[Sugar-devel] conversations about sugar ui design

[Aleksey Lim]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 09:09:57AM -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 11:56 PM, David Brown <djhbrown at gmail.com> wrote:
> > ...
> > 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.
> 
> As regard the activity icons on the home page (as several people have
> responded already) we haven't observed this as being a major problem
> with Sugar in the field. Also, at least in the beginning, we were
> disciplined about naming activities as actions, e.g., Paint, Browse,
> etc. Turtle Art was a bit of an exception and probably could have been
> named Program.

Keeping activity names consistent sounds too over centralized for
dispersed community on SL level. But I think it will be useful if
UI will present two id elements for one activity (somehow, not exactly
two labels for one activity item). When the first one will be a
functional name, e.g., "Paint" (despite of presence Paint activity, it
might be, e.g., TuxPaint) that can be tweaked on distribution level
(different distributors might follow different naming schemes assuming
the targeting audience).

On ASLO, this feature is implemented by categories and tags. But for
desktop application (which is different to ASLO because clicking
assumes immediate launch) it might be useful to implement this feature
a bit different. For example, having functional abstraction level
in addition to activities one. Users might run activities directly
from functional level but can switch to direct activities (and select
what particular activity will represent "Paint" function).

> It has been oft observed that children will push buttons in order to
> find out what they do, as oppose to adults, who like to know what
> buttons do before they push them.
> 
> In general, there are roll-over text hints for every icon in Sugar.
> We've had a long (4+ years) argument about the length of the delay in
> revealing those texts and in the most recent Sugar, all secondary
> palettes will appear immediately.

Functional level will be useful not only for newcomers when people don't
know what TurtleArt does, but also for simplification users experience.

-- 
Aleksey