Re: [libreoffice-design] Design ethos

Hi Björn,
The principles I put on the whiteboard was just me spitballing. The initial
idea was that the community would suggest design principles and we'd refine
them until we got something well-defined and something that we could all
agree on.
The new proposal is to take Mozilla's design principles as our basic
guidelines, as those have worked well for them, and work off of those. As I
believe that is a better approach, I'll simply address your concerns with
that.

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 6:50 PM, Björn Balazs <b@lazs.de> wrote:

> I think this is a general problem with general guidelines as they are
> outlined
> in the mentioned article as well. Either they are so abstract that nobody
> would reject them - but then it is also hard to derive any consequence out
> of
> them --- Or they are specific but exceptions are the rule.


With the ideal design principles, exceptions would never be allowed.
Mozilla's principles may not be perfect, but they're quite good and we
could fix their bugs as we encounter them.
Could you point out specific points that you don't feel good about?


> I see a possible solution - and hey, surprise - this again has to do with
> researching and understanding users: I think we should try to define
> conditions user under which certain rules apply. Conditions could be
> something
> like "If the user is likely to be in a stressful situation, prefer to the
> use
> of a wizard"
>
> As I stated before, I'm a bit hesitant about user research -- not because
I don't believe it can't be useful, but because we have to be careful to do
it correctly, as otherwise it can be quite detrimental to our design. If
done badly, user research can be used to justify just about any design.

I continue researching user design. Windows seems to do a lot of it [1],
but I'm not sure how much it helps them, given that they're dropping
everything they know for Metro, which firmly stands against the overcrowded
ribbons their research has gained them. Mozilla seems to first design, then
test, much like we do now, but then it has some guidelines that help it
shape its design [2]. elementary does some basic user research (if it can
be called that) on Google+ [3]. Gnome design team doesn't do any, which is
a bit surprising, as, IMHO, that's one of the best open-source design
communities out there.

I would definitely be interested to hear about your own personal experience
with user research and how it has lead to design decisions (with concrete
examples, if possible).

Plus every open-source project that cares about design listens to its
users, of course, and the advantage of open development is that people can
see the changes before the product is released, so design bugs can be
caught before release. We've seen this just recently, with two people
reaching out to us, one on G+ and one on the IRC, complaining about the
usability of the new About dialog, which Astron has fixed.

This is just my experience, perhaps I did misunderstand your intention here.
> What do you think?

I feel like Mozilla's design principles have worked for them and that they
would be a good starting point for our own principles.
As for user research, I see it as a means to an end. It's definitely
something that will help us refine our principles and form our HIG, but we
should be careful, as user research can be quite misleading. We should
ensure that our principles and our HIG can be followed under all
circumstances -- exceptions should never be the rule.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=532j9sfBcbQ
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMDBwa4huUY&feature=player_embedded
[3] https://plus.google.com/114635553671833442612/posts

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