Front to back

A great quote from an OLPC spokesman about why some governments are not following through on ordering educational laptops from the OLPC initiative.

"It has not been that processor versus that processor or that operating system versus that operating system - it's been small thinking versus big thinking. That's really the issue.

Change equals risk especially for politicians. And we are certainly advocating change because the [education] system is failing these children."

However, a Nigeria's education minister replies,

"What is the sense of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in, where they don't have facilities?"

Maybe you don't need a seat or a uniform or a roof to engage productively with a computer. Purveyors of mobile computing in developed countries are trying to convince us of that. But other studies say hyper-mobility is a myth: you need somewhere safe and quiet before you can do any real thinking. Maybe it just depends on the person, and the context they are used to existing in.

See the BBC News article: Politics 'stifling $100 laptop'

There's also some great video and a wonderful slideshow of trials in Nigeria.

I'm excited. I've just registered for Designing Interactive Systems 2008, in Cape Town, South Africa.

It's at least partially about interaction design for less developed countries. Here's a key chunk of blurb:

"At DIS 2008 we want to bring together people from different cultures and understand how designs and techniques employed in affluent high-technology environments can be translated to relatively poor environments to be used by people with relatively low literacy levels. Due to the prevalence of cellular handsets throughout the continent, many Africans are now having their first experience of interactive technology. We believe that DIS 2008 will be an important step in understanding how to design interactive systems for these new users."

It's a huge and wicked topic, and I'm looking forward to learning more about it.

For now, here are a few interesting dimensions:

• Emerging economies are big, so designing for them is terribly important. Mobile phone manufacturers have been exploiting the massive growth in emerging markets for at least a couple of years now. In Q3 of 2007 Nokia sold nearly 112 million devices, and reports that sales of handsets in emerging markets have soared. The number of Chinese Internet users was estimated in June 2007 to be 162 million people.
• Some developing economies have developed further than others. Does interaction design really have any relevance to people living on a dollar a day or less? I can't see it. At the base of Maslow's pyramid, people have more pressing concerns. But there are emerging market economies, newly industrialised economies and less developed countries to consider. So its important not to reject ideas that can work well for one group or environment, just because it won't suit others.
• OLPC is a great case study. Is it the biggest, brashest example of ill-informed western ideals meeting "third world" reality? Or will the kid-powered network triumph over geographical, cultural and political constraints and help a new generation to learn by doing? It's interesting to watch.As discussed above, there are some countries where it won't work. Spending money on digital technology makes no sense when you don't have books, a teacher or a reliable source of clean water.
• Opportunities look different in each place. In South Africa, only 8% of people can get online from home. A lot of the population can't afford the high local price of broadband, or the cost of a computer to plug into it. There are a range of interesting results. 3G is more popular, and mobile operators subsidise laptops, as well as handsets. There's also a community that relies strongly on internet cafes for getting online.In Nigeria, where conditions are different again, you can buy a goat and pay by transferring mobile airtime minutes.

So - designing for developing contexts is complicated. Just like any form of design. And the only sound approach is to do contextual research, to make sure really understand the reality of whatever niche you're designing for.

DIS 2008 is at the end of February. I'll blog about what I learn.

On the 12th November, the One Laptop Per Child initiative will begin a limited "give one get one" programme. For $399, people in the USA can buy an XO1 laptop for themselves, and at the same time have one donated for use in a developing country.

This seems to be because OLPC isn't going to sell nearly as many units as expected to governments of developing countries. There was lots of nodding and smiling when Nicholas Negroponte talked to the world's education ministers and heads of state, but not much signing on the dotted line.

A good while back the Indian Ministry Of Human Resource Development rejected the XO1 as "pedagogically suspect." China also rejected it. For both countries, reasons are more likely to be political than pedagogical - but whatever the reasons, they are big markets to lose.

The Libyan government's promised order is not materialising.

"I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written," said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit project. "And, yes, it has been a disappointment."

Competitive pressure

The competition aren't hanging around.

Intel's Classmate is making headway, and the pricepoint is not far from that of OLPC. Intel doesn't want to see the global educational computing market dominated by the OLPC's AMD chips. There are allegations of Nigeria switching allegiance to Intel after some shady dealings.

Microsoft have similar concerns to Intel. They're working on a version of windows that will install on the XO hardware.

Not that there is much XO hardware yet. Manufacturing has got off to a slow start. There are not going to be enough machines to satisfy Paraguay's order by Christmas. (Paraguay loves OLPC - and they are putting their money where mouth is).

OLPC supporters called for a change of sales tactics and a new initiative to "get them out in the market." The belief is that the XO1 laptops will prove themselves once people can see them in action. Hence the "Give 1 Get 1" idea.

I still love this project

I'm a big fan of this project - even though everyone tells me I'm an idealistic fool.

I personally want and XO1. I'm pondering whether to ask my friend in the states to get me one. Why?

• They are wonderful objects, well designed by committed, talented people

• They represent a vision for kid-powered education that transcends politics, propaganda, race, class, poverty and geography. There's power in networks that delivers unexpected, astonishing results. Look at Google, Facebook or the blogsphere. I want to see that happen again. (I think I may be a constructivist).

