[IAEP] http://www-testing.sugarlabs.org/

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Christian Marc Schmidt wrote:
> Ben, could you please let us know where you encountered any bugs?

Clicking "collaborative learning through rich-media expression" causes the
page to scroll to a point where the "About" button obscures the text.  In
general, the floating About button is ugly, confusing, and in other ways bad.

I do not believe this site can be redeemed, so I cannot provide
constructive criticism.  I can, however, provide destructive criticism:

1. This visual design reminds me principally of the website my friend
Jeremy and I made in Dreamweaver when we were twelve years old:
http://web.archive.org/web/19991012175905/http://members.aol.com/jekl84/welcome.html.
 Clashing colors do not a cool website make.  Fancy animations cannot
redeem a lack of useful content.

2.  This site repeats the mistakes of the original laptop.org.  Even with
the "redesign", the front page still presents the user with a bunch of
meaningless words.  These words linked to other mysterious phrases, and to
this day I cannot figure out how to get any useful information off of that
site.  Sometimes the mistakes are repeated with remarkable exactness: for
example, both sites make it difficult to discover where something is in
the menu system.  At the sugarlabs.org beta, the menu items are invisible
until you figure out that the menu (itself often nearly invisible due to
the random color scheme) has a rollover dropdown... and the same thing
applies again to the menu items, which (a) are of many different types,
but all lumped together, and (b) provide no indication as to whether they
have dropdown menus too.  Compare this to wiki.sugarlabs.org, where the
principal option are highlighted in a green bar, right across the middle
of the screen, with no searching required.

2a. The cardinal sin, in both sites, is to prize form over function.  OLPC
didn't mind this, since they were sure that everyone who needed to know
about OLPC already knew about it.  In fact, they were trying to cultivate
a visionary image, so an unusably stylish website seemed perfect to convey
the appropriate mysterious aura.

Sugar Labs is the reverse.  We are engineers and educators.  We are here
to get things done.  We are truly an open organization, with no need to
present a false front of trendy but uninformative buzzwords, or make
understanding our project into a game of hide and seek.

3.  It never says what Sugar is.  "Sugar is a computer operating
environment for students, designed to replace or complement existing
desktop user interfaces."  The website never states anything plainly,
opting instead for this long list of dull incomplete aphorisms, which link
to phrases that are _still_ not valid sentences.  Even aggregating all the
information in that list, I would not be able to tell you what Sugar is.

--Ben

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20090227/8c3a8b8a/attachment.pgp