Talk:Design Team/Proposals

Proposal for an alternate home ui

sugar is feature-rich and functionality-rich, but access to those features and functions is currently via a myriad of cryptic icons.

once established in the mind of a user, icons are powerful. The letters of the Roman alphabet, for example, are powerful carriers of information.

but to become a user of that alphabet, you first have to learn it.

a novice xo user has to learn another alphabet - the alphabet of its icons and what they mean.

the sugar ui was designed by computer enthusiasts, and it bears the hallmark of such enthusiasm for computer wizardry.

but it's target users are not computer wizards,...

so an alternate home ui is proposed here, which would provide access to all the features and apps of xo via a simpler, more obvious, user interface (ui).

precisely what that ui will look like is something to be worked out, by trial and error, by a spiral of prototyping and end-user trials.

here's a start:

imagine you are a 5yo opening an xo for the very first time:

what would you like it to tell you? i suggest it could tell you what you can do with it:

just 3 things: - play - learn - meet up with friends (just for a chat or to play or learn together)

imagine a startup screen with just those 3 things on it, perhaps as graphics of labelled doors.

suppose you push open the door called meet. what would you like to see? how about an album of photos of all your xo friends who are currently also online/onlan? pushing your cursor onto one of them, a window on their current activity opens with a chat subwindow underneath.

which brings me to cursors. "xo" is clearly an identity icon that would seem to be fixed in the minds of xo developers as their trademark. what does it represent? it represents "me", it's an icon of "me". everyone has they own colour - the first thing i was asked to do by SoaS (sugaronastick) was to choose my xo colour. i had no idea why i was being asked this!

it turned out that everyone in my group or environment was also an xo and we were distinguished by our different monochrome colours (but it didnt occur to me to hover over them). the iconography of xo rather reminds me of a game called "pong" - the first video game - which had very low-res images because that's all the hardware could furnish at that time. but these days, we have high-res, high enough that my friends could be indicated to me by thumbnail-sized photos, so i could see over a dozen of them on my screen at the same time. and if my album were shown to me as an imaginary "rounded square" wheel (viewed edge-on), i could spin it and bring the other photos around the back to the front. it would help me if the photos were in alphabetic order of first name.

xos could retain the iconography of xo by making "x with an o on top" the cursor! the "o" would be the positioner and the x the body that the user drags around with the mouse or fingertip, leaving the o visible so you can see what thing you're pointing at. that thing would blink or change colour or expand so you knew you had got it.

in play mode, imagine you could see a wheel of activities (games, group-activities, etc)

in learn mode, imagine a wheel of learning opportunities, each one remembering where you were in that activity last time you explored it so you could pick up where you left off last time)

so, doors and wheels and xo as a cursor.... any comments? --David Brown 22:34, 13 August 2012‎

• These all seem worthy for further consideration and experimentation. The mass demand for touch and inertial interfaces is already producing easier computing. Perhaps there are some iPad or Android apps or app development environments that would allow more folks to mock up or create new, user inspired tools. (The XO 1.75 has an accelerometer and newer versions will have touch screens.)
• Many Sugar Activity instances already resume with the state automatically saved at the time of exit (depending on the developer's design--try Physics, for example).
• Children are frequently asked (or try for themselves) to do things that they don't understand. This seems a natural way of learning. --FGrose 03:11, 14 August 2012 (EDT)

yes indeed, children of all ages, myself included, try to do things that are new to us, and find ways of doing them, often ways that their designer never imagined. and we sometimes fall down or injure/defeat ourselves with some tools when we use them in a way that the designer did not intend. i feel sure a design could be worked out that would work equally well with mouse and keyboard as well as touch screens and finger-sliding.

another comment received: doors and wheels and xo as a cursor seems retrogressive, hiding functionality to simplify user choices, and making them harder to discover. my response: not hiding functionality, but aiming to provide obvious paths to activities instead of trying to show everything at once on one screen. i will flesh out my concept idea later on --David Brown 02:31, 16 August 2012 (EDT)