Mozilla Labs: Collaborative Subtitling Design Challenge

Welcome

The Mozilla Labs Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. Our aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole. [more]

The Collaborative Video Subtitling Design Challenge is a joint collaboration between Mozilla Labs and the Participatory Culture Foundation (the folks behind Miro and the Open Video Alliance). Together we invite the wider community to join us in this challenge, develop concepts and submit them to our sites.

The Brief

For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: "Collaborative subtitling -- How can users quickly create a timed transcript of any video on the web?"

Participatory Culture Foundation and Mozilla are working to build a universal system for creating and collaboratively improving subtitles for any video on the web. We believe that many users would be willing to contribute and translate subtitles if there was an easy way to do so. And that we can use this energy to knock down language barriers for popular online video.

Concept:

Our vision:

Publishers can add collaborative subtitling and translation to their own sites.
Video hosts will have an easy way to add subtitling support to their Flash players.
Users can install a Firefox extension to enable this technology on any compatible video they watch in Firefox.
Subtitles themselves will live "in the cloud", stored on one or more community sites where users can collaborate and compete to create the best subtitles.

However, the most important question to answer is also the least straightforward: what is the best way to solicit and facilitate the creation of high quality subtitles from viewers? Most subtitle interfaces, designed for highly committed professional users, have too high a learning curve and are too complicated to be helpful examples. And they aren't built to take advantage of multiple collaborators. For collaborative subtitling to work, it needs to be easy to learn, easy to use, and fast.

PCF has created a prototype that lets users create a transcript as fast as they can type, and create an aligned set of subtitles as they watch. Teams' work will start with data from user tests on the prototype and propose new designs to address these problems in the form of a mock-up and video. PCF will select winning ideas and integrate them back into the subtitling interface (teams will see the results of their work in action).

Why We Need Open, Collaborative Subtitling

There are now roughly 25 million videos on the internet. The words in these videos are, of course, spoken in the hundreds of languages of the world. Subtitling these videos and translating the subtitles has the promise of opening up a whole new world for all of us, letting us peer into other cultures in new ways, explore otherwise inaccessible information, and enjoy the best creative content from anywhere in the world.

Subtitles bridge linguistic and, for those with hearing and visual disabilities, physical barriers to video. For many people subtitles are not an option for watching video, but a necessity. Despite their indispensability, subtitles are not well standardized or prevalent online. Individual video services offer varying degrees of subtitle support for their publishers, but this fragmented and incomplete approach has generated very little subtitle creation and therefore very little content that is accessible through subtitles.

Subtitling across languages and for accessibility is an outstanding opportunity for internet crowdsourcing and collaboration. We believe that people around the world will be excited to participate in creating and curating subtitles if they are given the right tools and incentives. Natural human desires to bridge cultures and support the disabled are very powerful and the results of subtitling are both tangible and of benefit to everyone.

How The Design Challenge Works

This Design Challenge focuses on the rapid deployment of concepts. The goal is to develop and launch winning concepts in a matter of weeks rather than months and years. Over the next three months we will complete one full cycle of the product design process.

Design Cycle

Ideate (7 weeks. March 9th – April 26th)

On March 9th, participants will be presented with PCF’s collaborative subtitling tool in its current form as well as a usability study of users’ experience with the current tool.

Using these resources as inspiration, participants will have until April 26th to design and submit mock-ups of a revised user interface. Actionability will be a key attribute of successful submissions. Mock-ups should be high-fidelity and consider the tight timeline for development (i.e., drastic departures from the current UX are not advised). Participants are essentially acting as designers in a rapid application development project. Appreciating the tension in design that is integrative (innovation) while somewhat incremental (speed) will be a hallmark of successful submissions.

Teams will submit:

PSD, HTML or image files of the interface design, ready for integration into live site.
A 3-minute video that describes the interface design and explains decisions made.

Templates
Coming soon.

Upload
Upload your video to a website such as Vimeo, YouTube or Flickr, tag it with "mozconcept" and fill out the submission form (don't forget to add a short description of your concept) to register your submission. (To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all content and contributions will be licensed under appropriate open source licenses)

Discuss
During the Design Challenge you can discuss your ideas with fellow designers on the Mozilla Labs Concept Series forum.

Select (3 weeks. April 26th – May 17th)

All submissions will be published on this site as they are submitted. On April 26th, the Design Challenge will be closed to new submissions and the judging process will begin. Members of PCF and Mozilla will evaluate all entries and on May 17th "Best in Class" honors in the categories of Innovation, Execution, Producible plus a People's Choice Award will be bestowed.

In addition, development plans for the next iteration of the subtitling tool will be released, integrating designs from one or more winning submissions.

Prototype (4 weeks. May 17th – June 11th)

Over three weeks, PCF will develop the winning concepts as detailed in the development plan into a functional prototype. On June 11th, a public link will be shared on this site to the new prototype.

Evaluate (1.5 weeks. June 11th – June 18th)

Just as was done with the previous prototype, usability testing of the new prototype will be conducted and on June 18th a new usability study will be published on this site.