Comments on: The OLPC User Interface

By: dizi izle

dizi izle — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:20:45 +0000

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 â€” I think that is the age at which

By: Emo Resimleri

Emo Resimleri — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:52:09 +0000

I suspect, havenâ€™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?

By: doÄŸalgaz tesisatÄ±

doÄŸalgaz tesisatÄ± — Wed, 06 May 2009 10:54:01 +0000

By: dizi izle

dizi izle — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:15:37 +0000

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

By: travesti

travesti — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:21:48 +0000

By: Andy Dent

Andy Dent — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 05:28:22 +0000

Just for starters, “The â€œZoomâ€ 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?

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 17:53:21 +0000

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!

By: Oblique

Oblique — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:30:17 +0000

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.

By: Seth Wagoner

Seth Wagoner — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 01:51:44 +0000

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.

By: Adri

Adri — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 18:02:04 +0000

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.