Re: Encourage correct use of styles (was: [libreoffice-design] Line Spacing Button)

Hi everyone,

2012/1/19 Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>

> Hi Graham,
>
> At 03:09 19-1-2012, Graham Lauder wrote:
>
> > On Thursday 19 Jan 2012 00:22:11 Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> > > At 03:47 18-1-2012, Andrew Pullins wrote:
> > > > Im for the one button being a drop down, iv been wanting this to be one
> > > > button for some time. to me the slider/button with a slider drop down
> > > > sounds like a bad idea.
> > >
> > > My main concern is whether new UI widgets are keyboard accessible and
> > > screen reader accessible. A slider is a bit more complex for a screen
> > > reader user.
> > >
> > > A more general question raised by all those toolbar buttons: how can
> > > we modify the UI to encourage the correct use of styles (as opposed
> > > to direct ad-hoc styling)? Does anybody have ideas about that?
> >
> > Stop people from using MSO first :)
> >
> > Take styles out of the tool bar or replace it with an indicator ie It
> > shows
> > the styles in the present context but clicking on it opens the stylist
> > pane
> > rather than allowing styles to be applied from the dropdown.
>
> I find it very important to be able to see what style is in use at the
> current editing location (that is what I hate about the MS Office Ribbon:
> as soon as you leave "Home", you can no longer see what the current style
> is unless you open the Styles panel or the Apply Styles panel), but opening
> the Style pane when you open the Styles drop-down list sounds like a bridge
> too far for me. Keyboard focus would need to be handled very carefully for
> blind users and other keyboard users. It is also potentially confusing for
> magnification users, because not all magnifiers follow the focus when a new
> window, pane, etc opens.
>
> I would think opening the style pane would discourage more users from
using styles, since the user could no longer apply a style quickly without
a huge pane taking up his precious screen real estate.

Fonts and sizes are features that, in most situations, should be done with
styles rather than hard-coded. My advice would be to change the font
drop-down into a font icon and decrease the width of the font size icon
(right now, it takes 6 decimal places, and LibO can only go up to "999.9"
anyway) to decrease their prominence as well as allow room for more
commands on the toolbar. Furthermore, these two items should be moved after
after "bold", "italic", and "underline", as those are used more commonly.

That's not really a solution, though. Styles need to be cleaned out.The
styles drop-down needs previews. The style drop-down needs to be made more
powerful, as powerful as the style pane: a user needs to be able to add and
edit styles from here. In my Citrus UI proposal, I have a separate style
drop-down for each selection type, so it's easier for users to distinguish
whether the style they're applying will be applied to the paragraph or just
the selection and so that they can access more styles easier. I also
applied a color to the buttons, so that they're more prominent and easier
to target.

>  Have the stylist pane docked by default on the right for left to right
> > text
> > flow. Left dock is too intrusive for normal work flow. Symphony does this
> > rather well.
>
> Yes, I like this. (In LibreOffice, I typically have the Navigator and the
> Styles and Formatting pane docked above each other on the left).
>
>
>  Do away with "Default" template and have multiple available templates at
> > install. First run then would have a "choose your normal template" dialog
> > something like the "Master Pages" dialog in Impress but with an obvious
> > "create your own" option. That would show off basic document elements
> > such as
> > Title, Heading, sub head, text body, para indents, font faces, list
> > styles and
> > page styles and maybe headers and footers.
>
> Sounds good, but many people configure Impress so it doesn't start with
> the wizard; they might do the same with a similar wizard. If you only run
> this wizard on the first run of Writer - as you seem to be suggesting -
> that should be OK. The trick is then to make the concept of styles as clear
> as possible.
> (I'll come back to this when I have more time and ideas.)

I would leave wizards out of this: if a user just needs to create a simple
document, it only serves as an annoying barrier, not as a helpful feature.
If the user chose to not show it again, he might also have trouble finding
it again when he needed it.

Document themes would solve this brilliantly -- let's hope they get
implemented. See http://blogs.kde.org/node/4515

>  Install a large wet rubber glove that jumps out of the screen and slaps
> > them
> > when they try to format on the fly.
>
> I would prefer electric shocks through the keyboard - think of Stanley
> Milgram's "obedience to authority" experiment ;-)
>
> For most use cases, hard-coding is actually the better option than styles,
since it's much faster. (If the user suddenly realizes he needs to
italicize and underline all the bolded items in his document, he can just
use "Find and Replace".)

>  OK trying to code the last one might be a bit of a challenge, but it is
> > something that would be an excellent behaviour modification tool. ;)
>
> LOL
>
> Best regards,
>
> Christophe
>
>
>  Cheers
> > GL
>
>
> --
> Christophe Strobbe
> K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
> Research Group on Document Architectures
> Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
> B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
> BELGIUM
> tel: +32 16 32 85 51
> http://www.docarch.be/
> Twitter: @RabelaisA11y
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