The beginnings of a design project

I’m back in Connecticut, and getting slowly settled in. I don’t have a desk, but I’ve got two boxes next to my bed that I can put my laptop on, so at least I have somewhere to work. And I’m starting to get a good sense of the constraints, goals, and problems that need to be worked through to get AbiWord into shape for the OLPC. Here’s where I’m at.

How can we conform to Red Hat’s design vision?

Right now, the folks at Red Hat[1] are sort of holding the UI design reigns for the OLPC. Marco has told me that they they want to make the work more open, but it will take some time to get there. They are under a tight schedule, and releasing their work to the public takes time and energy, so for the time being I’m mostly just going to try to follow their lead and put as much of my work out in the open.

You can read about my understanding of their design direction here, but this is what they seem to be going for, in short:

Simplicity. Their apps are generally simpler than the stuff we are used to seeing on the Linux desktop. There are no menus, and they are using pretty basic toolbars with no labels. Abiword has a lot of features, so getting down to this level of simplicity is going to be tough.

Collaboration. They are really focused on the online presence stuff offered by (I think) Galago. And other people are excited about it too. Marc and Martin have been doing some amazing work with AbiCollab, which fits in beautifully with the Red Hat folks’ vision. To really get this cooking on the OLPC, I think AbiCollab will need to integrate with the OLPC’s presence and chat infrastructure.

Direct Editing. Chris Blizzard mentioned this to me, and if I interpreted him correctly, what this means is moving away from the open-edit-save cycles, and towards just editing documents in place. “Instant Apply” for documents, if you will. I think this makes a lot of sense, especially in the context of AbiCollab. When lots of people are editing the same documents, it just seems simpler to have one current version of the document. Having an open and a saved version would just create confusion. Doing this in AbiWord might be as simple as removing the save buttons and having documents be automatically saved on exit.

Making sure it works on the hardware

The biggest constraint of the hardware is, of course, the screen size. But Red Hat’s strategies are design to take that into account, so I think by following their lead, we’ll get this one “for free”.

Staying aware of the context

I’ve posted a few posts about the kids who will be getting OLPCs (here and here), and I’m starting to pull together a picture of this very diverse group of people here, but to sum up:

In the first round of pilot deployments alone, the OLPC is going to be going to kids in grades K-12 who speak dozens of different languages across three continents. Most of these kids will have no computer skills, and very low literacy rates. The current desktop system is littered with metaphors that will be completely foreign to them. There’s a good chance they’ve never seen a clipboard, a floppy disk, or a manila folder before, and they never will. Many of these kids have an insatiable thirst for learning, and a variety of competencies they’ve learned participating in the economic engine of their household, farming and hunting and bringing goods to market after school.

It’s not clear exactly how AbiWord or the OLPC needs to change to meet these kids needs, but I’ve taken a look at a few of the metaphors AbiWord uses and asked how they might fit in to these different cultures.

Starting to prototype

Taking into account some of the prescriptions above, I threw together a quick mockup:

This design is really just a “straw man”… there are a lot of problems with it. For one, it drastically reduces the usefulness of Abiword, removing a lot of features. But I think it’s probably going to be the case that if we want to hit the level of simplicity the OLPC folks are striving for, we’re going to have to make some AbiWord features inaccessible.

Deciding which features are important is going to be a bit of a task. I did an inventory of most of AbiWord’s features and tried to think though what would be important on the OLPC and what would not. It’s a starting point, but I think what we really need to do is talk to someone who’s worked with kids and computers and find out how they actually use word processors. User research is much more useful than my barely informed guesses.

But for the time being, we can still explore how to present AbiWord’s various bits of functionality. Trying to get more of AbiWord’s functionality represented I put together some sketches of a slightly different kind of toolbar:

You can see how some of the other buttons would work on my sketch page. This would be a pretty non-invasive change. It doesn’t require changing much about how AbiWord works, just reorganizing the interface a bit and cutting some features out.

I’ve also been sketching out some possible UI for integrating chat and AbiCollab into the OLPC style:

Chatting within a shared document:

Labelled cursors showing who’s doing what:

And I mentioned using clip art to help teach language. Here’s a sketch of what that might look like:

There’s still a lot to do to figure out what’s feasible implementation-wise and what’s really appropriate from a design perspective, but at least these are a starting point and they’re heading towards something a little more OLPC friendly.

Hacking

I’m still working on getting Fedora Core 5 and the Sugar development kit installed on my old laptop. It’s slow going, but I’m holding off on playing with the source until I get that set up.

Next steps in research

I have some good research that was sent to me on kids and education in Malaysia which I’m planning on filtering through at some point. But what I think is most important right now is that I start talking to people who have experience with kids and computers so I can get a better sense of what they really use in a word processor. I also need to talk to someone who knows more about how kids learn to read and write to get a better sense of how AbiWord fits into that picture. I’ll keep you posted.

[1] As far as I can tell, the team is Chris Blizzard, Diana Fong, Marco Pasenti Gritti, and Dan Williams.