UI usability for 4 year old (was Re: Call for Papers/Talks/Ideas!)

[John R.Hogerhuis]

Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpgritti <at> gmail.com> writes:


> I have not seen a good analysis of the frame problem yet. For example I know
> that at some point the trackpad jumped to the corners very often, and that
> obviously aggravated it. Also in my experience the thing is nowhere so
> annoying on my work laptop (still using a trackpad), why? Finally, when this
> happen, is the mouse left still in the corner or do kids just touch the
> corner momentarily...
> 

It's not a problem of the cursor moving randomly. What happens to Kailea is
that she'll try to get to the activity menu or the color tool at the top left
hand side. Just due to lack of good control of the trackpad she ends up getting
the popover frame. Once it comes up, she tries to escape the mode by randomly
moving her finger on the trackpad. This doesn't usually work which raises her
frustration level. 

On paint, specifically, a couple of other observations, now that I think about
it: between Kailea, 4 and my wife (an elementary school teacher) helping her,
they had difficulty figuring out how to set the color in the paint program.
Maybe if the color icons had a color rainbow or something it would be more
obvious.

Also holding the button down and dragging as a normal operation (as it is in
Paint) is a tricky concept and physically difficult in terms of dexterity for
my 4 year old (actually it's not all that pleasant for me either given the
button placement below the trackpad). Something modal or pressure based would
be better. If a key on the keyboard held down were the "up/down" button that
would be resolution of the dexterity issue. Though, some thought would need to
be given to make this "discoverable."

> 
> Tomeu managed to reduce startup up time to 2-3 seconds in the faster branch
> using an approach similar to maemo launcher:
> 
> https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/maemo-launcher/README
> 
> If we don't find any blocking problems with this approach, I think we can
> make startup pretty much instantaneous.

I'll try it out. That would be a big improvement.

Instantaneous would be 150-200 milliseconds, but I'd guess anything under 5
seconds would not frustrate her.

> 
> Python was chosen mainly because it's a good development tool for kids. I
> think the few performance problem it's causing are all solvable, it's just
> that no one had time to focus on it until now.
> 

How is that working out in the field? I certainly agree that kids
developing/altering their own tools is a fantastic idea for the >=9 year olds.
Are kids scripting? What is the process they go through to learn the language?

I remember as a kid how I learned BASIC. The computer came with 2  1-inch thick
friendly (lots of cartoons, short example programs) programming manuals that I
devoured in the first 2 weeks I had the machine. Also, they used to have
"type-in" programs in the home computer mags I got for my TRS-80 Color Computer.
I'd type them in but they wouldn't work. So, I would have to walk through line
by line and fix them. Looking at the code while debugging exposed me to
different programming concepts like modularization (GOSUB/RETURN), keeping code
organized for understandability, etc. Further the mags themselves often had
introductory articles on programming, walk-throughs, ...

That challenge is to make Pippy permit natural, incremental, discoverable "baby
steps" into programming. Probably it needs to be highly integrated with html
tutorials and tips Pippy meets Clippy ;-)

-- John.