Upon visiting the website, Joe will encounter a screen that prompts him for the language he's studying, the textbook he's using, and the chapter he's studied up to. There will be no registration or login required in this model prior to being able to read sentences. Because the options presented depend on the previous selections (ie the textbooks displayed in the textbook list depend on the language selected), then the steps are numbered to ensure that users will choose options in that order. The below image shows the textbook selection screen.
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After selecting his language, textbook, and chapter, Joe will now be presented with a listing of sentences that use the vocabulary and grammar in that chapter. In the initial state, Joe will be shown sentences that must contain either grammar or vocabulary from the current chapter he is studying, and must not contain vocabulary or grammar that have not been taught in the textbook up to that point. If Joe happens to have skipped some part of the material for certain chapters, he can deselect them in the grammar/vocab/kanji known sidebars on the left side. The sentences will each have below them initially-collapsed accordion menus which can be expanded to show the romanization, English translation, and list of grammatical patterns and vocabulary that the sentence uses. The below image shows the initial sentence reading screen, and the sidebar.
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When Joe reads the sentence, and fails to understand some particular word (in the scenario, りんご), he will likely hover over the word, at which point the mouse cursor will change shape to indicate clickability, and then Joe will click the word. This will cause the Vocab accordion menu to be expanded, and りんご will become highlighted. There, the romanization "ringo" and English translation "apple" of that vocab word will be displayed. Should Joe wish to practice reading additional sentences that use that vocabulary word, he can click the "more sentences" link next to the word in the Vocab accordion menu, which will open a new tab displaying only sentences that have that vocab item (which also use only grammar and vocab that have been covered in the textbook that Joe indicated).
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If Joe wants to see the entire sentence romanized, he can expand the "Show romanization" accordian menu. Likewise, if Joe wants to have the English translation of a sentence displayed, he can expand the "Show English translation" accordian menu. If Joe does not understand some grammatical aspect of the sentence, or simply wants more practice with a grammatical form (in the scenario, the -tai verb conjugation), he can expand the Grammar accordian menu. Here, he will find the listing of grammatical aspects that are used in this sentence. Similarly to the Vocab accordian menu, there is a "more sentences" link that, if clicked, will open a new tab displaying only sentences that use that grammatical pattern.
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If Joe encounters a sentence whose grammar patterns listed are incorrect, then he can expand the accordian menu, and click the "edit" button. Here, he can remove any categories that are incorrect (or add any that need to be added), and click "done editing" to save changes.
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If Joe wants to contribute a sentence, he goes to the home page, and switches to the "contribute" tab. Here, he selects the language of the sentence he'll contribute from a pull-down menu, and enters the sentence itself and its translation in a textbox. Then, he selects any additional grammatical tags that would be used to help users find his sentence, clicks on "add" to add them, then clicks on "contribute sentece" to contribute the sentence. Now, any user who subsequently clicks the "more sentences" option on that type of grammatical tag will have Joe's sentence displayed to them among the list.
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Usability Analysis
Learnability
The per-sentence information gathering process makes heavy use of accordian menus. These are becoming fairly common in web apps, and hence learnability with their usage should not be an issue. The usage of the clicking on a part of a sentence to expand out the accordian menu for that vocab item, however, is somewhat inconsistent with the users' experience of how accordian menus work. Namely, users may not expect accordian menus to expand by themselves if the user clicks elsewhere. Additionally, the highlighting of an item in an accordion menu may not be noticed by the user, because it occurs far from where the focus of the user's attention (the mouse) is. However, this is a tradeoff for internal consistency, as it ensures that no separate popup or hover-over information dialog is needed if the user wants information about some particular word in the sentence - all supplemental information is displayed in the accordian menu.
Another learnability issue is that it may be difficult for the user to know what each of the grammatical tags mean, particularly because differing textbooks may describe different sentence patterns using different terminology.
Efficiency
The initial screen, where the user selects a language, textbook and chapter and can start reading right away, is efficient for new users , because they don't need to go through the registration process. However, it may be less efficient for experienced users, especially if what they have studied differs from a particular textbook and chapter, because they would then have to select in the "known grammar"/"known vocab"/"known kanji" the parts of the language they do or don't know, every time they visit the website again. Using client-side storage to keep track of this information, or implementing an optional login system which stores such information server-side, would help alleviate this issue.
Another issue with efficiency on the initial screen is that a selector is used to locate the textbook, which, while necessary if the user is able to recognize but not recall their textbook name, may be less efficient than typing a name with autocompletion for users who already knows the name of their textbook .
The choice of a selector box for adding grammatical tags to sentences, while easily learnable because all of the grammatical tag types are visible, may be inefficient for users who already know the category the word belongs to. While the grammatical could be sorted alphabetically, a user might know the particular grammatical pattern under a different name from the terminology that is used in this website. Hence, it may make sense to also allow a search box with autocomplete to be used for searching for particular tag types. Optimally, users shouldn't even have to input what types of grammatical structures in a sentence, but this would unfortunately involve complex NLP work for detecting grammatical patterns in sentences.
Visibility
This design has very little state - the type of grammatical structures and vocabulary that the user is expected to understand are listed in the left sidebar, and this dictates the sentences that will be displayed to the user. While information about the sentence's vocabulary, grammar, romanization, and translation are hidden in the accordion menu by default, this is by design, because it is meant to be relied on only if the user has trouble reading the sentence without assistance.
Error Handling
The usage of opening a new tab for displaying additional sentences when the user clicks the "more sentences" button in the Vocab or Grammar accordian menus, instead of modifying the state of the current tab, is chosen so that it is easily undoable - the user can simply close the newly opened tab to return to the original sentences he was looking at prior to clicking the button.
The editing functions - namely, adding and removing grammatical tags from sentences, and changing translations for sentences, are unfortunately not undoable. For this reason, because this model functions much like a wiki - in that any user is able to edit or contribute any sentence - it may be necessary to introduce some form of history into the interface should accidental editing or vandalism become a problem.