Re: Fwd: [libreoffice-design] Re: A new old branding?

Hi Astron,

On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 2:02 AM, Stefan Knorr <heinzlesspam@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Mirek, all,
>
> sorry for the OT stuff here... this is just re: personas.
>
> In LibO, personas are exclusively available through an options panel.
> Since most people haven't ever looked at LibO's options, they of course
> won't see the feature. *being devil's advocate* One could try shipping a
> default persona. The only problem with that approach is that it won't
> help at all with making the feature discoverable to the casual users [1]
> that might perhaps most appreciate it (since those people still won't
> look at the Options dialogue).

If we show a gray persona by default, people will assume we just changed
the default look, not that there is a Persona feature hiding somewhere in
Options.
For example, if you used Lotus Symphony, the immediate thought isn't, "Oh,
that's a non-native look, they must be using personas". It's "Oh, the
default look is blue." (And in the case of Lotus Symphony and basically
every other software that isn't Firefox, it really is that way.)
Or, when we shipped the new Windows look, I doubt anyone thought we were
using a persona then.
Shipping with a persona won't make the feature apparent or discoverable.

> What we risk by bundling a persona by default, though, is that people
> will be blocked in their work by having to look for some less annoying
> as a background/turning the personas feature off. Or even switching to
> something else to do their office work, I guess.

I think the majority of people will just complain about it, but not do
anything, because most people just don't tend to waste their time
customizing. (Especially if the feature is buried under our awful "Options"
dialog, plus we do have an additional "Customize" dialog that one might
think to be equally appropriate for the feature.)

It also goes against the ethos of shipping with the most friendly defaults
possible.

(Frankly, I still fail to see the benefits of the feature. A minority of
the personas look good, almost all of them detract attention from the
document, and most make our menus and icons harder to distinguish.)

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