[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] 'Resume' vs 'Start a new' Activity

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 08.01.2010, at 08:56, Simon Schampijer wrote:
> 
> On 01/07/2010 05:19 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
>> Simon Schampijer wrote:
>>> When they resume a previous activity, and they wanted to start a new
>>> one, I have seen learners erasing the previous content and keep on
>>> working in that activity.
>> 
>> This is the purpose of resume-by-default. The idea arose in response to
>> feedback from Uruguay, where students routinely filled their disk.  The
>> situation became so severe that, infamously, children in Uruguay began to
>> memorize the shell commands required to erase the Journal by force.
> 
> I meant that: You click on the turtle in the home screen. Last week you 
> did lesson 1. The kids want to do lesson 2 with has nothing to do with 
> lesson 1. They erase all the blocks they had and begin doing lesson 2. 
> Hence they lost lesson 1.

How about the "erase all" button also starts a new Journal entry?

How about if every activity would have such a button?

>> If you are working on systems with larger than 1 GB disks, or students who
>> do not use the machines full-time, then you will of course be far less
>> likely to encounter this problem.  This is not to say that I know what the
>> right solution is; I'm not at all sure.
> 
> Of course, I see the point of limited space, and I am aware of why we 
> choose to have resume by default. The problem I see is unclaerity. Just 
> look at the home screen. Do you know what will happen when you click on 
> one of those icons? What are the expectations. Maybe there are better 
> ways of displaying the options you have in the home view to the user. I 
> guess that is what I am looking for :)

I see resume-by-default as an experiment. It tried to solve the problem of cluttering in the Journal, and succeeded in that. It gave a different set of problems though, like making it much easier to lose work.

Maybe the Journal clutter can be solved in a different way. E.g., by grouping all entries for an activity with the same title, and resuming the most recent. Each entry takes up so much screen space in the Journal, it could as well have a line with the dates of older entries with the same name.

Or maybe the best would indeed be to let the user decide if she wants to resume or start a fresh instance. E.g. how about adding a "mini journal" to the home screen? When selecting an activity icon it would show the most recent Journal entries and an icon to start a new instance. Fitt's law would suggest to either pop it up close to the activity item, or put it in a predictable place at the screen edge. The former would be almost trivial to implement - simply bring up the palette on click and have it fully expanded right away. The double-hovering is just too undiscoverable and time-consuming. Click-choose-click would be much faster.

In any case I do agree there is a problem with resume-by-default and some simple adjustments could improve usability quite a bit :)

- Bert -