Newstand by Berenice Abbott, 1935

In print design, the expression “above the fold” dates from an era where broadsheet newspapers were folded in half and piled up in stacks in front of newsstands, showing only the upper-half of the front page to potential customers. If an article or a picture did not appear “above the fold” on the paper, it might as well have been invisible to potential customers. Putting a sexy photo or a gripping headline “above the fold” was a way to drive up sales.

From the very earliest days of web design, that old term “above the fold” was appropriated to allow designers to discuss which page elements would be visible to users without their having to scroll the page. You see, way back in the 1990s it was generally accepted as fact that many everyday web users rarely used their browser’s scrollbar — it was even thought that some users didn’t even know how to scroll at all!

These days it seems hard to imagine millions of helpless computer novices wondering why so many articles on the web seem to end abruptly halfway through, especially now that everyone and their grandmother uses the web (well, except, apparently, John McCain). But things were different a decade ago. Many users had only owned computers for a few years. Few people had ever bought anything online or posted a comment to a message board.

Since then, however, it has become clear that people do, in fact, scroll their web windows quite a bit. Usability tests of all kinds have shown this. Our old fears of content below the fold being lost forever are no longer valid.

This does not mean, however, that “above the fold” is obsolete. It has just become a little more nuanced.

For one thing, despite the fact that users can and do scroll web pages, the first impression a web page gives a user is still critical. Before the user can actually get around to scrolling a page, they are already getting a instantaneous impression of what they see. This instant is dominated by the above-the-fold design elements. If you want something to grab your user’s attention, even on a subconscious level, it obviously helps to put it above the fold.

Also, when you are talking about those specific page design elements that appear on every page in a site — navigation, cross-promotions, related items links, etc — these items will appear repeatedly to the user every time they go to a new page. Again, being above the fold makes those elements more prominent in the user’s mind.

That being said, I still don’t see the fold as the critical factor in designing for web page prioritization. The underlying objectives of these two examples (to expose users to important content and features) is entirely achievable through other, traditional graphic design techniques other than simply placing things “above the fold”. Size, color, positioning, typography — there are ways of calling something out besides putting it at the top.

In fact, we should start thinking of “the fold” as something other than a hard line with an “above” and “below” portion, and we should stop thinking of the vertical positioning on a page as equivalent to priority. Scrolling up and down through a web page is a fundamental aspect of the web user experience, and there is much more to it than simply seeing what’s on top and then gradually seeing everything else.

When scrolling the New York Times web site, for example, the above-the-fold content (here shown as Zone 1) certainly contains many of the page’s most critical elements. But as you scroll through the page, the landscape changes. It’s not just a stack of elements of gradually-decreasing importance. Instead, the scrolling experience is punctuated by elements of clear high-importance: the video in Zone 2, the belt of featured stories in Zone 3. Even Zone 4, the page’s “links ghetto” has a distinct identity of its own.

Scrolling down the page, then, is an opportunity to view the page as an unfolding temporal event, not as a static snapshot.

I’ll often find myself in design meetings where someone says they want Element X to appear “above the fold”. Some designers may wince at the expression, but in reality the client is saying something fairly straightforward: They want Element X to be prominently displayed to the user. If the holistic page design can make an element stand out on the page while the user is scrolling the page, even if it is below the fold the design can succeed in that goal.

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I am thoroughly enjoying the debut crop of iPhone Apps — a welcome improvement over the (mostly) second-rate half-baked apps available in the Jailbreak era.

Here are a few imaginary apps and functions I wish I could be using right now.

1. Batch Sync

Most New Yorkers with iPhones will recognize this scenario: You get on the subway and decide to catch some headlines on NetNewsWire, or maybe you want to catch up on the last hour or two of tweets on Twitteriffic. But when you open up each app, you find yourself looking at the same headlines you were looking at ten hours ago — the last time you launched the app. And now you’re underground and it’s too late to sync.In fact, many subway commuters have learned to practice a little ritual where, on their way to the train station, they launch each of these apps one by one just to sync the data so that when they go underground the data will be there ready for them.

“Batch Sync” is my solution. It’s simple an icon on the Home screen that, when clicked, launches each and every of the apps the user wants to synchronize with the cloud.

