[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Yet more feedback from Boston! - Chat and Speak

[Eben Eliason]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> On 14 Aug 2009, at 17:11, Eben Eliason wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 8:28 PM, Caroline
>> Meeks<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Neither wind nor rain nor flaming emails will deter me from telling you
>>> about what happened with kids and Sugar today in Boston! You however are
>>> free to use your delete key at any time.
>>> Today, working with 6th grade students at the Museum of Science Computer
>>> Clubhouse I learned not to start a Sugar intro session with chat.  It was
>>> hard for us to believe but the kids spent 3 hours really wanting to do
>>> nothing but use chat to talk to other kids in the same room!!  We did get
>>> them to use other things but
>>> next time I will end with Chat, not start with it :)
>>> We used both Chat and Speak.  Chat was more robust.
>>> I suggest that Speak be limited to about 4 participants. It seemed die a
>>> lot and if someone typed a lot of garbdy gook it would try to say it all and
>>> get behind.  What do other people think of this idea? Should I ticket it?
>>> I started the lesson by creating a chat, sharing it and showing the
>>> students
>>> how to join from their neighborhood. That worked fairly well.
>>> However, some of the students wanted to create a private chat.  It could
>>> be
>>> done but it was very challenging workflow.  The problem is if two kids
>>> decide they want to chat the natural thing for them to do is both goto
>>> Home
>>> and click on Chat and share that with the neighborhood.  This results in
>>> two
>>> chats and much confusion.  I don't know how to solve this, as I'm not
>>> gifted
>>> at UI design, but its clearly a problem.  Perhaps when you start chat you
>>> have a UI inside of chat that lets you join other existing chats
>>> directly.
>>
>> I think there are a few first-steps to simplify this process that have
>> already been designed. First and foremost, it should be possible to
>> select a sharing scope when starting a new activity. In past mockups,
>> we offered this functionality via a "Start with >" option, which
>> revealed a submenu containing both a list of friends, and a list of
>> groups. We could build the first part of this today.
>>
>> Likewise, the redesign of the sharing controls within the activity
>> itself provide us the chance to do the same when sharing an ongoing
>> activity. In addition to listing "private" and "my neighborhood", we
>> could also introduce "my friends", as well as individuals.
>
> Ooohhh, nice one, +1, though I think the actual menu needs some thinking
> about so we don't conflate the Journal "Resume with -> <activity>" and this
> proposed home view "Start with -> <Friend>". Also think "Start with ->

Good point. Perhaps resuming should say "Resume in >" instead, to
indicate that you're entering into a new activity context.

> Neighbourhood" should be in that list. There is also the issue of shared

Oh, absolutely. In my mind, "My Neighborhood" and "My friends" should
act like two implicit groups. I think the best way to order the
submenu is [my neighborhood, my friends, {list of groups}, {list of
friends}].

> activity titles... Currently you have to title your activity before sharing
> (though that even feature seems somewhat buggy, not sure if this is broken
> Sugar UI, or an issue with Telepathy), otherwise you just get default "Chat
> Activity" activities in the neighbourhood.

There have been a number of discussions and ideas around better
default names for activity titles. Perhaps we could take a small step
with a potentially large payoff and make the default activity title
"<name>'s <activity> activity" instead, so that at least we'd have
"Eben's chat activity" and "Gary's chat activity", which is far more
useful as a default.

> Tthere is at least one obvious string change to be made to the home activity
> palettes. "Start" should be "New", or given above possible feature perhaps
> "Start new" is better, so that "Start new with -> <Friend>" will read a
> little better:

I like keeping the distinction between "start" and "resume", both of
which are verbs. That's important. If we fel the need to make it more
explicit by appending "new", that could work, but I'm not sure it's
necessary with the proper uncolored icon.

Eben