All in all, a mixed Christmas here. Both Megan and I have had bad colds, mine culminating in a temperature of over 100 degrees last night. It broke (I hope) about 4am but still, it didn’t make for an ideal Xmas. Naomi has also been unwell suffering from a 3 day headache and sickness brought on by a combo of being pregnant and the fact that when Megan wakes up in the night she only wants her Mum. My son Anthony and I were also shocked to hear that yesterday morning my ex’s (Anthony’s Mum) partner had had a heart attack!! They released him the next day with a battery of pills but it was still a bit of a shocker. Of course the most terrible event over Xmas was the ongoing disaster in South East Asia. I’d urge everyone to help as much as they can.
In slightly more upbeat news, Megans Nan bought her a ‘Leapster’ for her Christmas present. We were unsure how much she’d get out of it as its a fairly advanced toy and not one she was used to playing. However, her experiences mastering DVD/VC controls and a PC interface (sort of) have obviously given her a good grounding in the world of interface design! She got straight into it and was soon playing away to her hearts content. Her ability at the games was also pretty jaw dropping, showing us a level of perceptual ability we just didn’t know was there. Sounds a bit silly maybe but it was a real lump-in-the-throat moment. Its very difficult sometimes to see a measure of the progress your child is making, especially when the potential is masked by autism and things like this are a God send.
Speaking with my designers hat on it was also fascinating to see how easily Megan navigated using the animation based interface. It all serves to convince me even more than pictures and animation could well form the core means of addressing the needs of perceptually and learning difficulty based users of web sites.
Left Brain Right Brain 
I’m with you on the leapster thing – Beth got one for Christmas from “santa”, and she’s also proficient with navigating the device. I think simplicity of UI entirely depends upon the intended user market – I sometimes can’t fathom out interfaces at all, but my kids will be able to use them immediately – perhaps as educated adults we have trained ourselves to not see the obvious and look for other kinds of pointers in navigation? Interesting topic whatever the answer is!
“perhaps as educated adults we have trained ourselves to not see the obvious and look for other kinds of pointers in navigation?”.
Could be Sam, could be. I suspect that people who are in our line of work are not typical interface users. I know I look at interfaces with a more webcentric point of view than I should.
It is a fascinating subject and one I’m trying to follow up and document with Megan as my ‘test case’. She (as a person with autism) simply doesn’t ‘interface’ with the world in the same way as NT (neurotypical i.e. you and me) users and her narrow band of sensory data processing certainly is more accomodating of visual and animatory interfaces than textual ones. I suspect (but don’t know) that the same is true for a lot of users with a sensory or learning disability.