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Ricardo

On Sat, 2011-06-18 at 10:46 +0200, RGB ES wrote:

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


I agree about the users will need to customize the UI for their
particular needs. This is one area where MS made a mistake with the
Ribbon. It is not that easy to customize by the user. On problem I have
noticed with many users is they will not experiment with many of the
features of any software package once they get past a limited period of
learning. They will solve problems often with an awkward work around
never realizing there is much easier way to accomplish the task
available. In fact most users I have seen never modified their tool bars
in the older MS Office suites. The problem is how make users aware that
these features are available and if they need to use them regularly they
can customize the UI to include them.

-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com

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