Luke Wroblewski gave an excellent talk called “Design Patterns” at SXSW. A highlight was when Luke presented the results of user interface research into the advantages of various form label alignments.

I’ve condensed the slides from Luke’s talk down to just the ones on form labels because that information holds up particularly well on its own. The information here is based on research and is actionable. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in UI design.

Download Luke Wroblewski’s slides on Form Label Alignment

The full set of slides from Luke’s talk are available on his blog.

This screenshot of the homepage should sum up the functionality:

You enter text on the homepage and click translate. A real live native spanish speaker translates the text in under 24 hours. Then you receive the completed translation via email.

Automation and the “True Cost” of Translation

With Lingos.cc, we wanted to charge as close as possible to the “true cost” of translation. The “true cost” of translation is the amount paid directly to the translator for the time spent translating.

Distributing documents to translators, managing translators, sending prices to customers, and managing invoices are all expenses that have nothing to do with the “true cost” of translation.

The Lingos.cc web application automatically handles all of these tasks. As a result, we are offering the lowest price available online from a translation agency.

Time is Money

Bad translations are everywhere. Signs, menus, brochures, web pages, and product descriptions are poorly translated all over the world.

The reason these translations are bad isn’t because people aren’t willing to pay for quality translations. A quality translation costs just a few cents per word.

Translations are bad because working with a translation agency is time-consuming. Time is spent sending sample documents, receiving quotes, discussing quotes with colleagues, negotiating a final price, and sending the full document to the agency. All this lost time adds up and makes getting a human translation more costly than it should be.

At Lingos.cc, we don’t give quotes, we charge a flat-rate per word. We don’t accept documents, you just paste your text on our homepage. We don’t give far away deadlines, your translation will be completed in 24 hours.

Details

To assure the quality of our translations, hand-picked proofreaders read over and correct every translation we deliver.

Distributing the text to translators and proofreaders is automated.

We only support english to spanish right now, but we will be expanding to more languages soon.

“The principle of the Kodak system is the separation of the work that any person whomsoever can do in making a photograph, from the work that only an expert can do. . . . We furnish anybody, man, woman or child, who has sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button, with an instrument which altogether removes from the practice of photography the necessity for exceptional facilities or, in fact, any special knowledge of the art. It can be employed without preliminary study, without a darkroom and without chemicals.” Found via Lawerence Lessig’s Free Culture

And so the people became photographers.

Having “sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button” was all that was needed to take a photo. Simplifying a task was all that was needed to create an industry.

Web applications can benefit from subscribing to this same level of simplicity.