Jari Varsaluoma talked about the concept of E-democracy and ways to make it more accessible and enjoyable to people. What E-democracy means is essentially the use of information and communication technologies and strategies in political and governance processes. (Wikipedia). It turns out there are webpages such as lausuntopalvelu.fi and nuortenideat.fi which allow youths to take part in politics through the internet. Varsaluoma talked about making services like these more accessible, one suggestion being gamification.
The youth’s view on this was that applying gamification to such serious services can be tricky, but could be done in the form of using elements such as “likes”, “badges” and “user statistics”. In my opinion, these are not bad ideas, but I feel the main focus with these kinds of services should be the style and register of the text. Legal text is often very complicated, so finding out ways to make it more understandable would instantly make it considerably more accessible to young people.
On the other hand, I do agree that things like statistics and multimodality (such as video and sound in addition to plain text) also improve usability. It never hurts to have multiple means of communication, as different people prefer to learn things in different ways.
Tuuli Keskinen had a presentation about user experience and the importance of knowing who the users are. If you want to really make a product accessible to a certain user group, it is important to test the usability of the product with people who the product is targeted to. For instance, a handicapped person is very likely to notice factors about a wheelchair that a normal person would not even think about.
Evaluating user experience can be done in many ways. These include questionnaires, interviews and diaries, for example. It might be tricky to pick the right method, as each of them has their pros and cons. Questionnaires that have a few options to choose from are good if there are lots of participants, as it allows for quick collection of data. On the flipside, the quality of the answers may not be optimal, as there are only a few fixed options to choose as an answer, which can result in inaccurate answers. An interview, on the other hand, would be quite the opposite. Interviews allow researchers to gather data more precisely, as they can ask the users very precise questions and ask them to clarify their answers if needed. The weakness of interviews is that they are more time consuming, which makes them more suitable for smaller evaluation groups.
Tytti Suojanen talked about user experience, and one thing that I found particularly interesting was user-centered translation. In her own words, user-centered translations means that “information about users is gathered iteratively throughout the process and through different methods, and this information is used to create a usable translation.” In user-centered translation, the focus is on users: It is detrimental to understand who the users are and how they are going to use the translation.
There are some genres where user-centered translation is extremely important. Manuals and instructions, for instance, would be a perfect example. Their purpose is to clarify a subject to the reader and enable them to apply information into practice. If I’m reading the instruction manual of my new vacuum cleaner, I couldn’t care less about the atmosphere and feeling that the text creates, as opposed to a novel for example. I just want it to be straight forward, precise and easy to understand!
I personally find user-centered translation particularly fascinating, because it’s the kind of translation style that I’m the most comfortable with. I always prefer texts to be as clear and understandable to everyone as possible, even if it’s against the basic principles of the text’s genre. As a consequence I usually do pretty well with technical texts and educational material, but I wouldn’t count on myself when it comes to translating any sort of legal documents for the government. Honestly, I feel like those texts are intentionally designed to be as deceiving as possible!