Notes from a Planning Session

[Carol Lerche]

Thank you for sharing this discussion.  Upon reading it I had two questions.

*Sugar.*   I have seen offers on this list from a class ofuniversity
graduate students to do usability testing.  Maybe someone responded to them
privately.  (That would have been perfectly appropriate.)  But in reading
the portion of the planning discussion about APIs and sugar, I was struck by
the unstated assumption that the sugar interface is unquestionably a good
thing.  Where is the usability testing with children of the age groups OLPC
targets that proves that this is so, in comparison with a more conventional
desktop model?  In watching 5-6 year olds use the interface for a week, I
was struck by sugar's complexity in pursuit of simplicity.  It was a
difficult interface for the children to learn.  Too many steps, including
going among different screens.  Perhaps I am wrong.  But I would like to see
the same care in usability testing for younger kids that has been given to
ensuring that all the underlying components are written in Python and thus
potentially modifiable by the oldest target audience.  Please point me to
the usability studies I have missed.

*Networking:*  how much of the problems still outstanding with the mesh
could be addressed by "throwing money at it", i.e. sending commercial APs to
the small schools not currently using them.   If this addresses the most
pressing problems in the most common use cases, wouldn't it make sense to do
so, given the opportunity cost of devoting engineering resources to the mesh
issues when so many other problems vie for this time?

Carol Lerche



On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:

> Dear devel@
>
> cjb, marcopg, tomeu, myself, and several others conducted a 2-hour
> planning session this morning. I've created a transcript of that
> discussion [1]. If you're interested, please review the questions that
> were raised and contribute your thoughts. (FYI: The end goal of this
> effort is a convincing written statement of where we want to go in the
> next four months, why we want to go there, and how we intend to get
> there.)
>
> Michael
>
> [1]: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/August_planning
>
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>



-- 
"Always do right," said Mark Twain. "This will gratify some people and
astonish the rest."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20080410/8c125436/attachment.html>