Talk:Design Team/Proposals
Proposal for an alternative design of home ui
Rationale
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.
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.
Clean Sheet, Square One, Back to Basics
on opening an xo:
i would like it to audibly say "Hello" in a language of my choice - i would like to be able to choose that language on the startup screen
- please add your own idea here -
what would you like to do with a little magic box called an xo?:
- continue an activity already begun. the startpage would contain a journal button to pull up a list of all the activities in progress (maybe as a wheel-list of thumbnails), plus activity category buttons to start new activities. (an "activity" is an app+documents created by the kid (or kidgroup) with that app; chats are activities too.
new activity category buttons/doors:
- play a game - learn something - make something - meet friends - find new friends - see what other people are doing - what else?
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.
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.
- 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.
a comment: doors and wheels and xo as a cursor seems retrogressive, hiding functionality to simplify user choices, and making them harder to discover.
a response: not hiding functionality, but aiming to provide obvious paths to activities instead of trying to show everything at once on one screen.