Update on the usability of educational laptops: Interesting news about Sugar from Computer World:
OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte also told The Associated Press on Tuesday that an insistence upon using only free, open-source software had hampered the XO’s usability and scared away potential adopters.
The article doesn’t make it clear what about the usability of Sugar was problematic.
Report: OLPC may eventually switch from Linux to Windows XP
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The interface definitely raises a few red flags for me, in terms of what Travis said on the previous post about this topic:
“For me, the biggest question with something like Sugar is whether is does children a service or disservice to provide them with computing tools that will not expose them to many of the UI conventions used worldwide.”
But in other regards, I wonder what the UI was based on, and if the ideas of designing for children in low-income, low-technology households was taken into account. The interface seems pretty obvious to me at the forefront, but if this is their first hypothetical introduction to a GUI, I wonder how they will react to the mainstream UIs later on. So interesting!
The OLPC Wiki has some documents detailing their Human Interface Guidelines. I have not had a chance to read over these yet, but perhaps their is some discussion of principles underlying the design:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines
It’s interesting to note that there are a number of additional controls on the OLPC keyboard that are very task-specific and unique to the OLPC:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Sugar_Interface/Input_Systems
Also, there are apparently some bootable CD images available of different flavors of Linux sporting the Sugar environment running on top of them – I haven’t had chance to try one of these either, but I’ll hopefully take a look this weekend:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LiveCd
I’ll reserve any judgments until I’ve had a chance to actually try a live version of the interface and read a bit more about the basis for their design decisions.