Understand spoken language

Improved recordings player

Submitted by Hugh on 2 June 2013

I have replaced the original recordings player, which used to look as follows:

Original recordings player

with the following design:

new recordings player

What's changed and why? Firstly, what's changed: basically all the buttons and controls which in the context of learning a language had no real value have been removed, and the overall size of the player has been reduced. Specifically

  • there is no longer a "<<" button to go to the start of the recording
  • there is no longer a ">>" button to go to the end of the recording
  • there is no longer a "mute" button
  • there is no longer a volume bar
  • the width and height of the player has been drastically reduced
  • the main controls which actually make sense for Lingopolo stay and remain exactly the same size as they were before: the play / pause, stop, recording length 

Why? Well, the original design was a general-purpose player designed for when, for example, you have a whole list of songs, and you might want to skp to the next song. On Lingopolo this doesn't make sense, so the player had a lot of buttons and controls which were just not needed, hence the redesign.

The other big, big driver for this redesign was the fact that now many of the pages have long lists of words which can be played, the player was starting to be a nuisance because of its sheer size. When the only place the player appeared was for a single word definition or during a quiz this was not a problem, but when the player was introduced for words all over the place (for example in the Examples of usage of words), the amount of screen space being taken by the player was excessive. Basically this meant that the user had to spend a lot of the time scrolling unnecessarily just because the player took up an inordinate amount of screen space.

Consider the following before and after example from the phrase "Yes, we have double and twin rooms". Both of the images below show the same literal breakdown of this phrase. As you will see however, the literal breakdown with the new player shown in the right picture takes up a lot less vertical space that that of the old player shown on the left.

literal breakdown (with original player) literal breakdown (new player)