Re: [libreoffice-design] User testing icons

Hi Andrew, all,

first of all thanks for the positive replies towards user-testing of the 
icons. I think only Andrew was negativ about it, so I would like to answer his 
mail in detail:

Am Freitag, 6. April 2012, 11:31:53 schrieb Andrew Pullins:
> I don't like the idea of letting the users test the icons. There are many
> things that the users can test that would benifit us, but the disign of
> things is not one of them. If they have something that they would like to
> be different then they can join the team, or find a way to help. 

Testing icons does not mean let the users design them. I agree that users are 
not the right people for designing icons. I was referring to the discussion of 
using 'a' or 'A' or 'i' or whatever. My advice would be to design all possible 
icons and see which work best for different users with different cultural 
background. 

> I think we
> would work on making the icons look relitivly the same. As though they were
> made by one artist, and not by eight.

Agree on that. Otherwise we would not talk about an icon 'set'.

> Besides I don't think that user really care what we make as long as we
> revamp the crap that we have now. 

Perhaps you should try to find some more careful words here. If you think LO 
or parts are 'crap' you should perhaps keep that to yourself. It is not 
encouraging for anyone who has been involved in the past and did the best 
possible in the given circumstances, if anything in this context is called 
'crap'. Times and fashion has changed and it is good to keep every part of LO 
up-to-date, including the icons.If this is what you mean - I would agree to 
it.

> If you go back and read the comments to
> the OMG!Ububtu article about the Citrus UI [1] you will see that all the
> users loved the UI, and that they could not stand our new one.
>
> If you want you can get there opinion of all the icons together once we
> have them done. 

The normal user (aka the vast majority) does not read nor comment on 
OMG!Ubuntu. So I would be careful about any generalization based on comments 
on a(ny) webpage. Please be aware that we have (probably hundereds of) 
millions of users in LO varying in technical, cultural, social and every other 
persepctive you can even think about. So getting a good feedback from these is 
a non-trivial task. And in any case not beeing done by publishing on 
OMG!Ubuntu.

> But most users don't enven care as long as we make it look
> pritty. My friend does not even care about that, she is fine with it the
> way it is. zshe just likes it because its free, and she can write docs for
> school.

See, you are disagreeing with the 'crap'-thing yourself. If it is working, it 
cannot be crap. And if it is working we need to be very careful to actually 
improve things. Not everything new is automatically better as well.

Summing it up: Do not take the integration into teams too easily. Next to the 
obvious teams, like developers, translation or marketing, it should be our job 
here to not loose the user-team, but to strongly integrate it into the 
development. So again: I am not going to do it myself, but I am willing to 
support anyone who really wants to go the way to involve users into the LO 
development. Simply ping me :)

Happy easter!

Björn

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