Re: [libreoffice-design] The Sidebar Problem

Hi Mirek,

agree that the duplication of functionality is rather confusing.Did you 
mean that the individual panes would appear as a pop-up like e.g. the 
"Insert table" button already does?
The cell appearance btton would then open the panel in sucha a way: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1SoIjRsaQikR3lZT1RBNThTcmc/edit?usp=sharing

I think this would be better than showing them in a sidebar, since the 
mouse has to travel more and there's no visual connection.

Cheers,

Alex

Am 28.01.2014 17:06, schrieb Mirek M.:
> Hi guys,
> Ever since we've adopted the sidebar, we've had issues with duplicate
> panels [1]. Worse yet, the sidebar brings yet another UI element to look
> through for commands. This might not sound like a big problem, but this
> makes our already hard to use UI even harder to use, and is bound to get
> worse as the sidebar develops.
>
> I'd recommend to read through the usability problems Microsoft found with
> its Office task pane (which was very much like our sidebar):
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/04/03/567261.aspx .
>
> So what should we do?
>
> I've been a big advocate of having a single place where to look for
> commands. (That, by the way, is the single biggest advantage the Ribbon
> brought to MS Office [2].) In our case, that place would be the toolbar.
>
> My proposed solution would be to split the sidebar into individual panels
> (e.g. Properties, Formulas, Custom Animation, Slide Transition, etc.) and
> add buttons for launching them to the relevant toolbars. This would not
> only solve the problems of panel duplication [1], but it would also add
> context to the individual panels. For example, the Slide Layout and Slide
> Transition buttons would appear in the Slide toolbar. The Functions pane
> could appear when clicking the functions button in the formula bar.
> Properties could easily replace all the toolbar buttons that currently
> point to the relevant formatting dialogs. And we already have buttons for
> Styles, the Gallery, and the Navigator.
>
> In any case, it's imperative that we do something about the problem. We
> can't afford to dig ourselves even further in terms of UX.
>
> [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73151
> [2] "The Ribbon is the starting point for all functionality." --
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2005/10/11/479586.aspx


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