Re: [libreoffice-design] The Sidebar Problem

Maybe one solution is that make the same think, that do Kingsoft Office.
Kingsoft office, in installation procedure offer two skins:
Classic - with menu, and LO style icons
Ribbon Style - with ribbon menu

and in Ribbon Style offer a Sidebar (Taks Window) too, for styles, 
shapes, etc.

Professional users, who use menu, templates and advanced formating 
options, leave the actual desing, and for users who like ribbons, modern 
design, and local formatting, offer a ribbon menu.


2014.01.28. 18:06 keltezéssel, Mirek M. írta:
> 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


--
Ákos


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