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

[Eben Eliason]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 8:32 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>> On 11 Jan 2010, at 20:44, Walter Bender wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
>>>> On 01/11/2010 06:12 PM, Wade Brainerd wrote:
>>>>> My feeling regarding all this is that the problem is deeper than
>>>>> finding a way to Resume Latest or Start New from the home screen.
>>>>>
>>>>> IMO, the whole idea of Resume Latest is broken and needs to be
>>>>> ditched.  The Journal is the place to resume activities.  We need to
>>>>> make the Journal more discoverable and usable instead of trying to
>>>>> mash its features into the home screen.
>>>>
>>>> My findings are as well that the Journal is the natural place to resume
>>>> an activity. The home view is the natural way to create a new activity,
>>>> since it contains a graphical representation with the available activities.
>>>>
>>>> I think resuming is a secondary option we can provide, but should not be
>>>> the default option when you click on the icon. To overcome the issue of
>>>> constantly creating new activities I liked the 'open the full palette on
>>>> left click' option. The learner is then provided with options to choose
>>>> from.
>>>
>>> I like this too. It is worth mentioning that on non-OLPC-XO hardware,
>>> there is no easily discovered (or typed) dedicated key or mouse
>>> movement to get you to the Journal--one of the reasons we have also
>>> discussed having the Journal icon always available in the Home View (I
>>> am in favor of always at the bottom of the circle). All of these
>>> changes collectively may help.
>>
>> I've been trying to stay out of this discussion so far, watching for what might stick. So summing up so far:
>>
>> - Always show Journal in the home ring, though I'd favour having it as the first item, so that would make it always at the top of the circle ;-)
>>
>> - Home view reverted back to the 'start new' activity focus, all icons are un-coloured.
>>
>> - Single left click always reveals the palette with the 'start new' item at the top and 'resume' items below. Some minus design points here as 'start new' and 'resume' will both become 2 clicks away, and take extra palette cursoring dexterity to reach. You could argue both 'start new' and 'resume' will drop to second level features with 'activity palette information' becoming the top level home feature. Being able to read (some of) this palette text would also now be required, so our 'low floor' just got a little higher :-( I do agree though that this provides a compromise between reducing Journal spam and preventing the unintentional overwrite of existing Journal work by making the choice explicit.
>
>
> I am with you until here. I think we need to be very careful with the
> introduction of such additional complexity in the UI. Even for older
> kids, those using the OLPC-XO-1 laptops that have the old jumpy
> touchpad will have a hard time with this.
>
> I would urge the design team to explore a few more ways to solve this
> problem spatially rather than temporally.

One potential design I kind of liked (though I do recall others did
not, for various reasons) was to represent only new activities in the
ring, retaining the one-click instantiation and the palette as it
exists, and add a new yet separate feature to the view. This would
place the Journal icon persistently at (say) the bottom left corner of
Home, and then to the right of it, separated by a thin rule, a row of
the (say) 10 most recent activity instances. This line could contain
multiple instances of the same activity (eg. 3 different Write
instances), and would maintain their temporal relationship as they
"march" across the screen and "into" the persistent Journal icon. This
makes the Journal persistent, and logically separates the notion of
creating something from scratch and resuming a previous activity.

This is one of a number of potential alternatives, I think. I do also
share the sentiment that the Journal is the logical place to emphasize
for resuming, and that perhaps the first order of business is to make
sure that it's as accessible as possible. If every lesson begins with
"go to the Journal and resume the story we were working on yesterday"
or "go to the home view to create a brand new drawing" (and the UI
affordances make these equally easy to accomplish) we might not need
to conflate home view with both possibilities.

Eben



> regards.
>
> -walter
>
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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