If you are reading this post from a news reader please click through to the page, as there’s an embedded video to watch.

If you’ve been a reader for a while, you may remember a short post of mine about how enthusiastic I was with Negroponte’s idea. I’ve been following OLPC’s development for a while now, and this post carries some personal weight in it, first because I care about the project and second because I care about UIs and Usability.

Dumbed down - sure; Stupid - no, thanks

The user interface for the OLPC, code-named Sugar, tries to make it easy for a child to use the computer to perform tasks like browsing the web, reading and writing documents, chatting online and play a few games. Thinking about it, that’s fantastic - anything that allows children to be connected is a great achievement.

However, by literally trying to revolutionize the desktop metaphor (or ignoring it completely), Sugar is becoming a complex, ridiculously iconic interface that does little to help and a lot to confuse whoever is using it. Have a look at the video below to actually see what I mean:

Sugary problems

If you’re interested in learning why the UI behaves the way it does, you should have a look at the Human Interface Guidelines for the OLPC, particularly the section on the Laptop Experience. But here’s a few of my considerations on why Sugar is just wrong:

• The “Zoom” metaphor is harder to understand than the desktop metaphor. Sure, we’ve been living with the desktop metaphor for years (whereas the OLPC children won’t have), but intuitively the desktop is easier to grasp than a set of nested behaviors.
• The whole system is built around icons - icons are ambiguous and lead to confusion. Naturally, a text and icon combination for the UI would make much more sense. If this is a laptop that’s meant to have the children share and learn, it should be simple, not cryptic. See the image below and try to figure out with no “manual”, what you are looking at.
• Removal of critical elements, like the address bar on the firefox instance or a field showing who you’re chatting with in the chat client is strange and taking information away, not providing it.

Salty conclusions

I can’t stop thinking that the people behind this got carried away. The OLPC is a fantastic project that if successful could play a major role in changing the lives of many children. With such an ambitious goal, it is easy to go with the flow and try to cause an impact by making more changes than necessary to the UI in order to try and be revolutionary. You didn’t have to.

I also can’t stop wondering whether going from an established open source environment like Gnome or the lightweight XFCE and making it dead simple (but not exclusively iconic, for crying out loud) would have been a better approach for this project.

The final fact is that this interface needs a lot of work and a lot of testing with the real people who will really benefit from using it. My guess is that either this hasn’t happened it, or it hasn’t happened enough. From my point of view, shipping the UI like this is a failure, because if people all around the world, who have been dealing with computers for years and years don’t get it, a child seeing one for the first time sure won’t either.

We need a device that’s connected, and open. We need it to be online at all times, to connect us to the people we care about, to let us work on the things we are interested in, to let us communicate, be productive, manage. We need it to be clear an concise, we need the interface to be simple, front and center - helpful, not hopeful. We need it to be modular, because although I might care about using it for music and photos, people next to me may want to use it for news, or as a phone.

We need to be able to extend it. In fact, we need it to be open to being extended by anyone - open source. If anyone wants to make it a gaming machine, great. If instead of games, I want RSS feeds, podcasts, and calling functionalities, fantastic. It doesn’t need big bells and whistles - these days, hardware is powerful enough to run everything we’d need in a mobile device, cheaply. All it needs is to exist, the community would grow out of the possibilities.

Why are we building platforms for User Generated Content, and aren’t building the platform for any content?

If you care about these problems, we want to hear from you. Drop us an email at hello@webreakstuff.com and speak your mind. We’re listening, and we’d love to work with people and companies tackling these problems. And we so want a chumby to get experimenting!

I have been meaning to write this for a while now - almost since I got back from Seattle in January this year when I was at Microsoft for Search Champs. I am writing it now motivated by some of the discussions that have been going on around the blogosphere about the Zune, Windows Vista, and the company as a whole. The fact is Microsoft (which grew in me a considerable lot during Search Champs) has an enormous problem - mass. Mass in people, in complexity of the solutions they use and in the software they develop.

Joel Spolsky read my mind 5 days ago when he wrote about the Windows Vista start menu and the seven choices to shutdown, hibernate, sleep, restart, switch user, log off and lock a computer. If you are as tired reading that list as I got tired of typing it, you know what’s wrong - choice, complexity, cruft.

Now you may think that the problem is simple, and the solution simpler - remove choices. But it isn’t - the problem is how Microsoft works as a whole, the “design” of their development process. Moishe Lettvin, who was in charge of the “start menu feature” described above, chimes in on that, and reading his post takes you on an excruciating journey about developing Vista modules (chunks of code, if you want to call it that).

Fixing Microsoft through lean development

Can Microsoft be fixed? Is there a way to turn back the years and years of complexification of processes? There might. One of Microsoft’s greatest assets is people - individual persons that inside their huge organization deliver exceptional value. Microsoft’s current culture doesn’t seem to (always keep in mind that this is my outside view, here) incite their people to have exceptional ideas - and that’s what should change.

Genius design, or allowing one person to assemble a lean team to build something remarkable, is perhaps Microsoft’s only way out. Efforts like the Zune, or the Xbox 360 need to happen more often. Projects where less of the “massive” Microsoft bleed into the product. I’m still using my iPod, and I got no Zune (yet?), but I definitely understand - and applaud - the team behind it.

The think tank

Think tank companies are paving the way for the future of technology. It is arguably hard to mutate a company like Microsoft into a place where individual genius could make a dent in the overall practice. It would take massive lay offs, or years and years of removing layers to the top (Microsoft has over one hundred Vice-presidents, and that’s only an example).

Unfortunately I provide no solutions but a sentence: Microsoft needs to pay attention to its own people. How many of the guys working over at Redmond have fantastic ideas that could create new markets, boost Microsoft’s reputation or generate tremendous revenues a day? Is the company listening? I highly doubt it, but it should.

Disclosure: I currently have no involvement with Microsoft. I do have many good friends working over there, and ever since I was over in January I’ve been rooting for some of them to rebel and try to take the company on its shoulders. There’s amazing value in some of the people working over there - value that’s being lost daily, by only allowing ideas from top to bottom and almost never the other way around.

Siteblimp, the application we developed with ACS (and that we wrote about before) is coming to its final stage. As you may know, Siteblimp is a web-based Adwords management application, built to simplify the process of setting up and running Google Adwords campaigns.

We’re looking for a handful of people who want to get in on the testing stage, to help us figure out what may be wrong, what tweaks (if any) need to be done, and to get us feedback over the application. If you’re interested, drop us an email, and we’ll add you to the list! Thanks!