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• why they want to do it,
• why someone else might want to do the same thing (forcing more thoughtful questions to reduce useless or thoughtless questions),
• what they tried before, and
• how do they imagine it could be done more simply and/or more easily explained/shown to another person.

• "Simplicity and understandability" will yield more reusability than "inheritance".
• Next in importance is "representing to the user how the content's relevance to her or him".
• After that in importance is "providing the tools so the user can create labels as handles for easily manipulating what they care about".
• Next is "reliability and reproducibility".
• Then it's more complex "flexibility, extensibility, or abstraction of structure".
• Perhaps last, a representation of what is expected of the user/student & their content by others.

• Don't forget to make Croquet "viral" by making it as easy as possible for all users to share the resulting "product of their excitement" with their friends/associates.

• Blender UI redesign proposal

• Non modality. Usage of 'modes' in software is highly discouraged. It forces a user to change his interaction methods and spend a lot of extra time of working with the UI itself.
• Make non-blocking, always functioning interfaces
• Undo is essential at all levels, to get rid of error messages
• Define and re-use the same core set of elementary operations for many purposes, preferably with hotkeys

Über UI

• the spreadsheet metaphor
• the scrolling (web) page metaphor
• the Squeak source code tile view and e-toy expanding tiles metaphor
• the Outliner metaphor (including source code outliners like Leo)
• the Zoomable User Interfaces metaphor
• the Blender3D user interface metaphor (including Blender's IPO window)
• the concept of "Limits & Boarders" which lead Alan to design OOP
• Wiki and other Groupware / Collaborative applications
• Blogging, syndication, and OSAF's fine grain, mutual sharing data architecture
• and a couple others

• Anything they are looking for is either above, below, or within where they are at.
• Like a spreadsheet cell, morphs or tiles would contain data or a reference to data.
• Sets of cells would/could be giving names as Morphs and Alignment Morphs can.
• Every cell that is a nested AlignmentMorph can be expanded in place to show details or summarized to hide the details.
• Like Squeak classes/morphs, each cell also has its own menu/list of methods that operate on it and its subAlignmentMorphs and menu/list of ways it and its subAlignmentMorphs can be displayed.

Cognitive & Social Principles

• A vast majority of beginning users are sequential thinkers, vs. linear or matrix (directed graph) thinkers.
• Notice how those who use an Internet Browser:
  • Use the Back button more often than the Page's Navigation menus.
  • Use the Page's Navigation menus more often than the Forward button.
  • Use the Forward button more often than the History List.
  • Use the History List more often than Opening a Link in a New Browser window.
  • Toggle between full screen Browser Windows rather than use Tabbed Browser Windows.
  • Use Tabbed Browser windows rather than Browser Windows Tiled on a screen.
  • Use Tiled Browser Windows rather than overlapping them like pages on a desktop partially obscuring each other.
  • Use Search after most of the above fail to return results after about 10 tries.
• Keyboard navigation and control is as important as or more important than mouse navigation and control.
• Most Web page users do not scroll more that one page down from the top.
• A user must be able to find what they want, when they want it in the fewest possible steps and with little or no missteps.
• There is a rough principle of 7 ± 2 for a limit to a user's short term memory.
• Users habituate or "chunk" their frequently repeated actions. It's hard to break those habits.
• Screens, windows, button, keyboards, cursors, mouse buttons, and mouse pointers that switch modes, especially with minimal visible indications of the new mode, place an enormous burden on the memory of the user.
• Modal dialog boxes do not behave like a piece of paper on a desktop.
• Dragging and dropping require careful placement of both the source and the destination of the object being moved before the actual transaction can take place.
• Attention Management - While learning can be enhanced by undirected exploring, it can be hindered by distractions. Sometimes the time allowed for one to explore a domain or learn a concept is limited by external factors. Squeak/Croquet should contain tools that give the student/teacher/user controls to prioritize what is important to view in the immediate future. This includes both what is important to view in order of time and order of location on the screen. This would be in addition to encouraging undirected exploration (oxymoron ?).
• ...

• Cells are known to have properties just as classes. The cell/class properties can be pivoted into view when the non-expert needs them and are otherwise collapsed from the view when not needed. This also implies the importance of the Outliner as a view of the same data.
• Just as the natural Smalltalk data structure for collecting data the collection class hierarchy of list classes, the natural display structure of the spreadsheet is the list. This also shows how lists help preview the debugging with Unit Tests.
  • HttpUnit http://httpunit.sourceforge.net/doc/cookbook.html
  • Cactus http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/index.html
• The visual grid for data entry can allow the non-expert to create a visual list of content before assigning the list to a specific class thereby inheriting the methods to work on the list.
• A spreadsheet can syntactically parse and highlight source code just like Squeak's "tile" view in the System Browser, each tile now being a cell in the spreadsheet. Notice how Squeak's "tile" view in the System Browser preserves the hierarchical nature of the data.
• I suggest that users of PC GUI's functionality suggest three distinct modes of display use. An ideal user interface could have two or more full screen panes to represent the difference between text-only-pane information and the exploring/feedback-graphical-pane (similar to how Squeak projects are each a full screen pane). I'd allow the two panes to interact with each other, including having a whole in one plane to reveal specific content in the other, alpha blending, and sharing links to the same content. The insertion point would be unique to either one pane or the other while command keys apply to both. One can have pre-defined templates that reveal part of a text pane grid superimposed over the graphical pane such as how game developers make a heads-up-display (HUD) superimposed over the 2D or 3D graphical scene. They would share the same keyboard input. This takes advantage of TeX type functionality.
• Text doesn't shrink very well on a CRT, and even worse on LCD, for rapid visual recognition due to fixed pixel size. Also bright colors and complex patterns have a detrimental effect. Therefore, almost all text should be kept on the plane displayed on the surface of the display. This should have no z-buffer. Use grid placement such as web pages to separate and group content. Since the keyboard is the quickest content creation device, this first, display-surface plane would mostly function for searching, grouping, prioritizing, content creation and some establishing relationships between content.
• This could be extended by adding a third 3D pane for simulations and storytelling about a process.
• I’d abandon the common row/column ($AC$12) naming convention of spreadsheets for a new one similar to named cell ranges.
• The advantages such a grid format has over the window layers that Morphic provides is
  • the reduction of occlusion
  • the sense that whatever one needs to find is either above or below the current focus
  • one doesn't need to bother about where a value appears and what it looks like if that degree of fiddling is not needed
  • like outlines, grids can be collapsed to only show a row with just the view's name or collection's name. Morphs are more sensitive to where the minimized title bar can be found and what will be covered when brought into view
  • outlining can easily be added to the grid model
  • as more fields are created rows can be added or filters applied by "filling in the blank" or inserting a column/row; contrasting the exponentially increasing time to adjust eToy-tiles/connected-graphs/connectors or add more pages to make more white space
• Graphics are always aligned by a grid of Cartesian coordinates as well.
• Hiding links of grid to remove "bars of a jail" feeling.
• Music scales on grid. How would one represent music theory?
• Midi composition & Video editing is done on grids.
• New rows below appended below all prior content build on and easily link to and reference back up to prior content cells above.
• Goals of the environment should be included as a part of the environment.