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.""

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...

[styryx]

Giving food will only sustain a larger famine. It actually makes the problem worse.
Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world. The world needs to learn how to do it themselves. Therefore if we spent all our time and effort giving people food the world would actually be a worse place. Giving people the ability to learn how to do things for themselves, as opposed to only teaching them how to put out their hand and beg for food is surely a much better approach to the problem.

There was another obvious point: You can still give them food at the same time. The OLPC project does not prevent aid! Also, I love how everyone is so specific to "omg teh children". Because as soon as people become adults we really just couldn't care less, huh? Perhaps if they had some/any education before they became adults they'd be able to take care of the children themselves. Also, let's just skip the arms trade arguments altogether and blame the OLPC project for the proliferation of the problem.

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.

Re:View Source Key

[Anonymous Coward]

Many computer users today are like monkeys looking at picture books. "View Source" is for the children. Microsoft has the world treating computers as mysterious black (okay, beige) boxes. Their operating system is subtly or not-so-subtly designed to discourage exploration and systematic understanding and encourage rote-learning of how to perform specific tasks (change the window borders and button positions on an office secretary's desktop and watch the confusion and horror). Hell, pigeons can deal with that...

For the future of humanity, it's vital that programming joins "reading, writing and arithmetic" as part of a well-rounded trivial education. Programming is a skill at the level of reading and writing and arithmetic. Microsoft are the dark-ages literate priesthood with an illiterate population of peasants to exploit. That ends this century.

 

Re:So why slag off MacOS?

[IamTheRealMike]

I made that (throwaway) comment because I had recently written about a few parts of the Mac GUI that annoyed me, and because the Mac is usually touted as being innovative in the UI space. I disagree, I don't think it's all that innovative compared to the OLPC, hence the comparison. Of course, the one sentence that mentioned the Mac got picked for the Slashdot front page and now the article itself is Slashdotted, nobody will read the full thing. C'est la vie ;)

Re:Endless Submenus

[LetterRip]

Tabs for UI panels containing new buttons has been available for a very long time for 3D applications - Blender 3D has had it from about its inception. Look at the bottom of our screenshot at the wiki here. How does calling it 'ribbons' make it innovative? I'll be kinda peeved if they tried to take a patent on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Blender_node_sc reen_242a.jpg [wikipedia.org]

LetterRip

Re:OLPC Hardware

[mcdermd]

I actually use the lower left and right corners to trigger Expose actions all the time. It's become second nature for me to use it to drag files, text, etc. between different apps and between the desktop and apps. You can't very well drag to the corner, then click and expect the object to stay "dragged". The only thing that I don't like about it is there is no company-approved software to allow me to do this on the Windows XP box I use at work.