The user-friendly design of applications and services is a fundamental prerequisite for their long-term and intensive use. For this reason, a half-day workshop with experts from the fields of lexicography and lexicology was held in June to discuss the new LexFCS web interface developed as part of the data domain “Lexical Resources”. The aim of the event was to identify shortcomings in the current implementation and to develop concrete recommendations for its further development.
The workshop highlighted both technical and content-related challenges. One problem identified was the heterogeneity of the integrated resources, whose varying scope and level of detail lead to inconsistent and difficult-to-compare search results. The formulation of complex search queries was perceived as unintuitive, at least for inexperienced users without prior technical knowledge. The support systems provided by the platform were generally well received, but were also considered to have room for improvement: users need more easily understandable support, interactive instructions, and concrete examples of real-world search scenarios.
The results of the workshop will be directly incorporated into the further development of the platform and will be discussed further in the data domain; first adjustments are already available online. A follow-up meeting to coordinate short- and medium-term planning and to prioritize improvements will take place in October.
The full report on the workshop is available on Zenodo. A short summary can also be found in the Text+ Blog.