[Educators] [Server-devel] TUE Total User Experience

[Yama Ploskonka]

By all means.  One problem that I am finding in the way to success with 
OLPC is that somehow reports on the end-user experience are not coming 
across, and there is little or no interaction with end-users to improve 
on the OLPC experience.

I correspond with the Localization and Server lists, and OLPC News, and 
privately with quite a few OLPC folk, and I keep noticing very dedicated 
teams and individuals working in their sides of the project.  Yet 
extremely little is coming from the actual classrooms, from the end-users.

I am totally convinced that this is not because we have solved all 
problems and our users are totally satisfied and there is nothing more 
that needs doing.  It is very clear, actually, that we have not achieved 
such a level of success yet.

It is a fact that teachers, students, parents are not communicating with 
developers, unless there are channels I and many others are not aware 
of.  Besides this evidence, I have actually and after much effort 
managed to talk to a teacher in Uruguay.  Not being at liberty to share 
details I can merely mention that there's much to hear from them (I read 
they are not allowed to talk to the press, and I want to respect that).

Is this important?  Well, communication and getting the OLPC users 
involved in their own education is part of the core, the very purpose of 
the whole project, unless I am very mistaken.  So far, it is not 
happening.

Do we need to make it happen?  I should think so.  I do think that 
everybody, in any of the deployments, can honestly say that the task is 
not yet done - that is part of what makes this an exiting thing to be a 
part of.  So far, it is the developers who voice opinions, and a bunch 
of dedicated outsiders like I.  Unless we get the end-users in, this is 
just benevolent cultural colonialism.

Total User Experience uses a holistic approach to evaluate and improve 
through feedback what is the interaction between the user and 
technology, in this case the OLPC XO.

I know this sounds like another ugly buzzword, but I am rather curious 
on what we can learn by actually designing our communication channels to 
receive that feedback.  It is more than anything a matter of the 
usability of the full OLPC experience, rather than just the usability of 
eToys or even Sugar.  What is learned in this way would hopefully become 
quite useful when it comes to implement ever more successful 
deployments, since eventually OLPC should be generating communication, 
sharing and creation of knowledge, should it not?

Apologies for a long and somehow rambling note.  Hope we can move on 
from here to practical matters, the elementary ones being
	-	why is it that teachers do not communicate,
	- 	how we can fix that.
Then, when they are communicating, hopefully we can center in more 
mundane issues of usability to improve on them.

Yama





Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Yama Ploskonka <yama at netoso.com> wrote:
>>  I believe that a TUE approach could help.  Please advise.
> 
> Hi, could you please elaborate about what is TUE and how that could help here?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Tomeu
>