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.

Dan Saffer, whose book (Designing for interaction) you should be reading, started a side project where he documents a series of inspiration bits for the interaction (and interface) designer. Check out his “No ideas but in things” - nice. (Via Adaptive Path’s blog)

Over at Digital Web Magazine, Jeff Cram posted an article for those of you who design and deploy websites and care about analytics. He outline some of the do’s and don’ts of site structure and goes into how CMSs play a role in site search engine placement.

George Olsen has a good post on Designing Breakthrough Products on UXMatters, and covers the impact of user-centered design techniques on the process. The article is full of interesting points, so save some minutes of your weekend to read through them.

Lawrence Lessig has a very good post on the Ethics of Web 2.0, and how sites like YouTube are “Fake” sharing sites where you can’t really get the content back. The post ends with a very important thought:

If YouTube is a trend, this is a depressing turn. No doubt, that amazing company has a billion things to think through (including what to do with more than a billion dollars). But one thing it really needs to keep in focus is a very important part of its success: That it was seen to respect the ethics of the web. Why post on YouTube rather Google Video? At least some did so because YouTube was “cooler.” Whether it continues to be as cool depends critically on the values it practices.

And finally, Andrew Crow over at Adaptive Path reminds me of an old passion for libraries in his “Library Porn” post, which is quite small, but definitely passionate. The experience of libraries is probably something I’ll post about soon (and to be honest, I’m dying to get back to Seattle and walk through the public library again).

Have a great weekend!

Simple things often dictate the success of a product. Details. Clever design. When you get it in a second. When experience beats complexity. Here’s a bit of inspiration from Steve Jobs. When asked whether he was concerned about the competition from Zune, here’s his answer:

In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

Apple has attached an image of human interaction to the iPod (mainly with the dancing models on their ads), and Jobs uses that to his (and his product’s) advantage. If nothing else, a pretty clever twist.

We are looking to expand our User Experience and Interface Design team with one or two more members. If you think you may be our guy, please email us at jobs@webreakstuff.com with an answer to the question “What do you believe is the role of design?” and some examples of your previous work. People with a sense of IA and Interaction Design are preferred.

You can work remotely, and will be involved with us on a per-project basis. Depending on your work experience, you may be directly integrated into one of our current projects with startups in the Web 2.0 space. Looking forward to your emails.