I hate it. But only the first page. Call me old-fashioned, but I can't drink enough coffee to get sufficiently wired to appreciate the hyperactive pace of multielemental, multidirectional motion on a page like that. There is no sense of the calm competence that for me is typical of the excellent team behind that site. Instead, images flip, logos zip and words fly and I think, "Get me the Hell out of here!". Face it, too much of modern web design sucks, especially when it is aimed at teenagers with an attention span of about three seconds.
The rest of the site, however, is a considerable improvement over the old Kilgray.com site, which reminded me a bit of the old Winchester House in California: lots of good stuff to be found, but on the journey to get there, you might wind up on a staircase that ends in the ceiling. Although I have used that old site for 6 or 7 years now in its various iterations I was often unable to find things like the webinat schedule or a particular mysterious back alley that led to the training resources I knew were there somewhere. Over the years I sent a lot of "Where the heck is... ?" e-mails to my contacts at Kilgray when hours or days of searching left me stranded, thirsty and desperate in the middle of some desert on God-knows-what continent.
No more. The overlarge, multi-column menus that show up under the categories across the top may take a while to read (pack a lunch and a few bottles of water just in case), and my eyes have to go over them a few times to find a particular item, but things are, for the most part, where I expect them to be, which is great progress. So what if the design still won't win any awards? I am saving time to get where I want to go on the whole.
And that's really what's important to me. I can see that I will be able to find the product and reference information I need with much greater ease* than before, and if that works for me, this will probably be even more true for most other memoQ users.
* assuming that I do not go blind due to the poor contrast with the light-colored font!
Thank you for writing about it! All the website was designed with customers and prospects. We did interviews, card sorting exercises, and even the user segment names (individual translators, translation teams, translation companies and other companies) were coined by people who are using the software. It's not exactly concise, but maybe it's possible to find the right information fast.
ReplyDeleteOne interesting, and probably little known fact, is that the user management between this website and Language Terminal is unified. Thus we removed the redundancy of those 3-4 logins from before (website/guides, Moodle course, Language Terminal, customer portal). And we plan to leave everything memoQ (including the memoQ cloud server) on memoq.com and everything tool-independent on languageterminal.com.
Oh? Nobody mentioned to me that you finally cracked that unified login problem. That is excellent news, István; I know it's been planned for a long time.
DeleteThe memoQ Cloud server is still on Language Terminal (or it was 2 days ago at least), and I was quite relieved to hear from others at Kilgray that it might stay there for a while, because a migration in the short term actually causes some headaches for me with a course I now have in progress :-( I thought that was settled. And the resource libraries on Language Terminal are not tool-independent, so does that mean they are migrating to memoQ.com? I am referring to the stopword lists, autotranslatable examples, etc. which I released on various profiles on Language Terminal.
MemoQ has a wonderful intuitive interface. It took me only 10 minutes to get started and effectively translate a project. Now, as I am getting outbid again and again by colleagues whose work I consistently refuse to "review", I have plenty of time to move to the next stage of working with MemoQ.
ReplyDeleteI welcome your new website.
Wouter, Bangkok