I realize that this app is probably impossible unless Apple does it themselves: Wisely, Apple does not permit any third-party iPhone apps to run in the background, a privilege reserved exclusively for a select number of Apple’s own apps (Mail, iPod, etc). But I can imagine a scenario in which Apple permits third-party apps to run in a limited way in the background, under specific user request and control: First, they can only sync in the background — no other functions besides syncing is permitted; and second, only if the user grants those apps specific permission to sync behind the scenes (or on demand) on a case-by-case basis.

This could most easily be done via a Preferences panel (a checkbox list, for example, listing all apps that offer the ability to sync automatically. UPDATE: Allegedly Apple is working on this, but no current apps seem to use it.

2. WiFi Switch

I turn my iPhone’s WiFi antenna on and off fairly frequently (to conserve battery life, for example), and it’s a pain to have to drill down into the System Preferences every time I want to do it.”WiFi Switch is a simple app that will provide Home-screen-level access to toggle WiFi on and off. That’s all it does — you click it and it turns WiFi on, click again and it turns it off. The icon could even change color to reflect the current state.

In fact, I sense some promise in the general idea of having a Home screen icon that simply switches some iPhone service on and off. There must be other uses for such a model.

3. A Decent To-Do List.

All of the current options really suck, IMHO. They’re either bloated GTD-crazed apps where it takes longer to write down and classify most tasks than it does to actually do them, or they are misbegotten piles of bad visual design, non-standard iPhone UI elements, and thoughtlessly inelegant user interaction design processes. More on this later.

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Last.fm’s announcement that they will be allowing their users to listen to full-length versions of millions of music tracks is one of the final nails in the coffin of the traditional recorded-music industry. Owning music is dead. The new business model for making money in the music industry is simple: Design a better music distribution system. Or, simply put, build a better user experience for music listening.

Which, interstingly, is how the enjoyment of music has always been throughout the centuries, with the singular exception of the century recently passed. Live musical concerts and performances have always been about more than the sounds in your ears: It’s also the experience of the venue, the culture or subculture of the audience, the smells and tastes. This also applies to live radio, including satellite and internet radio. Both live performance and live radio focus on putting value on (i.e., charging money for) the experience around the music — on the curation, the immediacy, the communal feeling of listening to the same music as dozens or even millions of other listeners — not on the ownership of the recording itself.

In fact, the ownership of recorded music will someday be seen as a weird historical anomaly, born during a decades-long spasm of corporate enthusiam about — and complete control over — the production and distribution of recorded music… a phenomenon in its death throes now that, finally, the ability to record, copy, and distribute music has trickled down into the hands of everyday people.

The era in which one could buy and sell recorded music lasted only about a century, from the early days of the phonograph in the late 1800s to the emergence in the 1990’s of illegal file sharing and now, in this decade, completely legal free distribution of recorded music. We are back where we started: paying for experiences, not for artifacts.

Today’s digital music scene is about experiences. iTunes, for example, is not so much a tool for organizing your music collection as it is a complete media experience platform: It’s the tool to listen to and organize your music, of course, but with the store integration, partnership with your portable player, accessibility to other users on your network, sharing with your TV and home stereo system, it’s become far more than a simple media player.

Last.fm takes it further: Are you listening to something you really like, and you want more? Well, right there on the page, the page that is playing the music, are a dozen different ways of exploring that music further: Talk to other fans, read about the band’s history, view recommendations based on your own listening habits, listen to artists that are intimately related to the band you’re hearing, find out about new music that came out just today.

Valuing Media

Kevin Kelly recently wrote a really insightful and thought-provoking piece about how the value of copied media can be measured:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

In the case of music, the “stuff which can’t be copied” is (among other things) live, performed music. Kelly’s piece explores a few other ways that stuff can be valuable without being copyable — it’s a great read, please check it out.

Last.fm actually hits several of Kelly’s values dead-on, including Accessibility (the ability to tune in from any browser and not be tied to your own hard drive), Patronage (the artist is getting paid by Last.fm, something that many listeners want to know is happening), and Personalization and Findability (Last.fm was literally founded on the idea of making new music findable through personalized recommendations).

Rhapsody was on the right track, but their catalog lacks the kind of Web 2.0 community-generated depth and recommendation tools to make listening to and discovering new music such a delightful experience. On Rhapsody, AFAIK, you are renting access to a database that allows basic browsing by artist, genre, etc. That’s it. It’s fundamentally still about paying for temporary ownership of music.

