Design

DAILP uses descriptive methods that consider every concrete instance of a word as ‘primary.’ That is, no dialect or variation is preferred over others to avoid community division and the erasure of historical developments. Instead, words can be connected in a non-hierarchical manner that supports the development of collaboratively created resources.

Navigation and Accessibility

Words can be tagged as similar to other words by any user analyzing a document. This allows words to be linked to one another as they appear in historically-situated, contextual use. Further, words can easily be searched in the DAILP glossary and presented alongside similar words and phrases, which avoids typical issues of dictionaries such as non-standardized representations/romanizations and the use of “head words” as opposed to unbiased presentation.

Digital Archives for language persistence can enable meaningful interactions between speakers, readers, writers, and listeners.

Supporting Technical Architecture

Community members are involved in decision processes and site reviews as often as possible. DAILP utilizes a staging site for internal and community review of design before information is published to the production website.

DAILP has a public GraphQL server that is able to query the database and archive data. This back-end makes the data easily reusable by anyone. This GitHub repository is also used to maintain transparency, acknowledge biases, and publicly document work.

DAILP’s technical work is open source and welcoming to comments and contributions. This maintains accountability and accessibility, building trust with community members and allowing anyone to adapt this word for other purposes.