A Laptop for Children: How HIGs Change

The field of Human Computer Interaction has always interested me ever since I understood what it is. As an HCI enthusiast, I often find myself reading Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) of various user interfaces. Recently, I was reading the HIGs for the Sugar UI. For those unaware, Sugar is the UI used in the XO laptops of the OLPC project fame.

This UI has more than just fascinated me. It is a completely re-invented concept and it has been done very creatively. These laptops are primarily intended for use by children, aged 5 to those in their mid teens. So, how differently do you create an UI targeted for that age group?

Well, to answer that question, just imagine that you literally had to re-invent the wheel, that lets say, will be used on a vehicle for a specific user group. Akin to that, the task of designing an UI for children requires additional imaginative thinking and an ability to present things in the most simplified form. Besides, simplifying necessarily doesn't mean that the UI be stripped of attractiveness. In fact the UI has to be attractive as well so that children are driven to use it. The Sugar UI HIGs take care of the possibility that the the XO might be the first laptop that their users will own, meaning they might have no prior experience of computing. Further, they would like to explore things without having the fear of ending up in a blue screen equivalent.

What excited me the most was the change in metaphors used to describe the environment. Speaking of the Desktop metaphor, the HIG mentions:

While this metaphor makes sense at the office—and perhaps even at home—it does not translate well into a collaborative environment such as the one that the OLPC laptops will embody.

Hence, these comparisons were redefined to create a simple, realistic user interface for children.

Applications are referred to as activities. Children can better relate with an activity instead of an application. So they could have writing activities, drawing activities or may be singing activities that are analogous to a text editing application, drawing, and AV recording applications. Besides, every activity can be a shared activity. An activity can be shared in a mesh which is a reference to the local network. The document gives an example of the web browsing activity. It says that unlike the normal isolated browsing, here you could browse as a collaboration with your group. Privacy in this case is implemented at a different level. Because children will be the primary users, sharing becomes the essence of all activities. Although users can alter the privacy settings if required.

The desktop is replaced by Neighborhood. A user can see other users and groups in their neighborhood. This view shows the group size and the activity around which the group is centered. Users are represented by the XO icons, and you can get more information about the user by clicking on the icon.

The menu bars are replaced by the Frame. But the Frame does more than just provide access to menus. In my opinion, this approach is much more efficient than the currently prevalent desktop layouts. It leaves more room for activities. The frame gives you access to places, people, objects and actions. The frame occupies the boundaries of the screen and remains hidden unless needed. One edge of the frame also doubles up as what we know as a clipboard. Users can place objects, like images, audio clips, links on the frame and then use them later to paste them on bulletin boards, in other activities or on other friends. So it behaves similar to clipboards on other operating systems and at the same time, provides drag and drop support, allowing selection from existing clipboard items, clipboard history and previews.

The hierarchical filesystem as we know on our computers, is replaced by the Journal. the journal maintains a log of whatever the user does. It saves things automatically letting users focus on the activity completely. The journal uses an intelligent algorithm that guesses forgotten entries and offers to delete them to maintain storage space on the laptop.

Files are not treated as they are in normal computing. Each file is an object which in turn is an independent instance of the activity which was used to create it. This way the children can access their creations directly, without having to associate them with an activity. So, a story will remain a story, and not a collection of words that needs to be opened using a text editor.

Besides these, there are a lot more analogies and innovative concepts brought up in the Sugar UI. Just reading those guidelines has changed the way I look at user interfaces and the way interfaces can be designed. (Ok, that happens to me after reading any HIGs...)

Those interested, can read the Sugar UI Human Interface Guidelines here. I also found this interesting picture on Flickr that would help Apple users to correlate the concepts used in Sugar with those used in our Leopard.