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The OLPC User Interface

Fred Oliveira on November 28, 2006 Comments (13)

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.

OLPC Neighborhood view

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.

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Comments on this post

Josh

I caught this on Digg this morning, and I can’t see why anyone would think it is an advantage to people in the developing world to learn something so completely different from what people in developed countries use. How does it help people in developing nations to learn computer technologies that no one else uses? Projects like OLPC are supposed to bring people closer together (I think), not isolate them in new ways.

Simplifying or improving the basic user interface that operating systems in the rest of the world use makes sense, but introducing something that is so radically different from what the rest of the world uses that they can’t relate to us through that technology is a disservice, in my opinion.

Martin

I used to tell clients that I design sites so that a 3rd grader could use it. The thinking being that the user interface and experience would be so intuitive that a child could interact with it.

I stopped telling clients that about two years ago. Have you watched a child interact with the web? First graders have a far better and deeper understanding of how our technology works than most adults in the United States. Why dumb down the UI for a child? Why not assume they can understand and interact with an application in a superior fashion than most adults?

To use this UI, it assumes you are of an age to read and write — I think that is the age at which most children start to surpass most adults on the web (especially my grandparents!!!)

mTp

I find this interesting. It does not appear that the designers observed children. My children and their friends from 2-7 play on the computer every once and a while (not little computer geeks ;). The challenge for them is not the desktop metaphor, the tree navigation, or Firefox browser. Their challenge seems to be twofold, the input devices are not made for their size arms, hands or motor skills and they cannot read yet.

The standard desktop arrangement with large keyboard and mouse is challenging because of the short arms. Trying to grab the mouse on the other side of the keyboard is awkward. The mouse is also too large. On my lap top they are able to maneuver much easier with the mouse pad (pointing just makes sense, precision is easier also).

On the reading part, go to http://www.nickjr.com and click on the game section. No explanation needed. The find what they want without mom and dad. Hmmm… maybe they have got something.

There is a lot to learn from the sites that cater to 2-7 year olds. They get lots of traffic so it must be intuitive. Maybe this project should take a few pointers.

(Note: I have not used the product. I am making my remarks based on this post.)

Adri

I believe that children from developed countries do have the ability to interact with computers, and remote controls because of the “legacy” they from their fathers and grandfathers. Take me for an example: I’m 30 (almost) and I deal with technology since I was 5 or 6. The first computer, game console, everything was so fascinating, I was almost afraid of dealing with it. My daughter (15 month old) pushes me to the computer and deals with the mouse very well (and she hardly speaks!). She has a “background” that enables her to deal with this kind of stuff in a normal basis.

The children from developing countries, I believe, don’t have that kind of technological awareness, and therefore, we can’t compare them with our children.

Seth Wagoner

Thoughts on this:

Not using language alongside icons does mean that they won’t have to translate it into a hundred languages and a bazillion dialects.

The metaphors appropriate for children in the 3rd world may be different from those that make sense to us digital natives. I expect they put some serious thought into it and have probably explained their rationale somewhere.

The software may be constrained by the hardware, which is limited by the pricepoint they are aiming for.

Oblique

It is important to remember that the project is aimed at children with almost no technological background. They have no preconcieved ideas as to what a UI should look like or do. Because they are still of the age where their learning abilility is very high they will easily grasp concepts that our previous learning makes foreign and difficult for us.
Given something to play with, children will learn, it may not be quite what we expected but they will learn. (At two years old my granddaughter was playing Minesweeper, “Look, Grandpa, I’ve found the black dots!” Not quite what I look for but she was having fun and the first words she learned to read were “Run”, “Quit” and “Exit”).
Although it would be good to have text with the icons Seth Waggoner (above) made a very good point. The cost of adding text could be prohibitive. Maybe it will come later when the project has made enough money to justify further development which could be sooner than you might think – wasn’t there mention somewhere of it being “non-profit”?
Let’s give the project all the support we can. If they become generally available I’ll buy one. Any new approach can only be good for the computing industry and the users.

Ben

I’m sure I read somewhere that Steve jobs offered free usage of OS X to the organisations behind OLPC, so they chose to disregard both open source OS software and commercially developed OS software!

Andy Dent

Just for starters, “The “Zoom” metaphor is harder to understand than the desktop metaphor” is an assertion I have a lot of trouble with. I’m a software developer with 25 years experience and a lot of that spent studying UI design, observing my kids and developing systems for casual and naive users.

I suspect, haven’t read enough to be sure, that the driving force behind the zoom interface is the embedding in a nested series of relationships that comprises the world of many of the cultures expected to use this laptop. Me, My Group, My Village, The World seems an eminently sensible progression. Are these kids seriously supposed to understand what a Desktop Interface relates to?

travesti

I suspect, haven’t read enough to be sure, that the driving force behind the zoom interface is the embedding in a nested series of relationships that comprises the world of many of the cultures expected to use this laptop. Me, My Group, My Village, The World seems an eminently sensible progression. Are these kids seriously supposed to understand what a Desktop Interface relates to?

dizi izle

Not using language alongside icons does mean that they won’t have to translate it into a hundred languages and a bazillion dialects.

doğalgaz tesisatı

I suspect, haven’t read enough to be sure, that the driving force behind the zoom interface is the embedding in a nested series of relationships that comprises the world of many of the cultures expected to use this laptop.

Emo Resimleri

I suspect, haven’t read enough to be sure, that the driving force behind the zoom interface is the embedding in a nested series of relationships that comprises the world of many of the cultures expected to use this laptop. Me, My Group, My Village, The World seems an eminently sensible progression. Are these kids seriously supposed to understand what a Desktop Interface relates to?

dizi izle

I used to tell clients that I design sites so that a 3rd grader could use it. The thinking being that the user interface and experience would be so intuitive that a child could interact with it.

I stopped telling clients that about two years ago. Have you watched a child interact with the web? First graders have a far better and deeper understanding of how our technology works than most adults in the United States. Why dumb down the UI for a child? Why not assume they can understand and interact with an application in a superior fashion than most adults?

To use this UI, it assumes you are of an age to read and write — I think that is the age at which

Something to say?