• In spite of all the controversy no one is saying that the user experience of the machine itself is anything other than wonderful.

A report from research in India...

"Even when English and Marathi are so different, even when the keyboard is in English, even when the interface is in English, even when we don't speak each other's language, and even when they are so new to computers, the XO is so user-friendly that I can manage to get across to them, to show them how to do something with it. And in little time, and having lots of fun, the children of a completely different language are doing this or that on their XOs."

A headmistress in Nigeria...

"You know education is not static. Education changes, and as it changes the world it self changes. The way I passed through education is not to compare with nowadays education. Also children themselves today are more curious than before."

Harsh realities

Well, the debate rages on. And I mean rages!

It looks like a very rocky road ahead for the XO1. All the designers I know in Africa say the XO1 doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell. Life out here is just too tough, they say.

A sobering example: XO1s can run on Solar power. But the networks that support them can't. They need generators.

"From the Nigeria Chapter of the Club of Rome, we learn that the generator has to be stored in the principal's office to prevent theft, requires costly gasoline, and servicing that can take days. Worst of all, the generator broke down, burning out the UPS for the Internet, and its still insufficient for all the power needs of the school."

Ah well. A man can dream, can't he?

Hilariously sarcastic posting from Marc Andreessen (the guy who started Netscape) and now runs Ning.
His point: It may be a bubble - but is that a bad thing?
(Note that because he caters for an American audience, poor Mr Andreessen has had to put a disclaimer on his post pointing out that it is sarcasm.)
I could quote the whole thing. But I shall restrain myself...

"It's a bubble.

A huge, massive, inflating bubble.

We're all doomed.

Doomed, I say!

It's all over.

Stick a fork in it.

It has ceased to be.

The metabolically-differenced lady has sung."

"Entrepreneurs? Smoking dope. What are they thinking? Why aren't they all working for Apple, helping to build a fatter Nano? What's wrong with them? Potsmoking, mussed-hair, rooftop party-going, trendy glasses-wearing, sandal-clad, Red Bull-snorting, laid-getting wankers, the lot of 'em. The sooner they realize the world never changes and there are no new opportunities to pursue, the better."

"You big companies -- you eBays, you Yahoos, you Googles, you Amazons? Yes, and you, Microsoft? Think the new new B2B -- back to boring. What's with all these new products? The world is confusing enough. Shut 'em down and let's go back to the good old days: Windows ME, Mac OS 9, dialup modems, and 640 megabytes ought to be enough for everyone. You're just screwing us all over with all this new fancy broadband video-enabled phone-call-making wifi web-based lightweight touch-interface gorgeous long-battery-life flimflam -- just look at how you keep dropping the damn prices."

He's right- there is money to be made and value to be generated.  But the Web and and tech business is skittish: full of me-toos, charlatans and snake oil salesmen. So there's also time and money to be frittered away chasing the hype.  We're in another "Cambrian explosion" of technology. Much of it will be killed off by the selecting force of the market. Just make sure you're not invested in a species that goes extinct.

The winners will be businesses that understand customer needs, behaviours and motivations and that really work to create easy, useful, delightful products and services.

The whole post is here.

Recently, Joel Spolsky pointed out the brilliantly obvious: the groovy new boxes for Microsoft's next generation of software offer a poor user experience. As Joel points out,

A box that many people can't figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design.

For those of you who want the full details, my colleague Karl Sabino has dug out the official Microsoft help page for opening the box.

Yes that's right. A help page for the packaging.

I'd love to know the traffic stats for this page. By assuming that each page impression corresponds to about 10 minutes of user frustration, we could calculate the total amount of customer time wasted by this nonsense.

Still, I guess we should be thankful that the same designers aren't working on the escape slides for Boeing.

Balancing easy, useful and delightful

Microsoft have recently been talking about the importance of the aesthetic quality of a good user experience. Good for them. It's very important. Beautiful products make us more likely to try them out and, by putting us in the right frame of mind, make us more effective at actually using them.

But this box seems to illustrate the problems of going too far towards the aesthetic, and forgetting the easy/useful part of the equation. It's cute, groovy, cool - but it's a pain to use. And that's not a balanced user experience. That's where the web was back in 1998, and we all thought things had moved on since then.

"It's a business requirement"

Maybe the box is hard to open for business reasons. Perhaps its some anti piracy measure or linked to the licensing agreement.

That's no excuse. If a business "need" inconveniences customers, it needs to be re-thought. Why? Because if you treat your customers badly, they'll treat you badly - asking for additional expensive support, requiring heavy marketing expenditure to avoid churn, damaging your brand with negative blog posts. Which all cost you money in the end. In the words of Colin Shaw, "You get the customers you deserve."

Patching the hole

One thing that Microsoft have done right: issued a "service patch". They know there's a problem with the customer experience and they've done what they can in the short term to take the edge off the problem. They've published a web page. The next step is to stick the instructions to the box, so that you don't have to search the web to find them.

After 5 years of work, OLPC are ready to start rolling out the XO-1 laptop to children in developing countries. Those are the children who live in villages without water, electricity, and sometimes even decent medical care.