But as I said, it’s not about owning the music any more. It’s about providing easy and fluid access to the music, exposing you to new music you will like, immersing you in a music community, and making the listening experience as entertaining and interesting as possible. Ownership is no longer an issue. Today you pay for the experience of a product which, in the peer-to-peer era, you can always get in raw form for free or nearly free.

In the future competition in the music industry, such as it is, will consist of better and better ways of competing, essentially, with old-fashioned radio, nightclubs, and concert halls. Last.fm gets this.

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A follow up thought to the user personas discussion among Steve, Jared, Joshua, me, countless other people, and in particular to Peter Merholz’s thoughts about the value of personas created through design team conversations.

Let’s begin with a simple premise that I think most practicing UX designers would agree with in a heartbeat: The worst possible way to employ user personas in a design process is for the designers themselves to have no role in the creation of the persona documents themselves.

Or to put it another way: It sucks when the creator of the research artifacts is not also the designer of the product. If personas are created by a specialized “research team” and then handed off to a specialized “design team”, that design team doesn’t actually experience the substantive benefits good personas can provide.

This is true because, in my view, the primary benefit from creating personas is bestowed upon those who actually make the artifacts, via the thinking, collaboration, and conversations that occur during their creation. The best insights emerge during the investigations and discussions about the data.

Typically we think of a research-based design process being boiled down to a simple equation: “research + design”. I think this model is too simplistic. To me, there are three steps, not two, in any good research-driven design process. Between researching users and designing a product there is an additional critical step, something we all do but don’t recognize as a distinct stage in the design process: research interpretation.

The creation of compelling and useful research artifacts, whether personas or modemaps, mood boards or mental models, is a process of interpreting plain data into meaningful structures and systems that are sensible and useful to designers. It is a synthetic and analytic process at the same time. It’s a creative process. It is a design process.

The Second Step

Let’s look at these three components or stages in a research-driven design process, in particular the second step:

1. Gather research data
2. Interpret the research
3. Produce the design

Ideally all three steps would be conducted by the same team, with the same individuals doing the data collection, documentation, and design work. This is easy when the whole team is made up of skilled designers with good research skills.

But on some projects good user research doesn’t yet exist. Someone will need to conduct surveys, observe users, run tests and analysis, interview domain specialists, and do all kinds of of direct, primary research.

Meanwhile on other projects the research may already exist, in great quality and quantity. The only real research necessary is for the design team to ingest these pre-existing reports and data into their design process.

In either case, however, the second step needs to be taken. Somebody needs to transform the data into something that lays the groundwork for the design.

Getting Creative with Research isn’t a Bad Thing

For example, when we create personas we make editorial decisions about how many different types of users we will define. We may choose to represent several types of users in our group of personas. As an example, let’s say for a news web site we define the following four primary personas based on how dedicated they are to visiting the web site:

• The Temporary Visitor
• The Occasional Repeat Visitor
• The New Subscriber
• The Long-Term Subscriber

Does this breakdown of users not immediately suggest a navigation scheme or a UI design model? Doesn’t it seem likely that all four of these user types will want their needs addressed in some explicit way on the web site, something that manifests itself in a big way in the final design?

But what if we chose to define them this way instead, focusing on their content desires rather than on their devotion to the site?:

• The Sports Fan
• The Political Junkie
• The Concerned Parent
• The Well-Rounded Person

Would this alternate way of thinking of users and of interpreting the data not have a fundamentally different effect on the subsequent UX design process? Wouldn’t the resulting designs be different from the design that came from the first set of personas? The data behind these personas may be the same, but the effect of the interpretation of that data on the rest of the design process may be profound.

There are many other ways, of course, to structure a set of research-informed user personas from the same underlying data. My contention is that this process of transforming data is right on the edge, and maybe over it, of being a design process. Sometimes a dataset may reveal clear design solutions (if 30% of your users speak only Spanish, you may want a link to en español somewhere pretty obvious), but more often than not these kinds of structures are far from obvious in the data. Usually it demands creativity and abductive thinking.

Todd Zaki Warfel likes the phrase “Data Driven Design“. I prefer Data Inspired Design. Data-driven implies that the best design solutions are inferred from or deduced from the data, like Michaelangelo removing David from a block of marble. I don’t think design happens that way, even when data is deeply integrated in the design process. In my mind, the data exists to inspire the designers to new ideas, to point them generally in the right direction towards a solution. Not to provide the solution outright.

