Unclear example used in UG for a valid ENGLISH_PHRASE

[nus-pe-bot]

Note from the teaching team: This bug was reported during the Part II (Evaluating Documents) stage of the PE. You may reject this bug if it is not related to the quality of documentation.

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Under the section explaining ENGLISH_PHRASE, a Japanese phrase is used as an example, and is stated to be a valid English input:

This is not at all obvious to a user, because it is in Japanese and not English. What does this phrase mean exactly? Does this refer to valid Unicode characters instead?

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_{[original: nus-cs2103-AY2122S1/pe-interim#4021] [original labels: severity.Low type.DocumentationBug]}

[chownces]

Team's Response

We believe that the example used was clear enough and was the correct way of explaining our point, which was that non-English characters can be used and accepted as an ENGLISH_PHRASE. Users do not have to know what the Japanese phrase means to know that the phrase is non-English and that it is accepted as a valid ENGLISH_PHRASE by our app. Furthermore, stating that all valid Unicode characters are allowed does not explain our point well. Users may not know what Unicode characters are, or what characters the standard (UTF-8) we are using covers. Thus, this explanation might be too verbose for the our target users who are not expected to be tech-savvy. As such, it was better to include a very clear non-English example to show very clearly and efficiently what we mean by “non-English” examples.

The design decision to allow for non-English characters as a valid English input was to account for all possible valid inputs into the app. For example, déjà vu is a valid English word which does not only consist of English alphabets. Therefore, we decided to allow the user flexibility to input non-English characters as they need to, depending on their usecase.

Duplicate status (if any):

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