More intuitive word translation pointer suggestion

[kdaker]

Assalamu alaikum! First of all just want to say thank you for the great work an effort put in all your apps.

The word translation feature is a great addition and I think there is way to make it more intuitive for a touch screen. Currently the pointer stays idle on the side but can stick to many positions that are hard to predict. It makes a bit hard to use especially if you're using it on an iPhone one-handed. It may rest in a position really far away from your finger and you have to move all the way to the end of the screen to grab it and move it.

perhaps a more intuitive usage is to use tap-and-hold to activate it. Today if you tap on a verse, the verse gets highlighted, then if you release, it opens the menu. With the new feature, if you continue to hold the tap without releasing, after 2 seconds it switches from a verse highlight to the translation pointer and positions it under your finger on screen. We can even make this activation mode optional in the menu and allow the user to configure the delay of activation so it doesn't interfere with the current mode.

I'd love to work on this personally if possible too though I don't think the code for that is currently in this repo. If it is, please point me in the right direction!

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

[mohamede1945]

We alikom elsalam,

Thank you very much for the great feedback!

While I agree with the your feedback on the current UX of the word pointer, I'm not sure if using the long tap gesture for 2 different purposes would be a great UX. Introducing another functionality hidden behind long tap would just confuse users. Currently, a user can long tap to see the ayah menu for the tapped ayah, but also the user can move the finger around while tapping select multiple verses.

Personally, I haven't seen such behavior in other apps (that I used) and I think one important aspect of a great UX is to be intuitive by having a consistent UX across different apps and not have to learn new gestures specific to a single app.

[kdaker]

I see your point. How about adding it in the translation view? This matches Quran.com on mobile. A single tap on the word shows the word translation bubble. A long tap will still behave the same way.

[mohamede1945]

On transition view, we are using a different data source for displaying the Quran text which (unfortunately) cannot tell us the word positions. But I'll see what we can do inshaa'Allah when we change that to match the website.