This is where interpretation comes in. Interpretation and inspiration. This is the magical part of great design, the part where being a good researcher isn’t enough and where being a good designer isn’t enough. It’s where the designer understands research, and where the researcher understands design.

To be a good designer or a good design researcher, you must master the second step of interpretation.

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The following is in response to an interesting and thoughtful video and essay by Edward Tufte, posted on his blog/site, in which he argues, among other things, that many of the applications on the Apple iPhone do not adequately take advantage of the iPhone’s screen resolution and its compelling and easy-to-use zoomable UI paradigm.

In one specific case, he advocates replacing the iPhone’s Stocks application user interface with one that displays immensely more information in the same space. He critiques the Stocks app for the cartoonish UI design that wastes space with useless decorative graphic design.

You can see the iPhone’s Stock app and Tufte’s suggested solution side-by-side here.

I submitted the following comment to his site, but apparently Tufte doesn’t seem to think my critique is interesting enough to warrant passing through moderation :-(. So I am publishing it here on my own blog:

You are neglecting the fact that iPhones are *mobile phones*, designed to be used primarily by people on the go, or by people who are otherwise occupied. The cartoony UI screens are designed to be usable by people who are walking, talking, riding on a train or bus, waiting in line, bored in meetings, and (unfortunately!) while driving.

Typical iPhone usage lends itself well to the information-thin designs you criticize precisely because it does not attempt to do more than deliver the most important information in a heartbeat. The “image resolution” style of information design you advocate is great for someone using an iPhone while sitting in a comfy chair with lots of time on their hands, or for someone who posesses no other information platform (i.e., no desktop or laptop computer). But for most users, they will use the iPhone to informally keep their finger on the pulse, and use their main computer to actually think about and analyze data.

There is no need whatsoever for someone on their way to work or waiting in line for a sandwich to know what a stock is trading at down to the third decimal place, or for them to see a historical sparkline. In fact, I would contend that 90% of the benefit of the stocks app is in the colors alone — even if there were no numbers at all and just red and blue boxes, the design would be effective.

I find it ironic that Tufte is actually advocating the addition of more information to the screen, something which would seem wholly out of character for him. I suspect this is because he is thinking about the iPhone’s UI as a graphic design challenge, not as a component in a larger lifestyle-based user experience. He doesn’t view the iPhone as the object of delight that most iPhone users I know find it to be, and instead he sees it as a straightforward challenge of graphic efficiency. IMHO, he’s overlooking the most important part of the user experience.

Resolution

I also want to add that Tufte’s focus on the word “resolution” is revealing. He praises the iPhone itself for its high-resolution screen. He seems to extend the word’s meaning, too, in an intriguing way to include the fact that the iPhone’s zoomability effectively and elegantly increases the available screen resolution without adding what he calls “administrative debris” in the form of scrollbars, etc.

These are great thoughts, but is he playing with the meaning of “resolution” deliberately, or is he simply impressed with the iPhone screen’s dots-per-inch? Perhaps another view into this question is through Tufte’s insistence on posting his video as a 56-megabyte Quicktime file instead of as a one megabyte YouTube or Vimeo enclosure. He apparently cannot bear to post this video in a low-quality streaming video format, preferring crystal-clear resolution over ease and speed of use. This seems to relate directly to his more general fetishization of “resolution” as the saving grace of all screen-based communication.

From all of this, I am not getting a strong feeling that Tufte is up to speed on how we do things on the Internets these days.

If this is Tufte vs. Jobs, this one goes to Jobs hands-down.

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I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to justify a desired result), and (c) runs against what I think to be effective design methodologies.

I’m beginning to think my distrust runs even deeper. So deep that I fear I may be gaining a reputation as a “research curmudgeon” who’ll always have a knee-jerk dismissal of any new or clever techniques that pass under my nose. This may be true — I may be overly skeptical sometimes.

But now I think I can explain it with a little more nuance than before, and offer a new and largely positive perspective on research as part of a design process.

In the past, my scorn for user research has been aimed at everything from baroque user persona proceses to no-duh eyetracking studies. The latest technique I reflexively scoffed at is “modemapping” (pointed out to me by David Armano), a technique developed by Stuart Karten Design. Thinking more about the potential uses of modemapping made me realize that my scoffing was not directed so much at the technique itself, but that, instead, I have a deeper problem with the formalization of design research in general.

