[libreoffice-design] The future of design suggestions

Hi all,

I am a little unsatisfied with the amount of individual threads going into 
the direction of: "We need a new interface for LibreOffice - and it needs to 
look linke this...".

This is a Free Software Project. As a design team, we will not need to 
convince ourselves about this need to change the GUI (we all agree on that), 
we will need to convince the people actually doing (and financing) it - the 
developers and the companies paying them. 

We will obviously not be able to do this by starting the same discussion all 
over and over again (e.g. Ribbon discussion). To convince the sponsors of new 
software code, we should never argue about personal opinions. A conflict in 
personal opinion is not solvable. And developers and managers of sponsoring 
companies willl have personal opinions as well. These kind of conflicts will 
predicitably end with those parts of the suggestions beeing realised that the 
sponsors like. This again will not satisfy anyone in the end (not us, not the 
users and not the sponsors).

So, how can we make this more productive?

Ideas are good, visualisations are even better. So let us find a way to not 
comment on these, but to collect them with the goal of easy comparision with 
eachother. A gallary of ideas and visualisations of the future LibO. 

We should then try to extract the dimensions these ideas differ on. Knowing 
these we can then again use user-centric methodologies to have the users 
decide about what they like.

With this data we will have much less trouble to convince the code-sponsors 
to go into a certain direction.

So - the main point I am argueing for is a gallery of interface ideas. Easy 
to compare and on one spot. What do you think about this?

Best,
Björn

-- 
Voluntary Open Source Usability: http://www.OpenUsability.org
Commercial Open Source Usability: http://www.OpenSource-Usability-Labs.com


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