Improvements of Mesh-View
From Olpcaustria
Contents |
Some criticism of the mesh view
The sugar interface is, like the whole OLPC project, massively ambitious. It attempts to reinvent almost every metaphor and concept we've got used to in user interfaces. And it does so in very elegant and beautifully simple ways. Any criticism only comes because it is definitely worth criticizing.
Randomness
The Sugar Instructions have some interesting references to randomness:
"The screen will hold a scattering of icons, placed randomly just to make life interesting. [...] If there are any standard 802.11b wireless access points within range, you'll see a triangle for each one (in random colors). [...] You'll also see a circle in more random colors, representing the "wireless mesh", which we'll explain later. These icons may move around or change every once in a while, seemingly at random."
I want to argue that randomness in design and particularly in user interfaces is almost always bad. Colors, positioning, and size of objects should always be chosen according to some kind of system. In the unlikely event that no such system exists it might be worth questioning the necessity of doing the positioning, coloring or sizing at all: Why do it if it has no real purpose?
Randomness is confusing and most of all highly frustrating. Changing the mesh or "world view" every once in a while without a real reason is not going to make anyones life more interesting: How would you feel if somebody rearranged all the things in your appartement every time you were not looking?
I haven't really used a huge mesh view on an XO yet, mainly because we just have 3 XOs for testing and it's not really hard to locate them on the mostly empty mesh view. I do however know how often I wondered why the battery, mesh and access point icons change on the home screen. Now I know:
"Around the outside of the ring are a few randomly placed icons: a battery, a triangle, and/or a circle."
Every time I noticed a change in the location of the icons I wondered why it happened. Is it a bug? - Did I do something wrong? - Did something fundamental change with my surrounding? - Should I care about it at all, does it want to tell me something?
I wondered about this because most other aspects of the Sugar interface and icons are decidedly not random, and with good reason.
Use of colors
The Sugar interface uses colors to signal ownership of documents, activities and avatar icons. I think it's a bit of a weird decision for a device that has a wonderful black and white mode - which is probably going to be used most of the time. Basically it's not a bad idea: Ownership doesn't really matter too much until you get to the mesh view: Color is the most important information there. It's the only way to find friends or known classmates from directly within the view for example. (Unless you count rolling over a hundred icons until you find the right name, which i don't. - Maybe there's a search function too. But why show the icon view at all if you'll be using search most of the time?)
So what happens when the screen switches to black and white mode?
Another problem with colors is that there is a very limited number of color combinations that are distinguishable. In the following image please count how often you see an XO with a purple outline and an orange fill color and imagine wondering about who your friend with said color combination could be:
Additionally, color indicators have huge accessibility problems. They are basically unusable for anybody with some form of color vision impairment.
A beginning of a solution?
I did a lot of experiments with the mesh view and collaboration features and I didn't solve all the problems I pointed out above. I could solve some of the problems by using different avatar images than the XO icon though. The XO has a great camera and a few cool ways of generating images that could be used to create a simple, unique avatar icon for every child. I doesn't need to consist of a photo but children could be invited to just be creative with their icons. (Judging from the popularity of instant messenger- and cellphone-icons i'd say most children would love to do that)
This is how it could look like:
I chose a circular shape for the avatar frame because it nicely resembles the circles inside the mesh view and friends view icons.
I think the color fill and outline indicators are important and useful and should definitely stay. That's why I still used them as a double outline for the avatar icons. I just don't think that they always work as the only means of differentiation.
As for the spatial arrangement of items on the mesh view i don't know which parameter really makes sense to use for laying out items. A few ideas:
- Signal strength
- People who I have collaborated with in the past more often could get closer to the center
- The school system could decide how icons are laid out. Maybe different classes could be grouped together
- Children could be grouped by age
- Alphabetical sorting
- Avatars could be sorted by the color of their outlines of fill color
- Friends could be closer to me (that plays well together with the zoom metaphor; friends could be grouped around me just as they are on the friends screen, so that I actually "zoom in" on my friends and me)
Different parameters could even be combined to create one coherent view. For example, friend's avatars could be positioned in the center, followed by people I have collaborated with, followed by everybody else. And then the icons could be arranged radially by color. Basically anything that makes sense at all really makes more sense than a random layout.
A different but effective solution might be to just let the kids organize their world by dragging and arranging the icons themselves. Unavailable avatars could be just marked as such by either hiding or dimming them for example.
More questions
I wasn't able to do any real testing with the current collaboration features because I didn't have the opportunity to play with more than one XO with the new firmware yet. So these are just questions:
Avatar icons group around activities that are shared creating nice "roundtables" with collaborating people. But does that mean that it's impossible to share more than one activity at a time? Collaborating on a few documents might be one of the most important features for teachers who want to help a few groups of children with their work. Additionally, is it possible to share more than one document of the same activity application at once? And how would that look like?
