A Close(r) Look At OLPC Human Interface Guidelines

feranick writes "There have been a lot of articles on Slashdot about the OLPC project, most of them regarding the hardware, the social impact or the cost of the operation itself. However the software development, specifically in the GUI didn't get so far much attention. This blog summarizes some of the OLPC global interface guidelines. You will see that what is really new in the laptop is not the laptop itself, but the completely new idea behind the design, where instead of applications you have activities, documents are now journals, 'application bundles can be signed by whoever works on them — because there is a view source key on the keyboard, anybody can modify an app and distribute it'. It really looks like if this is successfully, we could see a new breakthrough in GUI design also in mainstream PCs: "This UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of the desktop user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what it is — boring and unoriginal.""

Comments

Endless Submenus

[jrwr00]

The most annoying thing i can thing of in a UI and i find it every where, is the endless menus!
there should be some way to work this out

Re:Mod me whatever....but...

[Rand310]

Food is good and all, but the fact is that in most of the countries this laptop is aimed at, people eat well. They're frankly some of the oldest cultures around (Arabic, Thai, Nigerian) and have survived because they know how to make and produce and eat food. That's not the issue. I spent a month working in the villages of rural Thailand. These people eat well but they have nothing to do. They just sit around during the summer and talk, as there is no extra water for farming, no economy to support, and no need to do anything other than talk. Everyone is doing just fine.

What is needed is education, access to the world beyond their village and the "city" miles away. These laptops will possibly (though again, efficacy has yet to be proven) encourage such interaction, learning and initialization into the modern world. Furthermore, the people are not stupid. The one computer that was in the government office was used regularly by middle and high-schoolers downloading music, reading up on the latest news from Bangkok, the weather, or various other games. But creation of original content, for access within the village, is another issue altogether.

As a side - those people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were not hungry, were not in a hurry, never spent much time indoors, never needed anything more than what they had. By connecting them to the capitalistic global society with these laptops we take away their status quo. They will be hungry, not for food, but for education, for money, for placement within the larger world. And it will destroy the villages as they know it. For better or worse.

Something to think about.

Re:New

[ronanbear]

But it could also be seen as a way of grouping things. Put your nail gun and your hammer together in your toolbox so that you can either easily when you want to put a nail in something. Keep them with your nails In fact have a whole section for fasteners where your rivot gun and ball hammer are grouped together with your rivets.

The metaphor isn't about using less tools it's about using them together. MacOS has an applications folder where everything goes. People might have 4 or 5 programs that can view/edit photos depending on their needs. Why not keep them separate (at a UI level) from your compilers.