[Sugar-devel] conversations about sugar ui design

[Sebastian Silva]

"We have an opportunity in Peru to do some experiments." - WB

Hi David,
As a member of the Somos Azucar research & development team and direct
responsible for the software distribution prototypes to be piloted in
Peru, I warmly welcome your constructive offer of help.
We (Laura and I) are responsible for the Sugar Network sketches presented
to you by Aleksey, who is doing the back-end implementation to support 
specific functionality.

It is important to underline that the Sugar Network client (webui) is an 
experimental intervention that hopes to facilitate knowledge exchange
within an initial environment (Sugar and Sugar Activities in Perú).
Of course, there are a wide set of constraints (**).

You can find more information about the Sugar Network project as it is
being implemented for Perú at: http://pe.sugarlabs.org/go/Red_Az%C3%BAcar

Specific goals of the system are: to provide a de-centralized network for 
feedback, support and learning resources exchange and distribution.

The current UI implementation is expected to evolve quickly and our
goal is to have a 1.0 release by December 2012 with main functionality.

The UI dev strategy has been to rely on standard HTML+CSS+JS in order to 
facilitate rapid UI experimentation by the widest possible group of people 
including ourselves.

So far we've sought to directly expose functionality, trying to follow 
Sugar's UI style and paradigms of simplicity, reflection and collaboration.
However we are at a stage of reflection into how to better expose 
functionality to reflect the system's stated goals to the local community.

As for a design forum, Sugar Network is hoped to become such a forum where
feedback can be collected with the purpose of improving specific system
components (for example, Sugar itself). Your feedback / proposals for improving
the Sugar Network experience are welcome and will be taken into consideration.

I recommend installing Sugar Network locally from the sweets-desktop packages
for you to be able to explore functionality specific to Sugar.
Regards,
Sebastian

(**) most notable constraints in no particular order:
- (almost) no connectivity
- slow hardware / crappy touchpads
- language/cultural barrier
- remote locations
- not skilled deployment personnel
- disreputed laptop project
- conflicted national education system


On Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:56:39 +1000
David Brown <djhbrown at gmail.com> wrote:

> this note embraces several different emails from >Aleksey and <Walter>
> 
> > What you see on http://network-testing.sugarlabs.org
> > is a first rough and implementation for webui,
> 
> you have put quite some effort into presenting your sketches, Aleksey:
> whilst that is in itself impressive, i'm not keen on the sketches
> themselves:  using icons instead of words is presumably an attempt to
> make the ui accessible to the illiterate, but in my view it only
> complicates matters.  icons would be effective if they were
> universally obvious a priori, but that is not possible - icons have to
> be learned just as do the symbols of any alphabet.  mother tongue is
> preferable, as it contributes to the learning of literacy useful in
> the broader context of the language world within which they live.  a
> single release of a ui could have a feature that allows the ui to be
> displayed in any of the languages that have been implemented.
> 
> the choices of names are developer-oriented rather than user-oriented:
> for example, the name "turtle-art" makes sense only to people who are
> already familiar with Logo.  Whereas, "draw a picture" (or its
> translation) would make sense to any kid who can read her mother
> tongue.  for those who can't read, a thumbnail of a half-finished
> painting and a brush might work - it would take up more pixels than an
> icon, but i don't think there should be many app-triggers on view at
> the same time.
> 
> with 69 apps already mooted (and presumably a thousand more waiting to
> be added), that creates a navigation issue which needs to be
> addressed.  i feel that it could be done by creating categories of
> activity (such as "learn", "play" and "meet") and subcategories etc,
> making a simple tree structure (or maybe a network with cross-links).
> the one thing i am sure of is that trying to put buttons for
> everything on one screen creates information overload.
> 
-- 
Sebastian Silva <sebastian at somosazucar.org>