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

Hi Björn,

2012/5/14 Björn Balazs <b@lazs.de>

> Hi all,
>
> trying to find some answers to the raised questions:
>
> # Structure (of artifacts)
>
> In my experience we will need to set-up at least the following artifacts
> (in
> whichever way we are going to produce them in the end):
>
> 1. Vision:
>
> Here are two examples of visions:
>
> "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal,
> before
> this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely
> to
> the Earth." (John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961)
>
> "The iPod will be a portable digital music player that will hold 5000
> songs.
> It will have a battery life measured in days, not hours. You will navigate
> the
> thousands of songs with a single finger. You will sync all your music from
> your computer to the iPod in minutes automatically, so you can have all
> your
> music in your pocket." (said to be formulated by Steve Jobs end of the
> 1990ies
> - might be an urban myth though...)
>
> To sum it up
> - The vision gives a clear goal (benefit) that helps to unify all people
> involved into making it become real
> - It is commonly understandable and does not provide technical solutions
> - leaves enough room for creativity
> - helps to provide criteria so that different people in similar situations
> will likely come to the similar decission
> - is short and hence present to everyone involved into the process
>
> -> We would have to involve all LibreOffice people to find this vision.
> This
> cannot be tested or validated with users. It provides the frame we want to
> achieve.

Of course. How would you propose we do this? On the IRC? Across mailing
lists? How would we agree on a common vision? I believe we should agree on
something unanimously...

My vision would probably be to make LibreOffice popular not as an
alternative to MS Office, but on its own right, as a set of simple and
straightforward tools that each do their one job as well as possible (i.e.
Writer helps you produce great-looking documents, Impress helps you
supplement a great speech, Calc helps you interpret your data, etc.).

> 2. Personas:
>
> Personas help us to understand and focus on certains users. Personas can be
> validated and quality assured by the users. Hope creating and working with
> personas is known to people on this list.
>
>
> 3. Situationas
>
> Situationas are the situation / setting equivalent to Personas. They help
> us
> to understand in which situations / environments our product is beeing
> used.
> These can again be validated and quality assured by the users.
>
>
> 4. Goals / Core Usability Goals
>
> When we place a Personas into a Situationa, we can understand the goals a
> person has in this situation. Yes, this gives a matirx that can be large.
> But
> again, we can validate and quality assure these with the users. From these
> goal we can derive the actual usability goals (e.g. learnability, Error
> prone,
> don't feel stupid,...) that can help us to design and later on meassure the
> success of our designs in usability tests.
>
>
> 5. Features / Szenarios
>
> On this basis we can derive the actually needed features by creating
> szenarios
> of the usage. Again this can be tested with the users by using imagination
> techniques. These can also lead to wireframes or other mock-ups of the
> intended solution, so this is actually the bridge to design...

> # Do we need to do user research for every project?
>
> No. If we have these foundations we can build upon, we only need to do user
> research if we encounter any gaps. Usually the above mentioned artifacts
> should be created rather independently to current project. But staying
> real -
> it makes most sense to only create the artifacts that are currently needed.
> This way all the artifacts are created over time.

> So instead of a workflow for every project, I propose to rather create
> sets of
> artifacts that every project would have to refer to, to reason the created
> solutions - but every project needs a maximum of freedom how to solve the
> problem. People are very different how they work. The task might be very
> different and needs different approaches...

I'd be open to having a centralized page for personas and situationas.
However, I still believe having a workflow for each topic is key to getting
work done.

> # Tool?
>
> With OpenUsabilily, KDE and other free software products, we are working
> on a
> tool, that helps us to actually do these things. This tool (User Weave)
> will
> be published under an aGPL soonish. My company wil then sponsor the
> hosting of
> this tool, so we can easily use it for our purposes, without having to deal
> with technical issues... So I would be happy if we would use and improve
> this
> tool for our needs. What do you think?

Possibly. I'd need to know more about the tool to determine whether it
would be useful.

> # Start?
>
> We need to start at the beginning. Let's start to work on a common vision
> for
> LibreOffice. We will need a small team that conducts a couple of surveys in
> order to get feedback from the community - it would be perfect if we would
> finish this process in time for the LibreOffice Conference - just to give
> you
> an idea about the length of such a process...

Could you propose the questions these surveys would ask?

> Paralle we could use user-surverys (such as the proposed work on the
> iconset)
> to gather information about our users in order to create first sets of
> personas.

Again, how would these surveys look? What would you ask?

> Ok, so much for today. I am curious for your thoughts on this....

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