[libreoffice-design] Re: The purpose of Impress

Le 2014-01-22 16:16, Mirek M. a écrit :
> I knew this was going to be brought up -- the word "complement" was chosen
> deliberately.
> Again, this is a question of focus.
> I'd really prefer to focus on creating the best speech complements rather
> than speech replacements, as, when given in conjunction with a speech, the
> latter tends to take focus away from the speech. If the slides are a
> full-on replacement, why is the presenter even there? Why not just autoplay
> the slides?
>
> That's not to say putting up only slides is worthless -- they often provide
> a good overview of the speech.
> That said, it's always better to provide the slides along with the talk
> (video or audio, or even transcript), and that tends to be the norm
> nowadays.

I believe what you are describing is an outcome ideal and not a 
functional use of Impress. IMO, we have to be careful to not purpose 
Impress to a narrow definition as it may lead to a tool that is rendered 
of less use for those who use it for what it essentially does best, and, 
that of slideshow presentations.

In education, we start school children experimenting with presentation 
software and later following with teaching them to complement their 
slideshows with speeches. It is only at the very end of their academic 
highschool years where we try to hone students skill sets at creating 
speeches that are in fact complemented by their slideshows.

What you are basing your present ideal of the tool is the outcome of all 
of this training. Till now, Impress fits in well with this type of 
training and it would be sad to see Impress being given a design purpose 
that sits only well with an end outcome goal.

IMO, giving Impress too narrow of a design purpose may result in having 
the very people who use it now to train early years students to look at 
using a different tool in primary/secondary school systems. It is pretty 
obvious to classroom teachers that tools used to teach young students 
are often times the tools they will use later on in life.

I see no purpose in moving the design of Impress away from what most 
people see it as being a good standalone slideshow tool. However, I see 
every reason to see Impress given an added design emphasis of not only 
being a good quality slideshow tool, but also one that helps in ways to 
complement speeches, for example, add some way to store "presentation 
notes" that may be read off a second screen, while the first screen runs 
the slideshow; or a way to store notes that accompany a slideshow, and 
where these notes may be pulled later to read along with the slideshow etc.)

We should be careful in giving any of our software too narrow a purpose 
definition, as we risk designing it for too narrow a slice of 
users/niche. Therein is where I would worry.

Cheers,

Marc

--
Marc Paré
Marc@MarcPare.com
http://www.parEntreprise.com
parEntreprise.com Supports OpenDocument Formats (ODF)
parEntreprise.com Supports http://www.LibreOffice.org


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