It sounds like insanity. And opinion is divided about whether it is in fact insanity or not. Is the XO-1 an imperialistic, American artefact? Will its batteries and screens pollute the environment? Should the money be spent on libraries, and clean water? Will it be used to surf porn? Will it drive black market crime?

The answer to all of those questions is "yes - to a degree". But none of those problems are insurmountable.

The real question is: does anyone want it?

The XO-1 doesn't run Windows: it runs a special operating system of its own with an interface called Sugar. It does have a web browser, PDF reader and the like. But you can't run MS Word on it. Sugars look cute and has some clever thinking behind it. But there's some doubt about it.
One very strong argument says that prospective users in developing countries don't want a "non-transferrable skill". They want to learn Windows, because Windows is what the rest of the world uses, and Windows skills will get them a job when they leave school. This could be a problem. Even though they are now part of the OLPC initiative, Intel is continuing with is Classmate programme - a PC with some of the same characteristics as the XO-1 but able to run Windows. Add to that a massive base of downloadable Windows software, the classmate looks tempting.

But the lack of Windows OS may also be the XO-1's saving grace. The modern desktop interface that we know is a complicated beast with lots of cultural and no-so-easy-to-learn assumptions embedded in it. Windows is ok for kids, but not fantastic. Sugar bypasses those issues. Designed and tested with kids in the real context of use, it's likely to work well because it will fit properly into the lives of the people it's aimed at.

To be a real success, the XO-1 needs to build a community of its own. The children and teachers who use it need to be able to create new things and share with each other. This looks like it could well happen. There are authoring/development solutions called eToys, Scratch and Squeak. And the mesh network allows XO-1's to communciate with each other to pass new ideas and information on.

My money's on it

If the children learn how to make the XO-1 do things that children love - communicate, play and invent - I think XO-1 will be a success. It won't matter if it's an American imperialist plot, or diverts money away from libraries. Gripes about it will be incidental to the market demand for an empowered and empowering, self-oragnising, kid-powered network of many millions of nodes. And controlling it will be all but impossible.

I'm probably an idealistic, techno-centric, Western fool. But I really hope that's how it works out.

My stats show that you everyday user experience stories have the greatest mass appeal. You seemed to like the posting about Delta airlines. So here's another quick one.

I went on a BA flight from Capetown to London recently and was astonished to find the food was very good. They seemed to have thought hard about what they could reasonably do to an economy class meal to make the experience better. They did two things:

1. The made it TASTE nice. Which is, I think we can all agree, the most important thing they could do.
2. They made the packaging look nice. Often you get a mystery meal with a plain foil lid with "chicken" or "beef" dot-matrixed on the top. Here the food packs had pleasant pictures on of what was inside. They were like the gourmet-meals-for-one packaging from a British supermarket. Looking at a tray full of colourful packaging made me feel more positive about the food before I even opened the packs.

Taking a photo of my meal would have required me to leap over other passengers to reach the aisle and my baggage locker. But luckily, it seems others are better prepared. At airlinemeals.net at least 500 people have sent in pictures of their airline meals for British Airways alone. Right.

There seem to be plenty more for other airlines too. Including Aeroflot which features this very special submission on the list:

The Chinese airlines all seem to offer things that westerners can't fathom. But most seem to forgive them, simply because the packaging is so beautiful. As the UX community has (re)discovered over the last few years - people respond more favourably to and have a better user experience with beautiful products.

British Airways have got the right idea. Promise a good user experience with well designed packaging, then deliver against the promise with a tasty product.

Does anyone know of any research about this:

Theory: people sometimes (often?) choose web activities by medium, rather than by content type.

So as well as saying "I want news" people sometimes say "I want photos" or "I want video" or " I want blogs". So aggregating lots of examples of the same medium can be more effective that addressing one genre of content with several media mixed together.

Consider:

• Mail and Guardian "news in photos" site
• Flickr, Youtube etc

Vs. a site like BBC news which mixes video in with copy. (Except they've also got a video and audio section, I note).

Is this obvious? Does anyone have any additional evidence?

I went to 27dinner last night in Cape Town, set up by Dave Duarte. They had cakes with amusing, web-related icing on top. Just like Stormhoek, the idea is that if you give a blogger a freebie to blog about, you'll go far.

Works for me!

Well done Charly's Bakery and well done 27 Dinner.

If you are in South Africa, check out the next 27 dinner. You'll see quite a cross section of Web folk there, talking everything from complete sense to utter nonsense. Take business cards and whiten your teeth before you go.

Thanks to Leisa Reicheld for an onslaught of fascinating links this week.

I was complaining recently that I couldn't cope with the sheer quantity of conversations that the network lifestyle was expecting me to have. Seems I'm not completely alone. This posting sums up some interesting information about the "stalling" growth of the blogosphere and the things that people really find the time and energy to do online.

The blogosphere is not growing much any more. A finite number of people really have time to run an active blog. Because it's hard work having too many conversations. 20% of us are using social networking sites. 13% of us are actively posting stuff. And 52% of us are not participating at all in this hoo-ha!