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Hi Charles, hi Andrew, all!

Charles, thanks for the explanations ... although I wasn't able to
reply, I've read some of them at work (of course, during an official
break *g*). Very well explained, thanks!

Here another take ... and by the way, I read the remaining mails in this
thread. So Andrew, I might refer to this or that you wrote after this
mail.

Am Freitag, den 28.10.2011, 09:05 +0200 schrieb Charles-H. Schulz:
Hello Andrew,

2011/10/28 Andrew Pullins <android2772@gmail.com>
[...]
we are starting from scratch here. yes the UI that Mirek has come up with
looks very much the same as his "Citrus UI" but that is the way it should
be(or at least if we decide to go with Citrus[which we should.])
of cores the interface that we have today would not be good on a tablet. I
have talked to a few people that USE pages on the ipad a lot at my church
to
make their sermons, and they have said that you can do too little in pages.
they want more tools with the tablet suite. they also say that because of
this they make there documents on the computer with M$ word. so some of the
curent UI should be put into the tablet suite.


I think it would be very interesting to collect even more granular feedback
on what they dislike with Pages from these people, do you think you could do
that some time?

Yes, some qualitative feedback would be nice ... some hint: don't ask
for the features they miss, ask for what they wanted to do and where
they experienced problems. And, after finishing the interview, I suggest
that you ask what other office productivity suites they use - otherwise
its very hard to compare.

Why this approach? Because normal users always tend to answer they need
certain features, although they never use them ... it might sound
cold-hearted from my side, but here we need to protect them to fiddle
around with their choice :-) I once summarized that for OOo Renaissance:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Renaissance/FAQ

(Sorry, wiki is down ... once it is back, you'll find something like
"Does adding functionality hurt?")

- Designing an interface won't be everything. You can draw a beautiful
 mock-up, but if the design/UX team does not translate it into
 specification(s) it will remain a nice mock-up. Developers do not
 know what to do with a mock-up, it can only be an illustration that
 gives a general impression.


what kind of specifications, from what Mirek and I have done so far what do
the developers need to make it work? from what I have done it it I can see
only one or two things that would need more explaining, which would be that
when typing the document the contextbar and maybe the top bar would hide
and
when press the bar that remains it would reaper.


Oh... We are very, very far from even 20% of the job of a specification
here. Here's a link that I found on a blog, it does not give you the precise
manual to write a specification, but it gives you at least an idea of what a
specification should contain:
http://boadweelaw.com/blog/2007/02/15/how-to-draft-a-specification-or-requirements-document-for-a-contract/

Thanks for the link! Andrew, for LibreOffice, being an end-user software
for *many* people, we finally need to cover more. But let's explain that
step by step ...

A mockup or a blog post is great to transport an idea - to get interest
by other people and to make sure that those people see the potential.
But for the implementation (which is more than development) you need to
involve a lot of people.

Besides the explanations in the link above, you'll finally need
accessibility, translation hints, QA details, "edge-cases" behavior,
potential migration issues, ... 

Don't get feared :-) Turning an idea into a feature needs a bit
experience, but isn't black magic ... for example, when I did my very
first contributions for OOo, I "simply" reviewed a lot of specifications
by the Sun developers (Some years later, I was told that almost everyone
in the Hamburg offices knew me for that ...). Did that help? Yes,
because I did not knew the topic too well (like a new developer), so I
hinted towards missing / incorrect stuff the author simply assumed to be
known.

Back to the topic: A specification (or more relaxed: a whiteboard page)
for a rather complex feature serves as a hub that connects all the
different teams. André and I did a presentation on the LibO conference
explaining exactly that ... and you might be surprised what we need to
make sure that even tiny features work right from the start:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/cgi_img_auth.php/e/e6/2011-10-15v3_LibOCon_Non-Hacker-Tasks_Schnabel-Noack.pdf

Here is André's specification proposal:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/User:Andreschnabel/Spec_Calc_grid_lines_on_colored_background


As you can see it's a full document that's needed, it describes very
precisely each interaction of the UI. By the way, since what is needed is
-at least for LibreOffice on the desktop- only one or two UX feature at a
time, the document does not need to be overly complex and long, but you
still need to have a specification describing everything, the layout,
aspect, behaviour, intended goal of the feature, dependency,etc.

Andrew, my proposal to you is to pick a smaller feature - maybe
unrelated to Citrus, so that it can be really implemented (maybe an Easy
Hack?). How about doing that together ... with all the people on this
list?

Christoph, do you happen to have a specification template?

Yes and no ... you already linked a whiteboard page, but we don't have a
template yet (because we did not decide on anything until now). André's
spec (see link above) was one proposal, my whiteboard pages (some of
them) also contain similar elements. A really great resource to get an
idea about "enterprise ready" specs can be found at the OOo
Specification Project:
http://specs.openoffice.org/

However, this might be overwhelming ... thus my proposal to do this
iteratively on this list :-)

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Christoph


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