plasma-mid (Mobile Internet Device)

[Artur Souza (MoRpHeUz)]

2008/8/25 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org>:
> that is understandable. when i compare the current maemo look to canola, it's
> really night and day to me: canola wins, hands down.

  \o/ ! =P

> if you could perhaps share what the goals or requirements are for canola when
> it comes to the look and feel goals, that could help us make sure that plasma-
> mid is on the same page as canola in this regard. is there documentation for
> this online anywhere? if not, would it be possible to summarize in a few
> bullet points the visual and/or interaction design goals of canola?

  Ow, we don't have this documentation "on the wild" but I can try to
explain: we were not happy with the current UI design of maemo because
it was very good for geeks and hackers but it was not very attractive
for the end user (where "end user" means that people that really
doesn't care how things get done: they just want a beautiful and fast
interface).

  So, our design team started doing a lot of research regarding
usability and discovered some patterns. The most noticeable was that
users tend to hold the device as a gamepad (as Marco pointed out) and
try to do everything with their fingers. Another point is that users
just hate waiting for something to load...so what do you do ? Distract
them with nice and smooth animations ;-)

  Regarding graphics, it was obvious that we needed something
beautiful and customizable. I say customizable because end users
_love_ giving a personal touch: this is where themes come in. And if
the user can make it really different (not just images, but
animations), the application earn bonus points =P

  One of the main problems is that we tend to "port" desktop
applications to embedded devices but it just results in applications
with bad usability...so we tried to avoid this behaviour with canola.

  It was funny because some months later, while we were developing
canola2, iphone was launched and proved this points hehe =)


-- 
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Artur Duque de Souza
OpenBossa Research Labs
INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia
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Blog: http://labs.morpheuz.eng.br/blog/
PGP: 0xDBEEAAC3 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net
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