Monday, October 15, 2007
These are a set of informal observations made while watching my little niece Ganga (she’s about 4 years old) draw a picture on the computer.
- Kids pick up the basics really fast. Having walked my mom and DP through many a confusing day, I noticed that teaching Ganga is not as slow, but different. For e.g. she didn’t understand that the thing you point and click is called a ‘mouse’, but the motor skills that go with it came very quickly.
- She liked to draw and move windows around much more than the online games I found for her. This may be because those games are largely singing and dancing stuff in english, or she might be too young (because frankly I found those games really interesting. Vaibhav and Gauri too when they came here).
- The paint application I used is Seashore. It’s a Mac-only minimal port of GIMP. I use it for editing only because it’s much faster than opening up Photoshop or GIMP on a Mac and it gets simple editing done quickly. However, there are three things that I realized a “kid paint” tool must have:
- A subset of features: a pen, brush, color selection, an eraser, easy undo.
- Much bigger and lifelike icons. A pen for a pen, a brush for a brush. Avoid a dotted rectangle for selection.
- Individual colors put up there on the screen instead of a two-step process to click the foreground color, bring up the window, select the color and then close it. She took a long time to get this step right.
- A quick way to clear the paper (her terminology) and to get a new one. She spent eons rubbing the eraser all over a finished work to get a clear paper and I had to intervene to click File -> New. Menus are beyond her at this point.
- Instant gratification. At one point where she clicked on many items in the dock and the mouse cursor turned into a spinwheel (the mac hourglass) and she couldn’t click anymore, she was really irritated.
- She was fascinated by the fact that you could click and drag windows everywhere on the screen. Add to it my multi-monitor set up and this made for her second-best computer adventure.
- This is what a 3 hour intro to a computer produces:
The whole incident made me really curious about kids & computers. How do you introduce programming for example? Squeak? _why has something called hacketyhack as well. I’ll be keeping an eye on this in the future coz watching kids use computers is really interesting because of the way they instinctively search for new features.
Tags: computers • design • HCI • kids
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Sunday, January 15, 2006
On Microsoft’s redesign of Office 12. I’d seen some screenshots earlier that were really impressive, but it does look a lot like a Mac product now. In fact, so does Vista - the brushed metal look, and the eerily minimalistic feel. The article though, is an
excellent read anyways.
Tags: design • HCI
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Saturday, November 26, 2005
There was a seminar on Information Communication Technology recently at M.G. College, and my mom and DP attended. I helped DP with her presentation there, and in the process, learned something of the topic which I feel I should share.
ICT is another one of those interdisciplinary fields that I feel I can be passionate about. It’s about using technology for effective communication; the seminar dealt specifically with technology as a tool for learning, what you can do with it and its implications. I got a good description of the seminar from my mom (couldn’t attend because I still am driving myself to write a perfect SOP), but first I’d like to go off on a tangent, and share some thoughts on literature analysis that I’ve always had.
Literature appreciation, the kind that goes around in English departments out here, I’ve felt is most often fitting theories to your primary source. The theories themselves are assumptions made by generalizing a large number of texts, and there is nothing wrong with that: it follows the “hypothesize, theorize, correct” chain of scientific research. What is innately wrong though is that appreciation is about analyzing fiction, and that has an incredible level of dependence on the text in question. Fitting Freudian and Jungian themes into character’s drives and aspirations, and explaining them that way seems so incredibly pointless. DP explains this (although she admits its “invory tower research”) by saying that ultimately, since characters in books are based on real people, this appreciation is in effect a study of human life. It still seems an incredibly round-about way of going about it though 
The kind of appreciation I like, is linguistic analysis of texts. I’ve read a thesis by one of my mom’s friends done on God of Small Things. I really liked the way the analysis moved about to point to the effectivness of language. Which brings us back to… ICT.
One of the other problems I believe, with the so-called-experts of this field around here is that while they are up-to-date with the latest of theories, they don’t experiment with them. No controlled experiments around here, folks, just talking and making mountains of debate. Research should always be with a practical goal in mind! Or, it must be to further a definitely stated goal. And it should always, always be supported by valid experiments. This time around, as my main project, I plan to do some usabililty field testing with people and how they use authentication mechanisms. Let’s see how well I practice what I preach 
HCI and ICT seem to be really related fields, and I’d like to do a course in linguistics/communication effectivness/etc. too sometime.
Tags: HCI • language • literature
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Friday, November 25, 2005
I should have posted this sooner, but
Rashmi Sinha’s weblog is a gem of a find.
Tags: design • HCI
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Friday, November 25, 2005
Microsoft and Apple are recognized stalwarts in the HCI and design fields. Yet I’ve noticed they take a distinctly different approach when it comes to designing user interfaces. While both have usability guidelines for UI designers (Apple, Microsoft), they seem to have a distinctly different approach to UI design.
(Note: I am no expert on any of these, and neither am I well-versed in the guidelines I mentioned, nor have I ever used a Mac long). The difference is immediately noticeable when you look at their flagship OSs: Windows XP, while being rich and colorful out of the box, manages to come across as increasingly dumbed-down and staid. All applications look and feel exactly the same. The UI guidelines emphasize conformance more than they do solutions to problems. The good thing about this is that the user is constantly reassured, never does he have to learn another user-interface model. Learning curve for familiar applications is almost zero, and even for applications which do complex tasks like say, 3D Studio Max, menus and widgets remain the same.
Contrast with the Apple Mac OSX: the guidelines seem to serve as very broad directions to the UI developer. Individual applications are left free to come up with their user interfaces. Anyone who looked at a Mac though and contrasted it with an XP interface will be blown away first by the sheer aesthetics of the computer: it’s beautiful, and pleasing, and that certainly doesn’t hurt a user reward model. The important fact I’d like to stress though is that rather than conformance, creativity seems to have been given veto.
Is a learning curve for applications bad? Leave aside computers for a moment. Just imagine an average human being going through his life. He learns to manipulate electronics from as simple as a watch to as complex as well.. a computer ;-), but since we left that aside.. a cellphone. Every one of these devices, from a book, to your toilet flush, to a TV remote to anything has a distinct and different user interface. And we seem to grasp everything either intuitively or with a small learning curve. Every time I encounter a new tap design (and once, I had to push one button and twist it to get the thing going) I learn a new user-interface. While examples such as these might be an argument in favor of conformance, it does demonstrate the versatality of humans when it comes to exploring and understanding novel user interfaces. But, excellently designed user-interfaces - like say the Apple Ipod - is intuitively usable once the learning curve is done. It’s almost like riding a bicycle in some cases: you never forget. It’s a testament perhaps that the most loved music player for Windows ignores UI conformance completely.
How does all of this help my Mom who forgets how to browse every now and then just because I rearranged the order of icons on my desktop? Is non-conformance to any UI model the answer? Hardly. The balance struck by Microsoft (or at least, illustrated by their applications) seems to be incorrect however. Word doesn’t need such a confusing plethora of icons when it advertises itself as a word processor (They seem to have learnt that).
More intelligent and well-versed people than me have thought about this for long. (As an aside, when has that stopped me? :-D) But I’d always be a designer leaning a bit towards the creative end of the spectrum. If only because if ever I learn to design well (and perhaps break the UI model in the process) I can be quite sure my users will understand it, and love the UI for it.
Tags: design • HCI
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