...
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.
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.
...
(The usage of tags for representing the grammatical patterns found in a particular sentence is used to simplify the backend, to avoid needing to use NLP to determine the grammatical structures found in sentences. Locating vocabulary in a sentence should be considerably easier from a backend standpoint, and hence sentence contributers don't need to tag sentences with the vocabulary they contain, only the grammatical patterns).
Usability Analysis
Learnability
The lack of needing to perform any registration or select options other than the language before being able to read sentences enhances the ease of use. Additionally, the interface for browsing sentences is simply a list of sentences, hence the user doesn't need to know what he's looking for (ie no need to know the name of the particular grammatical structure) to find reading material.
The prioritize/deprioritize model for filtering sentences is also more easily learnable than something like an explicit search for sentences containing particular words, as the user doesn't need to be able to recall, the vocabulary words and sentence patterns that he wants to review - he just needs to be able to recognize them when they come up in the list of sentences.
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 for a given sentence is displayed in its accordian menu.
Another learnability issue is that it may be difficult for a sentence contributer to know what each of the grammatical tags mean, particularly because differing textbooks may describe different sentence patterns using different terminology.
Efficiency
This interface is not efficient for users who already know what particular type of vocabulary or grammatical pattern they want to practice, as they must first find an example of a sentence using that vocab or grammatical pattern before they can click on the "prioritize" button to bring up additional sentences using that particular vocab or grammar. However, because of the choice to order sentences such that the ones using grammar and vocabulary introduced in recent chapters (which is likely what the user wants to review) come first, then finding such a sentence will not take long in the this makes it for the most common use case.
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.
...