90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Imagine you are the benevolent leader of a small fictional country somewhere in the third world. Your resources are limited. While your country isn’t as poor as some other third world countries, many of your citizens can’t read or write, and some live in complete poverty. Much of the population lives in slums, and people are currently migrating in droves from rural areas to the city. Your country and the world around it is changing.

Since you are a nice leader and you care for your people, you want to start increasing your yearly spend on education (as well as healthcare and housing). Last month some Westerners in shiny suits came to visit and tried to talk you into buying OLPCs. Everyone else in your position seems to be buying them.

It seems like a good idea, but on the other hand, you can’t really afford them. Buying them would involve cutting back on other things. It’s a substantial decision. You firmly believe that computers and internet are the future, but are they the right thing for you to buy right now, with what little money you have?

And you suspect that the men in shiny suits don’t really know how things will pan out for the children of your country. You’re worried the OLPC might be a white elephant. It almost feels like a big experiment carried out by the west, but funded by you.

What do you do?

1. Blow your cash on a lot of OLPCs. Trust that teacher training and infrastructure will emerge organically, as a result of being ‘connected’.
2. Don’t buy any OLPCs yet. Instead spend the money on old-fashioned, unsexy stuff like teacher training, books, school buildings and blackboards. Then, watch what happens in other countries like yours that have adopted the OLPC. Perhaps in the mean time some alternatives will appear on the market.
3. or… something else? Your suggestions please!

The OLPC (aka the ‘hundred dollar laptop’) has a ‘View Source’ button on the keyboard. See if you can guess which one it is in this image here.

The motivation for this is to let kids ‘under the bonnet’ and learn to program (Python, specifically). Is it really a good idea?

Blogger Mike Hearn made some interesting comments on this a few days ago:

• Could source code be confusing for people who hit the button by mistake?
• Is the source code up to scratch? One example Mike looked at (BlockParty) was completely uncommented.
• Is a fully-fledged program containing advanced code (e.g. sound servers, graphics libraries, etc) really a good place to start learning about programming?

When I was a kid, my school had a computer lab containing on BBC Micros. They were used for teaching maths, using LOGO and that sort of thing. They didn’t even start teaching us programming until we had a good grasp of maths and ‘procedural thinking’. Then when they did, they introduced it very slowly, so not to leave anyone behind. On BBC micros, you could get to the source code (BBC BASIC) at any time by hitting the Escape key. And you know what? Teachers would shout at us for doing this. When you teach kids, lessons are highly structured, and you drip feed them concepts one-at-a-time. You don’t throw them in the deep end.

To give an analogy, if you were teaching 10 year old kids literature, you wouldn’t do it by reading them random chunks of Macbeth. That would just turn them off. It would be overwhelming and, more to the point, boring.

But isn’t this exactly what the View Source button does? Take a quick look below at the source code of BlockParty (A Tetris-style game), and put yourself in the shoes of a 10 year old kid.

I’m sure it’s a neat feature if you’re already up-to-speed on Python, but there’s a fairly tough learning curve you’d have to get past first. So, like the OLPC itself, the View-Source button is just an adjunct to traditional teaching, rather than a learning solution in itself.

I’d find it so much more reassuring if there was some well planned open source teaching and teacher-training materials coming out of this project in addition to the OLPC hardware/software bundle.

In this BusinessWeek article, Jakob Nielsen calls the OLPC UI design approach “reckless” because they have done no user testing so far. Meanwhile, John Maeda bizzarely praises process as “…the Steve Jobs method. […] You don’t use focus groups. You just do it right.”

You just do it right? …You just do it right? … That’s a little overconfident don’t you think? You are talking about children’s lives and huge chunks of the education budgets of governments that don’t have money to spare. And no self-respecting UCD practitioner would use focus groups in this context anyway. Imagine trying to explain the UI to a bunch of kids in a room. The only way to test it is to put it in the target environment, and look at the way it’s adopted.

What exactly would the UI designers have had to loose from doing a bit of field testing every month from the outset? They had everything to gain and nothing to loose. After all, the UI is hugely adventurous:

• There are no windows, all the applications run in “full screen mode”.
• On the “desktop”, you don’t just see icons of your own files, you can see icons of your friends, and you do thinks with them like chat, draw, browse the web or study together.
• There’s a special button on the keyboard that lets you view and (allegedly) edit the sourcecode of the program you are using at any time.

Innovation is a wonderful thing but you have to reality check: are these concepts really the best approach for the user requirements? And have they been implemented in the best possible way? They are making a lot of assumptions - it’s a big gamble.

I’ve yet to hear about the plans they have for releasing UI updates for the OLPC. Since when in the history of computing did version 1 of anything turn out to be the panacea of good design? At least when you buy version 1 of something, you know what you’re in for. The kids wont have a choice.

> Read BusinessWeek Article (”The face of the $100 laptop”)

Maybe I should stop ranting about this but it really gets me going. The OLPC UI specs seem to have been revised slightly and it’s got some people saying things like “Wow!” “Genius!” “How Adventurous!” and that sort of thing.

I agree it is exciting stuff in terms of UI design research, but is it right to gamble with Kids’ educations? And with the little money that developing nations are able to spare?

We seem to be forgetting history here. It’s very naive to assume that OLPCS + Kids = Education.

In the past, technology-centric initiatives have a well documented history of not solving the problems they were intended to, when introduced into schools. Conversely, pouring money into teacher training is well known to be hugely effective.

