Re: [libreoffice-design] LibreOffice Design team IRC chat

2012/3/19 Stefan Knorr (Astron) <heinzlesspam@googlemail.com>

> Hi Mirek,
>
> > I've had a conversation with Alexander Wilms on IRC today and we've
> decided
> > that it would be productive if the whole Design team could meet on the
> IRC
> > to discuss relevant LibreOffice UI/design topics. We could start with the
>
> Actually, it would be a great idea if we could meet on IRC on a
> weekly/bi-weekly basis. Maybe name it something like "Let's talk
> design." (which conveniently abbreviates to "Ltd.") and set (a)
> topic(s) before we meet. How do you feel about that?

I agree.
The Gnome design team works on IRC only, and they're very productive.
Should I create another Doodle poll that's more generic and includes all
the days of the week? Is there a way to duplicate a poll on Doodle or do I
have to write in the time intervals again?

> Secondly, there already is a Whiteboard on the topic that Christoph
> started some time ago with many pointers to bugs etc – see [1]. I
> guess we should use that.

OK.
The page looks like it needs a bit of clean-up, though -- for example, why
are suggestions listed under "Current state", and what is the point of
"Further information"?

> Thirdly, often times we miss the basis for what we do here. With
> everyone going into the direction of touch-friendliness here, it's
> easy to steer LibreOffice into even larger inconsistency. What we
> need, clearly is some sort of HIG, else we might actually make
> LibreOffice worse. This is not to say that we need a completely new HIG,
> but we need to
> either copy/paste the pieces we like from others (it still need s to
> be conherent) or need to adapt a pre-existing one that covers what we
> need.

OK. I started a wiki page for it [1]. It's a good topic for our upcoming
IRC chat -- we'll put items in the "Tentative design" section only after
we've discussed them.
There are several things I'd like to talk about:
a) Converging the keyboard+mouse and touch input -- especially important if
we want to target hybrid platforms, such as Gnome 3, Windows 8, and, of
course, the Web.
b) Avoiding double-click [2] -- fortunately, single-clicking is the
standard on the web and on touch-first platforms (Android, webOS, etc.)
c) Dialogs -- Could we slowly obsolete dialogs in favor of contextual
toolbars? Complex dialogs have no place on mobile UIs, where it's
preferable to simply integrate commands into the toolbar, with commands not
fitting into the toolbar placed in an overflow menu on the toolbar; it's
also much easier and faster to work with commands inside a toolbar than
with commands in a dialog window, plus the toolbar allows the user to his
changes applied directly, whereas dialog windows tend to cover up most of
the document.
d) Menus -- Could we also obviate menus (just make them optional) by
integrating common menu commands elsewhere in the interface?
e) What the Android and Web ports mean to us -- a lot of code is reused in
these ports; maybe the LibreOffice dashboard could also become a simple
file manager like it will be on Android?

[1]
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/Human_Interface_Guidelines
[2] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/10/double-click-must-die.html

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