Scott
On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 13:49 -0600, Scott Pledger wrote:
One thing that I've noticed is that we have a lot of great redesign
proposals floating around, but we have yet to establish a true direction
for
the Libre Office platform. Someone recently posted this video (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4 ) which really made me
realize
the importance of having specific long-term goals for software design.
Therefore, I wanted to propose a few simple goals that I think
LibreOffice
ought to have for its design as we move forward (maybe even for the 4.0
release) as well as the basic tenets that I think we can use to help
achieve these goals. So, here we go:
*The Goals:*
- *Make LibreOffice easy to use while retaining its power.* This is
by
far one of the biggest complaints I have when I suggest that my
clients use
LibreOffice - they don't understand where things are in the
menu/toolbar hierarchy. The best example of this is page margins.
The
easiest way for a lot of my customers to find this is through the
right-click menu.
- *Lead current trends in technology, don't just follow.* LibreOffice
retains a layout that was first commercially phased out about four
years
ago. While the Menu/Toolbar paradigm is an excellent way of
displaying
program features for less fully-featured software and smaller screens,
but
let's face it - most desktop screens are no longer small and
LibreOffice is
extremely full-featured. Instead of copying another office suite,
let's
pave the way for others to build on.
- *Help people to be more efficient.* This is really important if we
want to get LibreOffice used in more businesses and schools, and is
ultimately the best way to get any piece of software adopted.
*The Tenets:*
- *Allow users to focus on the content, not the UI.* The document
viewport should never change size or lose/gain visibility due to
pop-up
dialogs or toolbars. The only exception to this is menus, as users
expect
these to overlap their document. One major subset of this should be
live
previews. For instance, you have to click through Headings 1-10
individually to see what the differences are.
- *Everything should be accessible within 3 clicks, not just the 'most
common' features.* This will help reduce the clutter while increasing
users' mastery of the software.
- *Consistent UI areas (not features) across all individual 'apps'.*
Keep the UI as consistent as possible without sacrificing the
features/functionality of any individual app (Calc, Writer, etc.).
- *Value context over comprehensiveness.* Users don't need to have
table
tools up and at the ready when they only have text in the body of a
document
selected.
Let me know what you think of these and, in particular, how you would
change/expand on these. This is just a very very rough draft (and very
well
could be repeating itself or incomplete) of things that I see , but
ultimately LibreOffice isn't any one man's software, but rather
everyone's,
so I invite everyone to put some thought into this and please reply to
this
so we can come up with a general UX direction for this incredible
project!
Scott
P.S. Sorry for the re-post - I sent this just before the list changed
addresses, so I'm re-posting it with the new one!
You brought good points about what our underlaying philosophy should be
with a good focus on the users. The point about consistency across LO so
users find the same look and feel everywhere is important.
To some extent everyone using menus is reusing the systems first used on
the Apple Lisa and first Macs (which may have been very similar to the
Xerox originals). I forget where the keyboard shortcuts came from but
they also are based on old system used in the late 70's and early 80's.
As far as UI, my concerns are not do something because someone else is
doing it. We should try understand the reasons why others are moving to
different UIs not copy them. If we believe those issues are true with
our UI then we are probably looking at similar solutions done by others.
Then we should study the other implementations for their good and bad
points. MS and Calligra have some very interesting ideas about the UI. I
think Calligra has a better idea but I do not think they executed very
well. And after reviewing the issues we may decide both MS and Calligra
are going down wrong paths and we must develop another or refine the
current UI.
There appears to be a lot of ideas coming out of the Linux community and
from the netbooks and tablets about UI. Some will not work for us
because of the technical requirements and how the LO is used.
--
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com
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