This is damning, and explains why it's hard to get new users even by trying to promote the site, especially in languages with very small numbers of speakers or mostly-older speaker communities.

You seem to be an expert on UX design? I'm not a developer, but we ought to defer to whoever is knowledgable in this area. User experience and accessibility should be the most important things for any site, especially one like this.

That is a good thing to start thinking about UX feedback :) Good job

About 4), A/B testing may help assess the (un)usefulness of some parts of the website. In particular, it might give hints on how the homepage could be more useful.

Thank you (again) gillux, for performing this usability test. I remember we had one initiative to test the usability of Tatoeba: https://forms.gle/LEBfNEP4mNYGMavUA, but it was not as complete as the one you did here.

I too, would like to encourage everyone to perform these tests with people around them. If we can gather a set of tests performed on a fairly diverse group, it would be a goldmine of information. And having this kind of info might attract some UX designers to help us out!

It's very clear that we do not have the skills to design awesome UI's, but we can do things that will make talented UX designers help us. And I believe that collecting usability tests is one of those things.

I actually tried once, to post a blue announcement saying that we need help in UI/UX design. And I got barely any response. Just one person responded if I remember, but they never actually got involved. It could be because it's hard to find a designer who would work for free. But I think it's also because we had nothing to show that they would be working in a healthy and engaging environment.

If anything, having those usability tests would show that we're not asking for a free ride. That we did our homework and that in general, we will be collaborative in doing whatever it takes to help them give us the best help they can.

I had never heard of the term "design by committee" before, but it certainly was one of our flaws. I think I identified this several years ago and the solution I found and started to implement was to focus on solving problems. This is why the guidelines for submitting issues have a paragraph that says "Focus on describing the problem".

Many features in Tatoeba were implemented on the basis of "I want this" or "it would be nice if". I can see now that this is the common trap that everyone who tries to develop an app/website for the first time falls into. I, myself, added features in Tatoeba just because I wanted them. Then when more people started to use Tatoeba, I added features because they wanted such features. And Tatoeba evolved in this dynamic. The focus was about fulfilling people's wishes, rather than trying to solve problems. For several years it never occurred to me that it's all about solving problems.

Then the engineer side of me kicked in, and I realized that trying to fulfill people's wishes is, in fact, trying to solve problems. But it's not an efficient way because you're not accessing the source information. Users will make feature requests because there is a problem, but they will express it by translating the problem into a solution, then translate their idea of a solution into words, then submit these words to us. When we decide to implement a feature request, we're actually (often subconsciously) first translating back their solution into the problem, and then we assess if the problem is indeed relevant for us, and then we assess if their solution is acceptable.

But we all know how things get lost in translations...

So that's my perspective on avoiding to design by committee: we have to focus on solving problems. Whenever someone asks to change something or to add something, we have to understand what's the problem. Then we have to ask ourselves if it's a problem that is relevant to Tatoeba. If it is, then we can start thinking about solutions. And the best solutions are solutions that don't bring back a problem we solved before and don't introduce new problems (not easy to find).

Along the way, we have to ask ourselves some of those existential questions, like what is our purpose, what is our mission, what do we value the most? While we probably all have a vague idea of the answers, this vague idea will not always be enough to help us decide and justify what problem to solve and what problem not to solve. We need to really think deeply about it.

All of this isn't going to magically transform Tatoeba into a beautifully usable tool, but at least it sets us in the right direction. From there, we "just" have to hope that we can find a great designer, or that a great designer finds us, or that one of us becomes a great designer.