[etoys-dev] The Paradox of Choice

[karl ramberg]

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 5:37 PM, K. K. Subramaniam <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 04 Feb 2012 7:41:36 PM karl ramberg wrote:
>> I read this article
>> http://www.hiltmon.com/blog/2012/02/01/the-paradox-of-choice/
>>
>> It would be fun to hear what other here think Etoys related to choices.
>> Designing a environment as complex and flexible as Etoys is hard.
>> Many problems are left to the user to solve. To get results can be
>> frustrating and bewildering.
>> Are Etoys to complex for users?
>> Scratch is a much simpler system, yet much more used.
>
> IMHO, it is not about choices as much as affordances. Etoys is not intuitive
> enough. It takes a huge leap of faith to connect "eye" icon with the concept
> of scripting. How intuitive is this association? eye->view->viewer->tile
> collections->script->scripting.
>
> When a morph is deleted, it slides into Trash so the effect can be guessed. But
> when Paint button is clicked, there is no animation for the modal easel that
> pops up. This cartoonish easel is so out of place with the rest of Etoys. I
> have seen kids getting confused and continue to work in the onion skin as if
> it were a world. It takes considerable guidance for them to truly grasp the
> concept of painting an object into existence.
>
> Regards .. Subbu

Good observations.

Paint mode is quite confusing. I observed my kind using Etoys and they
had a hard time
grasping that they  had to paint one object at a time. They wanted to
paint the background and all the objects
at the same time.

Getting used to scripting tiles take some time. I remember struggling
with the tiles and figuring out
how to mix tiles from different Viewers together. And that I could
change the receiver in the tiles.

Karl