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 sos (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?