Making Sugar sweetExperiences in creating a great user experience with UI design.

Our community

• Sugar Labs, a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy is a community of volunteers.

• Sugar is free software; it is licensed under the General Public License (GPL), versions 2 and 3.

Context

3

Learning has a bearing on all of the challenges our children will inherit.

Children don’t get ideas; they make ideas.

They construct knowledge in the context of building personally meaningful artifacts. —Kafai and Resnick

The challenge

going to scale

A child's laptop is...

• Safe and robust;• Light to carry;• Vibrant to look at;• Low power; Used outdoors;• Helps them communicate and interact;• Encourages them to express themselves;• Lets them engage in open-ended discovery;• And of course... inexpensive!

aside

Sugar is a testament to the power and quality of the development tools and processes used by the Free Software community.

The Sugar Learning Platform

Sugar facilitates exploring, collaboration, and reflection and to encourage critical thinking.

Originally developed for the OLPC XO

Sugar is largely platform-agnostic.It can run on almost any computer, even the old, obsolete hardware typical of schools.

It's an education project

Sugar is used every school day by one-million children.

Learning ≠ Windows

Nothing in our children's future resembles office work from the 1970s.

Sugar users

•Sugar “learners” create demonstrations, projects, and critiques. •They develop craft, engage and persist, envision, express, observe, reflect, stretch and explore, and understand. •They engage in open-ended discovery, going far beyond the use of the computer as a means of access to information.

“ถายดอกกระเจียวเห็นไหม”

User-centric design metrics (Nielsen)

•Learnability: How fast can a user learn a new system?•Efficiency: How fast can a user perform tasks?•Memorability: How easily can a user reestablish fluency?•Errors: How often do user make errors? •Satisfaction: How satisfied is the user?

Learning-centric design (Soloway)

Learning: How do our design decisions impact learning?

Simplicity is not the goal

We can use UI design to reduce complexity or to enable the user to reach to complexity.

time

complexityBuxton's Law

God's Law

The culture of Free Software

Free-software developers go beyond consuming; they create and they share their creations. Most important, they engage in criticism. They take nothing at face value.

Learning software must be Free Software

With Sugar:•children create content as well as consume it;•children share their creations and help each other;•and they engage in self-reflection and group critique.

Sugar core ideas

• Activities, not applications• Presence is always present• Tools of expression• Journal/portfolio

Low floor, no ceiling

Sugar places an emphasis on usability and discoverability.

Reading and writing and sharing

A network neighborhood

Dos and many don'ts

Do use hoverDo use consistent color

and icon modelsNo right clickNo double clickNo overlapping windowsNo “eye candy”No 3-D

Guided discovery

to startclearscreen make “box1 1 setpensize 20 repeat 1300[forward :box1 right 91 setpencolor division xcor 6 setshade heading make “box 1 sum :box1 1]end

Collaboration

Journal

View Source

Crumple zone: copy on write

Modifying physics

elif event.key == K_h:

self.setdensity=10

elif event.key == K_l:

self.setdensity=0.1

elif event.key == K_n:

self.setdensity=1

Under the hood

Sugar is built on top of the GNU/Linux desktop: GTK+, X11, D-Bus, NetworkManager, Gconf, Telepathy, etc. Sugar provides data-storage service and presence service through D-Bus (Sugar activities can be coded in any programming language). The majority are written in Python, which takes advantage of binding in the Sugar-Toolkit.

Freedom and empowerment

Sugar is about creativity, fluency, innovation, and problem-solving, all of which involve personal expression.

Sugar bring the tools of expression within reach of children so that they can be free to change their world.

The mantra of the next generation will be “show me the code and I will make it even better.”

Thank you

walter@sugarlabs.org