User Interface of the Day #4: Mango

Design UI Design Fundamentals

Today the Humanoids review Trymango.com — a Flash-powered language learning course currently available for free as a beta product. Mango offers nine courses for English speakers, as well as English courses for Spanish and for Polish speakers. After typing your email address and logging in, choose a language from the scroll-down menu and begin learning. Is Mango an effective learning tool? Read and find out.

Andrew Wilson

What’s Cool: To learn a language from scratch, the structure is basically correct in that it is designed to get you to start reacting to certain words and phrases in particular ways. I liked the use of colorization to clarify the mapping of words. In the Spanish course, for instance, they are able to show the natural word order of both languages.

What’s Not Cool: For picking a language in which you already know something, this is horrible — you have to find your own starting point, and this system doesn’t accommodate that at all. Basically, the system consists of three drop-down menus plus the main screen; other than the scroll-down that tells you which language you’re learning, the other two menus — which tell you which lesson and slide you’re using — are completely unhelpful. And that inviting slide control at the bottom? Not clickable.

So? A user interface should enable you to understand the point of its vision. Mango doesn’t make clear for what purpose this site is meant. This could have been a basic Flash movie and have been almost as effective.

Jono DiCarlo

What’s Cool: I really liked the hovering feature to assist you in learning pronunciation; it was very helpful for learning the languages that involve visuals, such as Chinese and Japanese. A basic audio tape couldn’t offer something like that.

What’s Not Cool: That I have to click over and over on the slide control to move forward is very inefficient. I should be able to either use this without using my hands, or receive a benefit from having to click constantly; instead, all of the clicking I have to do is inefficient. Also, I found the lessons to be very scripted.

So? Mango could use an interface that breaks down the main lessons in a way that you can go at your own pace, or seek additional practice in an area if you needed it. As it is, you are always at Mango’s mercy, going at the pace Mango sets for you, not the other way around.

Lauri Apple

What’s Cool: I thought the basic set-up of the page was pretty straightforward and easy to use. And I’m always a sucker for free. If you don’t want to invest your lunch money in a set of audio tapes, or if you are unsure about which foreign language you would like to learn, this is a great tool.

What’s Not Cool: While I like the minimalist design of the site, the various elements — the slide control, the scroll-down menus — are meaningless to me. Also, I found the lessons to be overly repetitive — how many times do I have to learn how to say, “hello”? This problem could be corrected, of course, by designing the system to meet users half-way and to take into account learning speed and existing knowledge.

So? Instead of providing a numerically ordered list of lessons that indicate nothing of consequence, the scroll bars should tell you something about the substantive contents of each lesson.

Scott Robbin

What’s Cool: I’m in agreement with Andrew that the greatest UI feat of the site is the multi-colored pronunciation tool. It’s a very clever use of visual and auditory stimuli, allowing the user to learn partial phrases.

What’s Not Cool: There’s not enough interaction with the site. Memory recall tests consist of nothing more than displaying a clock image while waiting for the user to speak out loud. I’d like to see the site make better use of its medium, perhaps creating more advanced quizzes that involve multiple choice phrase interactions that give site feedback, and letting you know whether or not you’ve responding correctly.

So? Overall, the site doesn’t innovate beyond standard slide-based learning tools and audio language lessons. I’d like to see the multi-colored pronunciation tool spun off into a widget that could be used in a bevy of other language/dictionary sites.

I found the Spanish course to be pretty fun. But I think the main problems with it are that there is no way to figure out which lesson to start on based on your skill level (as Andrew said) and not enough is covered to make it really useful to me.

Scott, your “what’s cool” part says “I found the drop-down menu to be very inefficient.” That may be cool to you but it doesn’t make sense to me :). Just a heads up on the typo.

I like how immediate and direct the pronunciation aspect is, but it is frustrating that with a internet flash program, the lessons remained linear. Not only are the lessons and slides labelled numerically instead of by content, the lessons themselves are still the basic dialogue + grammar + practice method. Isn’t language learning a perfect opportunity to do more of a zooming type interface? If you start with the dialogue, surely you should be able to hover and click on interesting parts of the dialogue, etc.

Also, frustrated that the Japanese bit has no kanji.

I’m enjoying these, but could you please look into breaking up the “What’s cool”, “What’s not cool” and “So” sections with some white space. It would make it easier for me (and I think others) to read.

[ irc ] made a positive comment. other improvements: mix the positives together and use scientific headings, like wikipedia.

I am on the development team for Mango and would like to thank humanized.com for the review! :D

We’ve received a massive influx of feedback from our users and many of them address these very issues. We’re in constant development here at Mango and can assure our users that all suggestions will be considered for future releases.

We are currently concepting a new client for Mango which actually addresses nearly all of the shortcomings mentioned here. We are, however, ecstatic to receive such detailed reviews. Thanks again humanized!

While a bit off topic I am excited by Claritaslux as it’s methods are closely aligned by what research bears out as most effective. And no, I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. Comparing between organically picking up French, Pimsleur Spanish tapes (geared toward organic language acquisition), Mnemonics, and rote memorization/standard schooling I greatly prefer first two. While the Claritaslux website has poor grammar I think it’s authors focus on vocabulary acquisition as opposed grammar. Memorization was always my largest difficulty, and Mnemonics are unnatural. A mix of Pimsleur style grammar-by-example
(he rarely explicitly teaches grammar) and this visual approach should be interesting.