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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.""
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
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> "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."
Wrong answer.
If something is good, it *is*, of its own accord. There is no need to assert *something else is bad* - unless you're feeling insecure.
A View Source Key -- now there's a top level UI component that hundreds of millions of computer users have been begging for.
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Fitts Law in corners for example works well when you have a mouse you can fling into the corner. But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner. Something localised would be far better, for example a double-tap + pop-up directional menu for actions. Also Mac OS X lets you assign the corners to actions, contrary to his post. Many people disable these because they're annoying!
(sneaking off topic. mod me down!)
And because they violate everything a reasonable UI person holds dear. I'll grant that OS X didn't originally make great use of the corners. One is for the Apple menu, which is rarely needed, and the other is for the clock's menu, which is almost never needed. However, keeping those in the corners and then adding an option to have the corner respond to other actions is a bit annoying - now there's no easy way to know exactly what the corner will do until you try it. That, or discover it automagically because none of the Exposé actions require a click.
Which gets to the next problem. These corner actions are generally things that radically rearrange the screen, start a screen saver, etc. Without a click. This is extremely undesirable when you consider that Fitts Law cuts both ways - the corners are such easy targets that most users will frequently hit them even when they don't intend to. For example, it's common for me to fling the cursor off toward a corner when I want to get it out of my way so I can read a document more easily or whatever. With hot corners enabled, I'll often end up hitting one of those corners, which ironically massively re-arranges the screen, usually in a way that makes it completely impossible for me to continue my reading. Just about the exact opposite of what I was intending to do. Similar problems for when I'm trying to use a UI element that's close to a corner (window resizing controls, Apple menu, etc.)
The only hot corner I like and use is the one which keeps the screen saver from activating. It's also the only one that doesn't have a nasty habit of mucking with the screen when I don't want it to.
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.
There's a VMWare image of the OLPC system (forget where...found the link on OSNews.com) and I downloaded it and played with it a bit. The "Sugar" interface is one those things that presumably works better on the intended hardware, because moving the mouse around to get to the "desktop" or whatever it was got old really fast.
The other issue, which I can appreciate is a very non-trivial task because it has to work with non-computer savvy kids (and presumably adults) in a variety of languages, is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it. A couple of apps I still don't understand what they do.
Being that it's Linux underneath, the standard ctrl-alt-backspace killed the interface and I was able to log in as root (no password) and poke around. The one programming language they include is Perl, and that got me thinking about why not give the kids an interface or some capability to develop their own software too? The next killer app could be written by a kid on a OLPC machine. It looked like they also included a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) as well, but I only saw the interface come up once and wasn't able to get back to it again. Would they ship the docs in all languages as well?
Typical american view of the world: everyone is starving out there. FYI: the OLPC is not intended to starving people, it is *not* food... It is intended for people who get their *basic* needs met already with the idea of helping themselves get out of poverty and hopefully improving the general economy of the country as well. Gee, what's so difficult to grasp? Following your argument we should not give any education to the poor either since what they need is food? What huge nonsense.
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.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe