User experience

Software has its trends, and user experience is no exception - today marketers are talking about user experience, customer experience, customer journey and other things. Trends are often seen as something temporary, but they surely affect the way people choose software.
A few years ago we focused on "ease of use", and identified it as one of the six areas where we are strong - today we would probably call it user experience. However, while ease of use is hard to quantify and rather a design principle, user experience is something that applies mostly when you can't really know your users personally anymore. It kicks in more when a piece of software is able to perform the functionality the vast majority of users need. While you enable easy use, you optimize or improve the user experience. It is no surprise that in the translation industry we are not the only tool vendor that looks at user experience.

We have recently started a project which focuses on simplifying the use of the software and cutting the learning curve. We are working with customer experience experts, and our new-old product manager Gábor Ugray is taking care of evaluating and implementing the feedback. While we believe that memoQ is a very user-friendly tool, there is always room for improvement. We think that with good default values, keyboard shortcuts and toolbars you are able to improve your productivity.

However, at the moment we don't have a way to understand how users are using the software. To elicit feedback from the users, we created a short, two-page questionnaire: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/memoqusability If you are a memoQ user (no matter if you are an expert or a novice user) fill in this survey and make comments about: defaults that are wrong in your view, or dialogs where you don't like that the settings change back the next time you want to use the dialog, keyboard shortcuts that you would like to use, but cannot because you cannot assign a shortcut to the functionality (e.g. "I want to have a keyboard shortcut for remove link/insertion in the aligner"), toolbar buttons that you don't use or you are missing.

Please do not use this survey to submit feature or large change requests. We only want to concentrate on defaults, shortcuts and toolbar buttons at this point. Based on the feedback and some other experiments, we will try and improve the possibilities of the software. This is not the only area where we want to improve user experience, but one where your input is definitely needed. So please go ahead now and fill in the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/memoqusability

Thank you!