I'm neither a child nor a teacher, so this opinion is personal : What you want to avoid is having the user decide "my intent has been ignored", when in fact it is something "under the covers" that is delaying the completion of his intent.
The best way I can think of to avoid the user making a wrong decision is to give him "feedback" whenever the XO enters a condition perceived as "as yet, nothing seems to be happening". -------- You are probably asking about situations where responsiveness is expected in seconds (let educators determine how long a wait needs to be to cross the threshold into "too long"). What I believe is needed is showing "Yes, something *is* happening". Many operating systems use the cursor appearance to tell the user "working on it". [Eye candy might distract the user during unavoidable waits.] If confirmation takes "too long", the user might end up confused. For example, I restarted an Activity from the Journal (no longer remember which one); nothing seemed to be happening, so I used alt-tab to switch to an existing Activity; a while later, while I was viewing its screen, the XO suddenly transferred the display to showing the screen of the new Activity, which had finally started. [A change to supply an unmistakable confirmation of "Activity starting" has been described -- I wish it were available now.] -------- Harder to endure are the situations where it can take minutes to do something. I am (and I expect others will be, as well) too impatient to sit still and wait for these to complete - I'll switch my attention to something else, and will need to be informed of what became of the thing I was waiting for. [For example, I believe that if connectivity to a server is lost -- recovery might be soon, but also it might take more than five minutes.] I believe there should be an ongoing indication (e.g., slow blinking of a front panel light) that unambiguously shows the user "I'm slowly working on this", with a specific how-it-concluded indication when this "working" activity ends (e.g., light goes off for "connection given up for good", or light goes steady for "connection properly established"). [Shutdown is an example of where I feel the XO is a "drag" - it takes me 40+ seconds. I don't know if "closing the lid" while the screen is still lit will cause problems, or if before packing up the XO I have to just sit and wait until the screen goes dark.] mikus (running G1G1, not emulator) _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
