Make language selection sticky

[alexgarel]

Problem

I use app in French / France.

I'm in a trip in Italy, I enter mainly Italian products. But I have to select Italian on every single photo I upload… (even have to type "Ital" to retrieve it in the list).

Proposed solution

1. make language selection sticky:

   • the language remains the same until I change it
   • or the language remains the same for this product, until I change it

2. add a color and/or small icon if the language does not match main language (to prevent errors)

   • and/or add a small message as I edit something not in the main product language

Additional context

We cannot change main language currently, but it's tracked in #4771

Also countries is not exposed in mobile app. This is maybe tracked in #4959

[monsieurtanuki]

Hi @alexgarel! I hope you enjoy your trip in Italy - unless it was just a hypothetical trip needed for the presentation of the use-case ;)

Perhaps a "travel mode" would help - "I'm currently in Italy, likely to scan Italian products but I still need the app to be in French": let me add a language (Italian) as a suggested language, in addition to my language (French).
More generally speaking, instead of dozens of languages, we could display "my favorite (and most likely) languages first":

• the user would be free to add a language to a favorite language list
• those languages would be displayed on top of the language list

Your issue seems to be mainly for new images.
In that case we could suggest first all the languages of the other images for the same product. Of course that wouldn't work for the very first image for a product.

In short:

• I think we should implement some kind of "suggested languages" system
• one of the systematic suggested languages would be the current app language
• the user would be free to add a suggested language - and could even be nudged into it
• on the product level, on top of the app suggested languages, we put the languages already used for the same product

We cannot change main language currently, but it's tracked in #4771

We can change the app language, but we cannot change the product main language, and indeed it's tracked in #4771.

Also countries is not exposed in mobile app. This is maybe tracked in #4959

Both origins and countries are exposed in the mobile app. #4959 is more about displaying things differently.

[alexgarel]

Thanks @monsieurtanuki for the proposal. I agree 100%.

Italy travel was for real :-D

I still think, at least on same product edition session, language should be sticky. The use case is that I meet a lot of people from different countries and thus got quite a lot of foreign country products in my hands at home that I like to scan.

[monsieurtanuki]

Italy travel was for real :-D

Beato te! ;)

I would summarize your needs with:

1. a "suggested languages" system, where some languages are displayed on top
2. the only thing we may argue about is which languages to put first: current app language, product main language, latest languages used for that product, latest language used for any product in the app, all languages used locally in the app, ... But that's a secondary question.

Do we agree on the "suggested languages" system, which means most relevant languages first? (and no "ital" typing)

[alexgarel]

Yes, I agree on 1.

for suggestions I would put:

• main app language first
• then product known languages in the order of most recently used
• then other recently used languages (if any)
• then the rest

the most recently used languages can be limited to maximum 6 languages (even 4 could do).

[monsieurtanuki]

@alexgarel Looks good to me!

Perhaps I'll code it step by step, because there are slightly problematic items, like:

• storing locally the product known languages in order (would be much easier to just consider the product known languages, so we wouldn't have to store something new - the order - for each edited product) (or we could store the order at the session level, that would probably be good enough)
• storing locally the most recently used languages (beyond storing an ordered list at the app level, that would probably require an additional "clean-up" page where the user could get rid of stupid languages added by mistake instead of seeing those languages forever)

I'll code the easy version first, and we'll see how it fits with your needs. I'll keep you posted.