[Sugar-devel] RFC: Kill the delayed menus for good

[Edward Cherlin]

I'm extracting some of the for [[The Undiscoverable]].

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Eben Eliason <eben at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
>> On 10/13/2009 04:36 AM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Michael just passed by the Acetarium and, since the dinner was late, we
>>> found the time to test and review his latest prototype^W patch.
>>>
>>> I'm loving how the menus suddenly are now snappy and responsive. Please,
>>> test it yourself and report back. If we like this change, I think we
>>> should go on and also kill the code that this patch makes redundant.
>>> (please, let's not add another configurable knob!)

Works for me. I hate hover menus.

>>>> From 83ef08969ed7bee08f90c12bfa1eedcb7fb0500c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>>> From: Michael Stone<michael at laptop.org>
>>> Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:33:12 -0400
>>> Subject: Make various palette animations happen more quickly.
>>
>> Can you describe what the patch will change from the user point of view?
>> Is this to get rid of the delayed build up of palettes when hovering
>> over icons?
>>
>> You can use right click to get the menu immediately. The delay is on
>> purpose.

Yes, that's in [[The Undiscoverable]]

> We should definitely get feedback. I wouldn't be entirely opposed to a
> change, but I do want to make sure that we make such a change for the
> right reasons, and that it's actually the right change to make.
>
> The initial design intent was to develop a system which worked in a
> sufficiently complete manner without needing palettes at all. Kids
> should be able to start activities, resume activities, join
> activities, write, paint, stop, etc. without ever seeing a palette at
> all. [1]

That's fine, if

1) Everything is discoverable.
or
2) Teachers have guidance on what is not discoverable and how to
introduce it, and on children's use cases and on how to handle those
use cases efficiently.

We have neither. I'm working on 2. Anything that improves 1 gets +1 from me.

> This is the "low floor". For kids with more experience or
> curiosity, we decided to provide contextual palettes which grouped
> related actions and provided more complex interactions with the
> system. This is "no ceiling". Furthermore, we wanted to help introduce
> kids to the availability of additional options in a discoverable way,
> which is why the hover effect was chosen to provide increasing levels
> of detail and interaction for a given object.

Was the discoverability of hover menus tested with children? I didn't
discover it, and I'm a born lever puller and button clicker.

> Finding that many kids were actually waiting for the palette to appear
> always, instead of, for instance, simply clicking on an activity icon
> to join it, encouraged us to INcrease the delay on the palettes to
> help emphasize this as a secondary mechanism for interaction.

A case of treating the symptom rather than the ailment.

> A agree
> that hovering in one place to click in another isn't great; but that's
> also not the intended primary means of interaction, and should only
> really be done when one of the secondary actions is desired.
>
> Removing the delay pushes us, I fear, even farther away from an
> interface in which nice friendly large clickable icons can be directly
> manipulated and encourages every action to be done through a
> contextual menu with a bunch of text in it. Is that really what we
> want kids to face?

I don't see the problem. The nice friendly large clickable icons will
remain where they are. You either have to create and *demonstrate* a
path to *equal* discoverability, or you have to think about helping
teachers help children with what they don't discover.

> Just for fun, I might suggest an alternate possibility which actually
> decreases the discoverability of the secondary palette.

Not my kind of fun.

> We could
> reveal the primary palette (label) on a delay as we do now, with some
> indication of "more options" that can be clicked to expand the menu to
> reveal the secondary items. This would provide the (essential) primary
> palette as a label and introduce kids to the existence of more
> controls without encouraging them to use this as a primary method of
> interaction. Advanced users, of course, could still right-click to
> invoke the full menu in one shot.

I don't like to hear children divided into advanced and non-advanced
that way. If we get a series of lesson plans together on all of the
known non-discoverable elements of Sugar, we should be able to get
this difference down to two or three weeks max. Then we can talk about
advanced children being the ones who have developed skill in what an
Activity is for, not in knobs and blinkenlights.

> Eben
>
> [1] Incidentally, one of my major complaints with the "resume by
> default" behavior is that it makes starting new activities hard to do,
> and virtually impossible to do without using a secondary action, which
> is the wrong approach in my mind.

I want to know what is in the children's minds.

> I think starting from home, with the
> option to resume, while encouraging one-click resume from the Journal
> is still the correct approach.  I think offering the option to enter
> "resume by default" mode is great, but I'm not sure it should be,
> itself, the default for Home view.

I have some experience with options. The entire APL community agrees
that there should not be an option for where to start counting, but
the business users all want to start at 1, and the scientific users at
0. Again, what I think doesn't matter, and what you think doesn't
matter. What the children think matters. Perhaps there is a clear
preference for one way or the other, but perhaps there is a clear
preference to have an option. We don't know yet.

> In practice, it seems it has worked too "well". It used to be that
> kids never resumed activities. Now, it seems, they never start new
> ones. The solution seems to be in encouraging use of the Journal and
> the Home view for these different default actions, and in clarifying
> the UI such that kids understand and desire to do so.

I believe that the solution lies in Education.

Albert Einstein is widely believed to have said, "Everything should be
as simple as possible, but _no simpler_."

> Eben
>
>
>
>> Regards,
>>    Simon
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-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.org/