Re: [libreoffice-design] Think, don't just do - WAS: Impress remote

Hi all,

thanks for your feedback. And no excuses needed for anything that is beeing 
said. I assume everyone (including me) has only the best in mind, so do not 
take anything personal...

I will try to address the major points.

1. Made bad experiences with User Research 

Anyone who is working in UX and does not believe in the power of working with 
users should actually question him / herself wether (s)he is doing the right 
job. Funnily enough, there was a great dilbert about this issue just a few 
days ago: 

http://dilbert.com/strips/2012-05-07/

If we do not go out of the house and work with real users (think of cultuural, 
social and many other factors influencing UX) we automatically do imply we are 
the users. But we are not. We are users, but not the users. Any UX process 
that does not take this into account will only accidently produce good 
results.

If anyone has made bad experiences with that, then do should not resign. 
Instead work harder on making this work. It is a difficult topic. At least I 
never said anything different.

I am not saying anything about the arguement, that we cannot do it any worse 
than it is, even without asking the users. If I have to say anything about 
this it would propbaly turm out to be personnal... So we agree on this never 
beeing said, ok?


2. If you want to help use our structures.

I will not use the structures you set up, because I think they are 
fundamentally wrong (disclaimer: as far as I could follow them, seeing there 
have been tons of mails about this topic that I did not read all - correct me 
if anything I say is wrong). 

You propose a waterfallish modell with a closed design phase at the beginning. 
All I have learned in software development is: This does not work out. 

Not all designers should work on every topic. We have to build small teams and 
apply best principles of agile software development. 

You are isolating topics. The personas for Impress remote are different from 
those I saw at some other place. This will never lead to a consistent user 
experience across LibreOffice. This might lead to some isolated really cool 
solutions, but the user will never feel this is one applications suite.

So, sorry, but I am not willing to invest my valuable time into these 
structures.


3. Vague offers of help
You said my proposals are very vague. I partially agree with this. 

I did make a very concrete suggestion to help you solve the "bold, italic,..." 
icon discussion, by showing you a way how to solve this problem with users, 
taking different languages and cultural backgrounds into account. But there 
was no reaction to this. This offer still stands and could be a extremely 
concrete starting point.

My following suggestions were indeed vague, because I felt it would be a waste 
of time to offer something concrete again, if there is no interest. As I said 
- my time is strongly limited.

So, still staying vague, I can help to build up the artifacts (vision, 
personas, scenarios,...) that can help us to create a consistent UX within the 
LibreOffice suite, help to validate these artifacts with real users, create 
solutions together with developers and again validating them with users - just 
to name some things we need to work on.

But be aware, this will shift the focus in this list from designing (which I 
still see as a craftmenship) to research and understanding. I strongly 
believe: if we understand, finding the solutions is easy. This is why the work 
we need to do is research.

So if there is anyone interested in this resaerch based approach on 
LibreOffice design, give me a sign and we will find a way to start working.

Cheers,
Björn


-- 
www.OpenUsability.org
www.OpenSource-Usability-Labs.com

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