First, what is modemapping? Well, it’s not so much a research gathering technique as it is a method of interpreting data. To produce a modemap, researchers first interview and observe users (no differently than they would for any sort of primary ethnographic research). Then they use the data to diagram each user’s behavior on a timeline-like chart. The resulting “modemaps” visually distinguish between different types or modes of activity a person may find themselves in during a given timeframe, such as during a typical weekday.

To someone like me, a lover of information graphics (and in particular of timelines), modemapping did have an immediate visceral appeal.

When I thought a little more about modemapping, however, I asked myself: Could the observations gleaned from these modemaps really be any different from — or better than — the observations that a good researcher could have gleaned simply by conducting the interviews, reading the transcripts, and watching the videos? Is this just a way to spend an extra week or two of research budget to develop fun graphics? Is this just infoporn that looks hot but doesn’t reveal new information or insights about the underlying data?

But then I realized that this kind of seemingly-pointless abstraction is exactly what I do when I make a jump from facts to ideas, from thinking to designing. For me it’s not the diagram or the artifact that matters. It’s the process of making the diagram that produces innovation. The most powerful design insights do not simply emerge from the diagram for any third-party viewer to read as if they were reading a billboard. More likely the design insights enter the mind of the diagram-maker while they are assembling it. The final modemap artifact simply serves as a tool to explain the designer’s inspirational process to other people (non-designers, especially, but also to other designers) in the hopes that the customers of the diagram (whether they be clients or collaborators) may understand the merits of the design. The diagram may even, in fact, be let incomplete or even discarded upon completion if the design insights may be better expressed through another means.

My Design Process

When I am designing, I almost always do tons of research first. But at some point I will start doodling and sketching different ways of making the data mean something. I try to visualize and organize the facts into systems. I’ll go through dozens of quick and wildly different sketches of how the data might fit together, almost always with no idea of how the sketching process will end up.

Quite frankly, much of this time might even be spent staring into space and just thinking, visualizing the data in my head. Sometimes the resulting sketches will resemble or even closely conform to known data interpretation techniques such as mental models, flowcharts, affinity diagrams, Venn diagrams, quadrants, and many others. I’ve probably used half the techniques in the visualization periodic table without even knowing it.

The “not knowing it” part is where my user research curmudgeon-ness comes in. I have a passion for letting my mind wander freely and letting it discover revelatory and meaningful visualizations. Rather than letting the visualization lead my idea process, though, I let the idea process generate the visualization. Because I prefer this way of thinking and designing, I have an immediate disdain for any methodology that purports that a particular data interpretation or visualization technique is the right one for a job. How can a great designer know what tools they will use before the design process begins? They simply can’t.

It’s a fundamental quality of design thinking, I suppose, to let the ideas determine the process. What veers us away from design thinking and towards (for lack of a better term) business thinking is the formalization of a research and research interpretation process. Instead of asking researchers to bask in the data using whatever methodology suits their temperament and idiosyncratic thought process, commercial design culture often asks the design researcher to fit their research into a proscribed process, in this case the “modemapping data interpretation machine”. The techniques themselves don’t demand this — the demand for pre-planned processes comes from business constraints where customers need to know what they are paying for.

This is a real conundrum for the research-minded design thinker who needs to keep to a budget: How do you sell a research-based methodology if you cannot say for sure what research-interpretation method you will use? How do you productize or justify the value of “staring into space for a few hours thinking about the problem”, or “sketching in a moleskine for a few days”?

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In today’s Times, I read a story that included a fallacy that I’m pretty fed up of hearing: The accusation that web-based news and journalism is overly brief and shallow, that it caters too much to the short attention spans of ADD-addled youths, and that the web is ushering in a new era of crappy journalism:

[Panasonic President Toshihiro] Sakamoto said he has a “dream” of seeing a newspaper presented beautifully on a television. (I hate Internet news, he said; it’s just a series of small sound bytes and quick updates. He’d prefer to see the entire paper).

I have to ask: Exactly which InterWeb is he looking at? Certainly not the one I am used to getting my news from.

My entire experience of Internet news has been deep and substantive, the polar opposite of this stereotype. All of the major news services have moved gracefully and effectively into the Web, IMHO. The most avid news consumers, too, now voraciously consume online news, including the new citizen journalism of blogs. So why does this myth persist?

