Case Study: BatchComplete Plugin for Trados Studio

I believe that even powerful, professional software should feel intuitive at every level. This is my attempt to fix a small but persistent point of friction in Trados Studio that I experienced in my own daily workflow.

The problem

I identified a simple but tangible pain point: Trados Studio, despite its power and being a true industry standard, has no way to mark multiple projects as "Complete" at once. This sounds trivial, but for a professional managing many small projects, it creates significant friction. The result was an ever-growing list of "In Progress" projects, because the manual, one-by-one clean-up process was just too tedious.

The challenge

The goal was to design the most elegant, minimalist and non-disruptive solution possible, making the new function feel like it was a native part of the original software.

• Seamless integration: The solution is a single command added directly to the existing right-click context menu, exactly where a user would intuitively expect to find it.
• Intelligent filtering: If a user selects a mix of projects with different statuses, the plugin automatically processes only the relevant "In-Progress" ones, preventing errors and providing a clear confirmation message: "Are you sure you want to mark [x] projects as completed", the [x] being only the uncompleted projects.

Design decisions & trade-offs

Building a solution within an existing ecosystem always involves navigating technical constraints and making pragmatic choices.

• Handling menu states: Initially, my goal was to create a perfectly seamless experience by disabling my "Batch Complete" option when only one project was selected, or even disabling the original "Mark as Complete" option to avoid redundancy. However, due to limitations in the Trados Studio API, I could not do it. But in the end, I think that the core value for the user is the powerful batch functionality itself, and this minor UI imperfection is an acceptable compromise that didn't detract from solving the main problem.
• Adding intelligent Feedback: I anticipated an edge case where a user might accidentally select projects that were already completed. To prevent confusion, I added specific logic to the system: if the plugin detects that all selected projects are already finished, it provides a helpful message: "All selected projects are already completed." The result is a more user-friendly experience.

The outcome

The result is a simple, lightweight plugin that solves a tangible workflow problem. The solution allows professional users to better spend their time creating value instead of clicking around.