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Amara Team Members, Your Opinions Needed on Amara’s New Filter Style
Thank you for this update, Rieann
I am currently admin of two old-fashioned teams (Captions requested and Music captioning) and member of one new-fangled team (Arte) and several old-fashioned ones, e.g. Art21.
I confess that being used to the filters in the old-fashioned teams, I don't feel the advantage of their simplification in the new-fangled ones, but maybe more recent users will: looking forward to their feedback and should those of Captions requested and Music captioning wish for the new form, I'll request it.
2 small details:
1) Members can no longer view the Settings tab that shows in your screenshot:
Could you change the screenshot - or allow members to view the team settings (not change them)?
2) Maybe something more pertinent than "collaboration team" could be found for the new-fangled ones? The old-fashioned teams are collaboration teams too.
Best
Claude
Thanks Claude!
I think we're trying to move away from the terminology for team types altogether, you're right, everybody's collaborating! Essentially what we're doing is updating all the teams, it's just taking us a long time.
We intentionally hide navigational tabs and links that users don't have access to in the new style teams. The idea was not to show people things they can't do anything with or access, because it's confusing and doesn't help them in anyway, just visual clutter. I'd definitely be interested to learn if Contributors feel it's important to see the settings tab, though, perhaps we made an incorrect assumption about this!
Thanks for the explanation, Kenzie.
One thing that slightly bothers me in the new template is that, for a team were I'm just member, in my Assignments History, under My Collaborators, I get warnings that say "Approver: *** not fluent in the assigned language". I happen to know that only one admin/owner must approve all subtitles in that team, so he can't possibly be fluent in all subtitle languages. But someone newer than me to Amara might be upset by this warning. Would it be possible to make this warning only viewable to admins/owners, possibly to coordinators?
Vice-versa, would it not be possible to let simple members (or better, everybody) view team settings (not edit them, of course). This way people would know what they are in for before joining a team.
Best
Claude
> One thing that slightly bothers me in the new template is that, for a team were I'm just member, in my Assignments History, under My Collaborators, I get warnings that say "Approver: *** not fluent in the assigned language". I happen to know that only one admin/owner must approve all subtitles in that team, so he can't possibly be fluent in all subtitle languages. But someone newer than me to Amara might be upset by this warning. Would it be possible to make this warning only viewable to admins/owners, possibly to coordinators?
I've heard of that setup before, where one admin/owner approves all subtitles in the team. Could you share a little more about how this works, if the admin/owner doesn't speak the language of the subtitles? How can they tell that the subtitles are good? What are they approving of?
> Vice-versa, would it not be possible to let simple members (or better, everybody) view team settings (not edit them, of course). This way people would know what they are in for before joining a team.
Which pieces of information do you have in mind that would be helpful for a prospective team member to understand before they sign up? If it's for everyone, we need to put it on the landing page anyway (since no team tabs show for non-members), and maybe those pieces of information need to show on the Team Dashboard if they're also important to team members.
The team settings in general are just getting more and more complex so the idea of exposing them all to all team members seems like it would be confusing and not that useful - that's why I ask above which specific pieces would be helpful.
Hi Kenzie
"one admin/owner approves all subtitles in the team":
this tends to happen with cultural and humanitarian teams where the project owner sort of want to emulate the TED team model, but without having the human infrastructure for it. So they choose a workflow with moderation and approval tasks, but as they don't have enough native speakers to really do them, they assign someone from the project to do the approval.
"Which pieces of information do you have in mind that would be helpful
for a prospective team member to understand before they sign up?"
A) Which roles can
- add videos
- remove videos
- transcribe
- translate
- if yes, how is it configured.
Awesome, thanks for sharing these details.
I have opened a Github ticket to design a way to show the information you shared would be helpful on the Team Landing Page and from the Team Dashboard.
Keeping the admin functions separate is one of the main ideas of how to minimize confusion in new team pages over the old team pages. We've had requests (external and internal) before to show the workflow steps clearly to team members, and I see how it would be helpful for contributors and potential team members to understand what they'd be able to do on a team too. Thanks for pointing this out!
"one admin/owner approves all subtitles in the team" - I have some more clarifications about this one :)
- do I understand correctly that on some teams, the team owner wants to use a workflow with multiple steps, like review and approval, but they have human resources to do that only for some languages?
- if this is the case, maybe we could look into the problem of workflow steps need to be determined separately by language, to account for human resource limitations. For example, Spanish could have review and approval steps required, but Hindi could only have review required, and an even less common language like Zarma could have no review or approval required. We would also need to allow team roles besides administrators to do the approval step, based on team settings, but this is pretty simple to add, we just didn't know whether it would be helpful so we haven't done it yet.
- can you say more about the user who would be upset by seeing "approver: this user is not fluent in the subtitle language?" Is that a contributor user? Have you heard of complaints of this by contributor users on your teams before?
Thank you for your reply: it would be wonderful if admins could differentiate workflows according to what human resources there are for each language. Could this be implemented (without risking (too many) glitches?
I'll check with the engineers :)
Thank you for the sharing! I like the theme very much ! Keep it up
Rieann Brown
In our latest page update to Amara’s teams, we included a new filter style that’s significantly different from the way we display filters on the other team pages. We put the filters on top of the list so they don’t take up the left side of the screen.
We’re trying out this new filter style on a single page, so that you can help us improve it in the early stages.
Here’s the thinking behind the new design:
The old filters took up the entire left part of the screen.
Users saw all the filters, even though some of them were probably irrelevant for what they were looking for.
Instead, we’re trying out a display that only shows the filters you’ve chosen, and that can show as many filters as you choose without taking up much extra space.
There was no easy way to reset all your filters.
We added a “clear filters” button that appears when you’ve selected some filters.
On the old Team Activity Page, the list of activities you could filter for was long and cumbersome.
We consolidated the activities you could filter by into a filter option labeled “Type.” We added a scrollbar within the “types” option so that once you select that filter, the dropdown menu doesn’t take up the whole length of your browser window. If you have suggestions for a clearer label for the list of different activities you can filter by please share!
If you’re a member of an Amara team, please check out the filters on the Activity page and click around, then write a comment on this blog, its corresponding forum post, or on Facebook!
Not sure if your team is a Collaboration team? If your Team Activity tab looks like the one below, your team is still using the old style model. Ask your team administrator about upgrading your team type to take advantage of the new styles and other new features.
We want to hear your ideas and suggestions!
You can leave a comment here or on the Amara Blog Post at the bottom of the page.
Thank you for all your contributions to Amara!