Sugar and spice for the $100 laptop

I was reading this article from Business Week (.com) about the face of the $100 laptop. I’ve been spending a lot of face time with the laptop lately, as part of the course we’re doing about the social, educational, and technological issues associated with the device. The article highlights some of the criticism about the design methodology behind the laptop - namely the lack of user testing on the target demographic. Although this will change, to date this hasn’t been a primary goal. That’s upset a lot of usability testing people (myself included) and of course the all time usability guru, Jakob Nielsen.

From the article:

Jakob Nielsen, a user interface designer and principal in the consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group, falls into the critical group. While familiar with the design of Sugar, Nielsen’s criticisms focus on the process. It’s only in the coming weeks that they’ll begin to get feedback from kids. “It’s always dangerous to release any product without the safeguard of user testing,” says Nielsen.

The response to this, from design guru John Maeda:

They’re backed up by John Maeda, a user-interface design guru from the Media Lab who has been watching the XO development process from its beginnings. “They’re using the Steve Jobs method,” he says, referring to Apple’s famous chief executive and design whiz. “You don’t use focus groups. You just do it right.”

Although I disagree with the mention of focus groups, many of us that are concerned about usability know how useless those can be, I do think there is something important here. I’ve felt for a long time that it’s unlikely that user testing alone can ever make something that’s truly great. Truly great things shift the paradigm. The best thing you can accomplish with usability testing is to create something that is good, but not great. Usability testing and empirical observation are useful tools to improve designs and fix problems, but you have to start somewhere. Consider the state of the Mac OS before the Jobsian revolution. It was a usability testers dream. Apple cared about usability, and it showed. They did controlled, iterative, evolutions of the operating system. The result was that the design worked, but it ultimately was leading to stagnation. There wasn’t the opportunity to introduce creative new designs.

Admittedly, perhaps, the olpc project has started a little later than they should. Still, sugar is designed to be so different and unique that perhaps getting the details right, before testing, makes a difference. Not every idea test well in the big picture, sometimes details need to be finally wrought to get a sense of the success and the impact.

It’s actually kind of refreshing to not kowtow to usability. Usability testing doesn’t always get things right, and it offers competing suggestions that can lead to a large number of different design decisions. One can imagine (although I don’t know if this is true) that the start menu was a result of some user testing. How does the user know what to do, where to go? Oh I see, “Start”, that must be where I start doing things. The problem with this is that the knowledge imparted by writing “Start” is actually useful, and it probably does kick start the first use of the system. That knowledge, however, is only useful exactly one time. After that it is useless information. A bad usability test would demand that it always be labeled start simply to avoid the initial first use breakdown. Twenty seconds of confusion makes people uncomfortable, but it isn’t necessarily bad.

The XO surely has a few moments like this. Sugar is simple, you only do one thing at a time. Sharing between applications (activities) occurs at the software level or the networking level, not so much the user interaction level. This makes metaphors like drag and drop less dramatic. They are used in applications, but the metaphor isn’t ingrained into the system.

“We’re trying to use as many references as we can to the physical world so it will be easy for kids who haven’t used a computer before to use this foreign thing,” says Lisa Strausfeld, the Pentagram partner whose team is working on Sugar.

What’s interesting here is the insight that our file and folder computer metaphors aren’t based on the physical world, they are based on the 1980’s office world. My office doesn’t even work like that! I can’t remember the last time I put a file into a folder. The idea that this metaphor is any more natural or intuitive than sugar’s is silly. If anything Sugar gives us the opportunity to explore simpler, more primitive, and more human styles of interface design.

We’ll see how they work later.