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OLPC team shows off UI design

UI designers from the OLPC Project gave a live demo of the OLPC's Sugar UI at …

At the keynote for the recent UX Week conference in Washington, DC, designers from the OLPC Project and Pentagram Design gave a live demonstration of the laptop's Sugar user interface, including a "zoom" spatial navigation system and its extensive collaboration tools. Using a handheld video camera to relay the screens of four on-stage laptops to the audience, presenters showed Sugar running smoothly on actual XO hardware.

Sugar is based around the idea of abstraction and social networking, UI designer Christian Schmidt said, with four zoom levels available. He referred to these levels as relationship spheres, characterized by trust and organization. The lowest level is simply the working application, which takes up the entire screen. Moving out one level, users can see their "XO" avatar surrounded by a ring of currently running or shared applications. Schmidt called this the Home Sphere. At the third level (the Friends Sphere), the user's icon is surrounded by icons for trusted friends. Fully zoomed-out, all users on the mesh network are shown as a Neighborhood Sphere, sorted spatially in a kind of overhead community view. Since only four machines made for a relatively lonely Neighborhood, presenters showed a sped-up Flash demo of the Neighborhood sphere, with XO avatars flying between active activity icons as the users switched between tasks.


The Sugar interface displaying the XO avatar.

The XO avatar becomes an important part of this system when customized with inner and outer colors, since collaboration is built into all of the Sugar applications (or "activities," as the project prefers to call them). By choosing to share a document, image, or file, it becomes visually available to any friends on the network, and its icon takes on the color scheme of its owner. The team showed off a word processor document being shared and simultaneously edited between the laptops, with changes appearing instantly across all four screens as they were made on one laptop. They also shared PDF documents and pictures taken with the integrated camera between the devices.

Instead of a traditional file system, the laptop uses a "journal" that is time-based and non-hierarchical. Applications will save file objects to the journal automatically. The journal shown had sorted entries by dates in plain language, such as "today," "yesterday," or "last week." It also included icons for the users that contributed to the object, a preview of each object, and integrated search and filters for locating specific objects. Launching new applications, grabbing objects from the clipboard, and switching between zoom levels is handled by a "frame" that appears when the mouse hits the edge of the screen. During the demonstration of collaboration, clipboard objects shared by one person also appeared on the other laptop screens for pasting or manipulation.


The Sugar web browser

The team answered a few questions from the audience, which, considering the venue, were mostly design-oriented. Unfortunately, many questions were simply referred to laptop.org. The presenters commented on the use of text in the interface, stating that the laptops will probably only ship with one localized language installed due to space constraints. Plans are in place for applications and storage to be provided at the school level, and the laptops will also cease to function if taken away from the school server for too long in an attempt to prevent theft. They also confirmed that plans are in the works to sell laptops at a higher price in developed countries in order to subsidize them in developing countries.

Overall, the demonstration was impressive from a design standpoint, although the educational aspects and project criticisms were basically glossed over. There are still a few remaining UI elements that seemed overly complicated, such as a color picker in the drawing activity with hue and saturation controls, but on a purely technical level the XO looked very easy to use, and its collaboration features were extremely impressive.

Channel Ars Technica