[sugar] FW: Touchpad XO

[Don Hopkins]

Mary Lou Jepsen wrote:
> The idea was simply to have labels, and I agree about the ambiguity - and it
> has been pointed out that there are 4 possible x's and 4 possible o's on the
> laptop.  
>
> Unlabeled right and left hand mouse buttons are ambiguous.  Many don't know
> right from left (I'm one of those).  
>
> What are better labels?  It may be too late for B3 - but please suggest
> something that's easy to convey to the kid: simply which mouse button to
> press to get something to happen. 
>
> - Mary Lou
>   
At the game developer's conference, Miyamoto gave the keynote address 
and discussed the design of the Wii remote controller and the evolution 
of Nintendo game controllers.

Nintendo uses  the letters "ABCD", and the change they recently decided 
to make was to make the A big and green and in the middle, so there was 
never any doubt about which button to press to get started.

Some Sony people stopped by the OLPC booth and mentioned that the Sony 
game controller labels the OLPC beta unit was using might cause some 
problems if Sony's legal department ever found out about it (which they 
will, if they haven't already). It's extremely an extremely proprietary 
trademark, like the Nike "swoosh" logo. Somebody from OLPC said that was 
a known issue but was ok because it was going to change and the current 
laptop was not for commercial production.

That raises the question of: is there any real advantage of using Sony's 
button layout and labels? One possible advantage is that it's 
"universally" recognized. But these laptops are intended for an entirely 
different "universe" where they might not be widely recognized. So it's 
questionable if there is any real advantage to using the layout in the 
hope that users might already be familiar with it. I don't think it's 
intrinsically a well designed set of button symbols (the symbols are 
easily distinguishable from each other, but there's no natural ordering 
or obvious directionality, while the real value comes from the money 
Sony's invested in making them "universal" for some definition of 
"universe"). I had to play a lot of Parappa the Rapper before I could 
remember the directions of each of the button symbols it displayed on 
the screen, but it would have been easier if there was some kind or 
ordering or mnemonic to help remember which button was in which direction.

Would there be any point in Sony "donating" their trademarked design to 
the OLPC project and allowing the OLPC to use their button symbols and 
layout for free? (Personally I don't think so -- it would be a 
meaningless gesture for Sony to "donate" the promise of not suing OLPC 
for using their design, when OLPC could use simply a better design and 
Sony could just donate money instead, which would be much more useful 
and ingenuous.)

I think Nintendo's button design is more insightful than Sony's, and 
possibly even less proprietary (or easier to apply the same important 
ideas to another design: use symbols with a linear ordering like 1234 or 
ABCD, and make one button obviously different and more important than 
the others, so the user can easily differentiate them and know how to 
start).

It would be cute to use "X" and "O" for the buttons, because it's the 
name of the laptop,  and they map nicely to "Cancel" and "OK". But you 
have a point that there are already "X" and "O" buttons which might 
cause confusion. Does that rule out all letters and numbers and symbols 
on the keyboard? How about geometric shapes (other than the set 
identical to Sony's)?

I agree that it should be easy to give instructions for operating the 
buttons verbally, so it would be helpful to distinguish them in multiple 
ways, like color and shape as well as symbol and position.
Would it be any more expensive to make the buttons different colors? I 
think that would help, but it might raise the price, or be easier to break.

    -Don