I mean, it’s not like there’s any evidence. Newspaper web sites include not only the exact same full-length stories featured in their print editions, but they usually also contain tons of deeper content than their paper counterparts, such as background information, raw reporter’s notes, news from other news services, plus more photography, audio, and video. Even TV news web sites run AP and Reuters news stories, not to mention uncut transcripts of their TV reportage, and go far, far beyond anything they show on the air.

Web news is everything print news and TV news is — and more. There’s simply no way you can argue that Internet news isn’t in every way superior in depth and quality to the news delivered in other media.

The only reasonable conclusion I can make is that people who argue this don’t actually read news on the web but want to sound like they do. Maybe they watch short videos clips of news stories now and then, or read the home pages without clicking to read the actual articles. But they can’t possibly be reading real news web sites and contend that the journalism is lacking in depth and quality compared to other media. I suppose they can’t even conceive that the real news on the web is delivered in a traditional but time-consuming medium: Words.

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The One Laptop Per Child, officially known as XO, is now appearing in people’s mailboxes. The unboxing photos are up on flickr. The OLPC buzz is hot!

But I’m a little sour about it. It feels like I have read nothing but breathless praise for the design and implementation of the devices, both the hardware and the software. Mixed with the kudos there have been some critiques of the methodology and pedagogy behind the whole project, questioning the idea of giving laptops to third-world kids in the first place and criticizing the designers for arrogantly avoiding user research and for not testing the device with real third-world kids. But even the harshest critics of the project seem to have nothing but praise for the design and even for the usability of the devices.

So why am I not excited? Well, to put it bluntly, I find the positive reviews of the UI design extremely hard to believe. From what I’ve seen, the UI bears all the hallmarks of a user interface disaster, a case study in designer-driven design. I don’t understand why the whole UX world isn’t awash in skepticism over an OS that looks all the world like a Microsoft BOB for the Wallpaper* set.

At some level I suspect there is a certain degree of reluctance on the part of user experience critics to stand up and say something bad about a project whose objectives seem so noble and generous. Maybe it’s a “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” thing.

So I have a challenge for UX pundits and professionals who are also proud new owners of the XO: Say something nice about the Sugar UI. Or say something critical. But talk about the user interface for real, in detail, and don’t hold back.

Don’t just talk about how awesome the project itself is, about the great minds behind it, or about the clever hardware and the cool mesh network functionality. Talk about the usability of the software. Think of how the design might be different, how it might work better.

I’ve not actually used an OLPC yet (I hope to very soon). I have seen a lot of screenshots and videos, however, and have used the emulator a little bit. But even the screenshots give me a deep, gut feeling that something is very wrong with this user experience. To wit:

• The game-like and oft-abused spatial metaphor, suggesting that the relative positions on the screen are where other people actually are in the real world.
• The circular menu — a darling of academia, unproven in any real-world context. As with the spacial metaphor, I think this idea has promise, but seeing it on the XO tells me that the designers simply want to prove a point.
• The idealistic and haphazard usage of language-agnostic iconography, which falls apart at every turn whenever words become unavoidable, defeating the whole point of using icons.
• The frequent lapses into a menagerie of half-baked and crappy open source user interfaces.
• The exposure of hard-core programming tools to extreme novice users (especially the choice of the ubergeek language Python!).

And, oh, those icons!

I can’t get over the creepy similarity between the Sugar UI’s icon for a person and the internationally-familiar “skull and crossbones” symbol, in particular its incarnation as the icon for minefield warning signage. Wealthy first-worlders might not see it this way, but if you live somewhere where minefields actually exist, and where children have been injured and killed by them, this might not be such an extreme connection. Not to push this too far, but the military term for a minefield/landmine is “UXO” (unexploded ordinance).

I hate to come across as bitter or petty here — I am actually quite sympathetic to the idea that technology can play a big part in the education of kids living in poverty around the world. I actually hope to be able to read some convincing arguments that the Sugar UI is great. In particular I would love to hear that it can and does work well for third-world kids.

The key word here is “convincing”. So far, much of the design commentary has been praise based on the pedigree of the team behind it — MIT Media Lab, Pentagram, Fuse Project etc. I want to get beyond that and talk about the UI itself and how people use it. Of course, this may take a while to emerge as the devices make their ways into the hands of children around the world. This is obviously a developing story.

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