There's a good
Business Week article with a slideshow that's worth checking out. It talks about the Graphical User Interface (called Sugar) on the famous laptops (XO and the "one laptop per child" program is an idea that arose out of the "failure of standard attempts to use computers in education to improve the lives of underprivileged children")
To quote the article, "Typically, a handful of computers, designed for business applications, are installed in schools; students only use them in special computer classes and are forced to share. Negroponte's idea was to give a laptop to each student that he or she could take to every class and bring home at the end of the day. "OLPC is child-centric, designed to be a seamless part of their lives at home, at school, and in play," he says."
What is shocking to me is that they apparently did not do any user testing. This goes for both the hardware and the software. The article quotes John Maeda as saying,"They're backed up by John Maeda, a user-interface design guru from the Media Lab who has been watching the XO development process from its beginnings. 'They're using the Steve Jobs method,' he says, referring to Apple's famous chief executive and design whiz. 'You don't use focus groups. You just do it right.'"
Will they have guessed what underprivileged kids want and how they behave on a computer correctly? We'll find out in the next few months...
