On Dec 27, 2007 8:18 AM, David Malouf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I would love to see someone who has the device slap it down in front of > their kids (if they have any) don't tell them a thing and see what happens > over the course of days and weeks and video tape the whole thing. There is > the child observation project in Berkeley which has a ton of cameras for > just such testing. It would be amazing to do that type of observational > research on the tool.
I think this would lead to interesting, but distorted, results. Here's the point: nobody uses these things in isolation. They're used in the contexts of classrooms and homes where adults are present. They're given by people with knowledge who share some of that knowledge to get the children started. They're shared with other children, possibly around the world, who share a pool of knowledge. If you strip away that context you miss the crucial success criteria. It's like taking a car from the showroom floor and complaining it doesn't go anywhere because you didn't put fuel in its tank. Putting one (mistake) in front of a single child (mistake) without saying anything (mistake) would produce such a compounding of errors that you'd still likely get irrelevant results. Or perhaps you'd reduplicate some of the work that's been done on childrens' explorative learning methods, but is that what you want to find out? (I think Allison Druin did great work in this area, see http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/ for what she's up to now.) I see now that I've really soaked in the Papert sauce, despite never taking his class. Blame six years at the Media Lab. Peer learning and peer teaching is such an important and fundamental part of my thought processes that I forget others don't see things that way. I cited Amy Bruckman earlier because she was a friend and I've thought her work was brilliant for over a decade. You can also look up some of Mitch Resnick's publications (he was her advisor and Papert's student) or any of the other work in that group if you want to learn about these ideas. I'm not prepared to say there aren't universal principles of design; Fitt's Law still describes the time to move a pointer to a target and so on, regardless of whether the person moving the pointer is me, my kid, or a person who's never seen a computer screen and pointing device before. What I'm saying is that it's not important to the last situation as it is to the first. The original point of this thread was about usability and its relationship to the (possible) success of the XO. My argument is that the universal principles of design we operate by aren't relevant to this success/failure, not that they don't exist. The challenge "say something nice about the design" written by someone who hasn't used it and isn't in the target audience is an expectation that the UI would somehow conform to adult, western, single-user notions of goodness. This is not an iPod - never was, never will be. The nicest thing I can say about the design is that I have to fight my kid to get him to relinquish it. I hear similar stories coming back from real-world OLPC deployments. If there's a usability metric that trumps that, I have yet to see it. --Alan ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
