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| Illiterate Street Children Teach Themselves The Rudiments Of The Web |
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posted by Editor on Monday September 17, @11:39PM
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According to this BBC article, a researcher in Delhi, India, installed a computer on the wall of his office facing a slum and watched what happened. Children in the slum were intrigued by the icons on the computer, and completely without any help, gradually figured out how to use the computers and access the Internet. At first, they thought it was just a TV, but then they figured out that cursor changed to a hand shape when they brought it close to an underlined word, after which they discovered that they could change pages. After about eight minutes, they were actually surfing. While this was just an isolated experiment, the results show that while current user interfaces may be baffling to adults, children adapt to a new system far more quickly, and will really exploit the system to get the most out of it.
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< A "Graphical" Command Line Interface | Survey Of 100 Headmounted Displays > | |
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If children can pick up new WIMP user interfaces easily (which, frankly, fits my experience watching 3-5 year olds use PCs), I doubt they need something "easier-to-use" than WIMP.
WIMP beat out CLIs because they were "easier to use", but if WIMPs are "good enough" on the ease-of-use front (as this study somewhat implies- once 'oldtimers' die off), wouldn't this also imply that a post-WIMP interface would succeed due to some entirely different advantage?
--Greg
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The point is that the interface should be *easy to start learning*. You should start getting results with the first few steps you make, and go from there. Learning a CLI requires a lot of initial effort before you can do anything at all, if you are starting from knowing nothing about computers.
Anyway, these children didn't really learn the WIMP interface at first. They started off by learning the Web, which is about as simple compared to the whole menus-checkboxes-taskbar-dialogues thing as WIMP is to a command line.
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Ed Avis
Finger for PGP key
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