Re: [libreoffice-design] Design Tenets Proposal

2011/6/17 Scott Pledger <scottpledger2005@gmail.com>:
> Hey all,
>
> 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

I only have one comment to your e-mail: you use the word "user"
several times, but THE user is something impossible to define.
It is a fact of life that you cannot please everyone, and a great
design for some people will be a disaster for others so first of all
we need to define the "user CASE".
An invoice is not the same than a technical manual, and a technical
manual is not the same than a scholar's essay full of old ligatures
and typographical variants.
So ideally we would need a UI flexible enough to adapt to as many user
cases as possible, then identify the elements needed for each user
case, "group" those elements on different "user case UIs" and finally
provide a way to switch from one user case to the other.
That's a HUGE, almost impossible task...
The alternative (but I think it should be the chosen path) is to
provide a flexible enough UI that it is easy to configure and have a
"reasonable" (yes, we need to define "reasonably") set of default
values to start from so each user can quickly build what they need
without effort and without costly "learning curves".
Cheers
Ricardo

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