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.""

OLPC Hardware

[bestinshow]

The OLPC hardware is very nice actually. I've held it in my hands, and it is sturdy and looks nice. The worst part is the keyboard, which is dire - hopefully this is something they will work on in the future to improve. Sadly it had run out of battery when I got my mitts on it, so I cannot comment on the user interface, and the operation thereof.

However there are some interesting points in the blog post - it just depends on whether they are valid for the OLPC.

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!

Re:So?

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Agreed, but this seems a bit more than JUST renaming. On the other hand its also not exactly new. There are many OS GUI interfaces which have tried similar things. Even MS had something that at least sounds similar from a high level (Microsoft Bob [wikipedia.org]). Since OLPC is aimed at children around the world who may not even know what a "folder" is and not businesses, this "more friendly metaphores" could work well.

Anyway, seems a bit more than just renaming but certainly not new.

OG: Original GUI

[Doc Ruby]

"It makes MacOS look like what it is -- boring and unoriginal."

The new GUI might be revolutionary, and useful, and create the new paradigm. Just like MacOS did.

OLPC might make the now mature MacOS look boring. But if it makes MacOS look "unoriginal", just because so many have copied it, then the audience must be a world of children with the first laptop they've ever seen. Because MacOS originated the features that MacOS still keeps the cutting edge - until something like OLPC maybe replaces it. Even if so many others have copied it, MacOS is the original.

Unless you want to dig into MacOS's roots, like the Apple Lisa, or the Xerox Star. Which were prototypes, even the failed release Lisa. All PC design has been evolutionary, however big a leap one subsystem (like a GUI, or a LAN, or a laser printer on it, or an input peripheral like a mouse) makes. But those seminal roots just show how original was the MacOS, which made it work with its original improvements and integrations.

We should replace the ancient Mac GUI paradigm. It was revolutionary in the home and office, because it finally put the home and office on the screen, replacing the algebra classroom and typesetter formes. The original. Now it's over two decades old, and we're all more familiar with PCs than with file cabinets and document scrolls. So when we improve the paradigm, it's good to target the original. Pretending that MacOS isn't original makes it harder to beat it.

I've played with it

[wandazulu]

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?

Re:Negreponte's got this straight, tho

[Anonymous Coward]

If humans would spend as much time, money, and effort with feeding children as they are with giving third world countries hand cranked computers with pretty picture interfaces, the world would be a better place.

The OLPC project is the cover story in the latest Technology Review magazine. The article is more about the OLPC project as a new form of philanthropy, and less about the technology. But Negreponte's realistic about where this fits: "I have not met anybody who claims they are too poor to invest in education, nor anybody that said it was a waste of money," Negroponte says. "If somebody is dying of hunger, food comes first. If somebody is dying from war, peace comes first. But if the world is going to be a better place, the tools for doing so always include education."

The whole article can be accessed through the www.technologyreview.com website.

Re:Letting 4 year olds mess with the code?

[IamTheRealMike]

You can't permenantly brick the OLPC laptops, they are designed to have a hard reset function that wipes the system and restores it from the original image. The idea is you can play around with your hearts content but it's trivial to undo the damage if you do somehow temporarily brick it.

"A modest 128MB of memory"

[dpbsmith]

For a couple of seconds there, I thought "Wow! The same amount as the original 1984 Macintosh." My, how times change...

Remember when John McCarthy said (sorry, I don't have the exact quotation... if anyone does I'd love to have it and the source) that there were no theoretical barriers to artificial intelligence any more, they knew how to do it and the only thing they needed was a "million words of memory?"

Horizontal ToC mediawiki extension?

[almondjoy]

The link to the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines [laptop.org] shows a horizontally oriented graphical table of contents - colored table cells to contain links to each section. And then whole page is rendered with with all of the editable sections rendered to show visual containment inside a bunch of DIVs, w/forward/backward nav, etc. Does anyone know if that is core, or some type of mediawiki extension? I'd like to experiment with it further. Can someone point me to the source of that extension for mediawiki? Its very interesting.

OpenDoc & Lifebooks

[Valdrax]

Because there's a difference, and it's very familiar to any old Mac hand as OpenDoc. [wikipedia.org] Read up on OpenDoc and Publish and Subscribe and then go back and read the OLPC design requirements until you see what I'm thinking. Also, look up the UI concept of Lifebooks. Activities are identical to OpenDoc components, and the Journal is a Lifebook.

The OLPC isn't doing anything new, per se, but it's bringing together a lot of old UI design concepts that have been sitting on the shelf untried for years and years.

Personally, I'm psyched. These are great ideas that have been considered impractical because they're somewhat incompatible with the current desktop metaphor and would lead to confusion. Also, previous attempts at some of these concepts had design flaws that are correctable upon reflection. Starting from scratch allows the OLPC to completely revitalize the HCI field. I'm suddenly filled with a lot more hope for the future of UI design than I have been in nearly a decade.

Reveal Codes in Word

[Old Man Kensey]

Sorry, those secretaries can hope all they want, but barring a major reengineering of the Word format, Reveal Codes will never happen in Word, ever. The best explanation of why is here [mvps.org]; in summary, WordPerfect uses inline marking (think HTML), where Word uses nested containers with formatting info in binary blobs at beginning and end of the document. So Reveal Codes implemented literally in Word would just mark off the containers and parse the leading and trailing data for you; you'd still have to mentally map formatting info to the container it applied to. Word does have Reveal Formatting, but that's not nearly the same thing.

Re:So?

[node 3]

Considering "Folders" are a totally Windows metaphor, why should they know (or care) ?

Folders is a real-world desktop metaphor.

As far as I'm concerned, they are called directories, and always will be.

Directories is a real-world text-based metaphor. Interestingly enough, the term is used primarily for text-based interfaces (such as CLI's). Call them what you want, but folder is the better metaphor for more people. Additionally, the fact that the icon is an image of a folder certainly helps the metaphor. What would a directory icon look like? A phone book? A mall directory?