Look at some of these quotes from Jane Healy’s book “Failure to Connect”. Note that she is talking about the introduction of computers into US schools the 80s and 90s. She isn’t talking about the OLPC - but she might as well be!

“‘Technology! I feel as if we’re being swept down this enormous river — we don’t know where we’re going, or why, but we’re caught in the current. I think we should stop and take a look before it’s too late. Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Long Island, New York”

“Technology shapes the growing mind. The younger the mind, the more malleable it is. The younger the technology, the more unproven it is. […] Today’s children are the subjects of a vast and optimistic experiment. It is well financed and enthusiastically supported by major corporations, the public at large, and government officials around the world. If it is successful, our youngsters’ minds and lives will be enriched, society will benefit, and education will be permanently changed for the better. But there is no proof — or even convincing evidence — that it will work.”

“The experiment, of course, involves getting kids “on computers” at school and at home in hopes that technology will improve the quality of learning and prepare our young for the future. But will it? Are the new technologies a magic bullet aimed straight at success and power? Or are we simply grasping at a technocentric “quick fix” for a multitude of problems we have failed to address?“

“Why do we so desperately need to believe in computers? After surveying current attitudes for the nonprofit organization Learning in the Real World, William Ruckeyser told me, “The nearest thing I can draw a parallel to is a theological discussion. There’s so much an element of faith here that demanding evidence is almost a sign of heresy.”

According to this article on Yahoo! news, the OLPC “Sugar” UI has had absolutely no user testing carried out on it yet. Shameful stuff! I’ve also heard rumours that the UI design has taken place predominantly behind closed doors at Redhat. In other words, apparently no prototypes, mock-ups or even sketches have been put in front of any of the target user groups to ascertain whether the proposed features are either useful or usable.

I guess the folks on the design team haven’t heard the axiom “test early, test often”. This is surprising since it’s on pretty much the first page of every undergrad HCI / CS textbook under the sun.

The OLPC is a phenomenal piece of hardware, and has such worthy goals. It would be such a shame to find that it falls down on usability just because of lack of planning.

Note: if you follow diggnation you will have seen this before (its two weeks old).

This post is a collection of my concerns about the usability of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child, aka the “Hundred Dollar Laptop”) and how well suited it is to its target user groups. If you haven’t seen it, take a look at the video, or if you want to read more about the UI concept (named “Sugar”) from the horse’s mouth, read about it here.

Involvement of the users

Building a UI is like making a pair of shoes. Creativity is all well and good, but ultimately they have to fit the person you are making them for or they aren’t walking anywhere. While lots of hard work has gone into the UI design so far, it seems they are getting ahead of themselves and chasing their own dreams. The whole ‘breaking away from the desktop’ smacks heavily of academics who have finally found an outlet for their wacky ideas. Creativity is of course very important, but it has to be tempered within the requirements of the target audience. You gather requirements by speaking to the target audience, testing your designs on them and generally involving them in the design process. I wonder exactly how much of this is going on. The eToys application, for example, currently seems very raw and most appropriate for teaching programming to educated kids.

Transferability of skills.

The Sugar UI seems weird and back to front to us now, after a lifetime of traditional UIs. What will a traditional UI seem like to kids who grew up with the Sugar UI? Weirdly upside down? It reminds me of that psychology experiment you can do with prism glasses. These glasses make everything look upside down. Wear them for long enough and everything seems the right way up - until you take them off and then the world seems upside down without the glasses. You have trained your mind to look at everything in a upside down way. Is the OLPC Sugar UI like prism glasses?

What kind of foundation are we giving these kids when they eventually get faced with a ‘normal’ desktop?

Are the collaborative concepts half baked?

The community features of the OLPC seems to re-invent some of the tried and tested techniques we already have. Traditional list style presence indicators and discussion boards are very effective. The graffiti wall ‘do anything’ style discussion board offered on the OLPC has popped up many times in the past but never caught on. The concept is quite lovely but in practice the result is often very messy and anarchic. Structure helps, it doesn’t hinder.

One size doesn’t fit all

Maybe it’s just me but there seems to be some real vagueness about target audience. Who is it really for? And what are they actually going to use it for? The difference between an 8 year old and an 11 year old is huge. So is level of literacy. Computers aren’t a silver bullet to education. At best they can be considered a small but important lynchpin. Where in the bigger picture of educational policy will the OLPC fit? An old saying comes to mind: Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. Well, give a man an OLPC and … what exactly?

Is the UI Patronising?

I can’t help thinking that the Sugar UI talks down to the users. It seems to be saying “You aren’t ever going to be able to cope with the computers we use in the west, so here, have this special one with cut down features!”

I’ve heard that users will also have access to the command line. I don’t see this as a solution, it’s almost like giving them a soldering iron and saying look - once they used the device fully for a few years and outgrow it, they can solder some new functionality onto the motherboard. Some middle ground is needed here.

The makezine blog has a great guide on how to try out the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) system yourself on Windows, but if you cant be bothered, I have put together a video clip of the OLPC UI in action. I’m amazed to see how unusual the UI is. Apps are full-screen by default, and the black border shown around the sides (see screen grab) is a menu that pops over the content when you move your cursor to the side of the screen. And that’s just the start of it…

It’s really not what I expected at all- I have opinions about interface familiarity and transferable skills… What do you think? Please post your comments!

>> WATCH OLPC USER INTERFACE DEMO VIDEO