[Libreoffice] UX opportunity ... / Easy Hacks

Hi Christoph,

        ( and any other UX gurus out there :-)

        Hi guys; I'd -love- to get a number of "easy hacks" - ie. small fixes -
that can be made to our ergonomics into the page here:

        http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Easy_Hacks

        These are entry level tasks for people - but IMHO[1] an accumulation of
small failings creates an overall bad experience. The problem is that
much of StarDiv's work (due to the process penalty for small changes)
tends to be of the form "totally re-write the slides side-bar" rather
than "fix slide side-bar-multi-select glitches" :-)

        I was wondering - do you have a list of small pet peeves, you know the
stuff: extra clicks, broken keyboard/mouse grabs, bad keyboard
navigation, over-complicated interactions in specific areas that we can
turn into easy hacks ? It would be great to get some volunteer
developers working on these things - and we are (so far) burning through
our most easy hacks rather quickly.

        If you can add some to the wiki page (with brief UX style descriptions)
and add a Skills: 'UX taste' or something ;-) then I can come and triage
them to add code pointers to make the fixes even easier for newbies :-)
[ and perhaps we achieve something good ]. Clearly the tasks need to be
bite-sized :-) thus:

* Good examples:
        + add XYZ missing keybinding to calc
        + remove redundant click in dialog ABC
        + in the slide-sorter, fix keyboard interaction so:
                + we do not jump back to slide one when multi-selecting
                + pressing 'left arrow' when slides are selected should
                  move to the previous page
        + draw / object selection handles should be larger: 8x8 pixels

* Bad examples:
        + replace all 'Apply' buttons with instant apply
        + unify all keybindings to new scheme
        + write new clipart selector

        Presumably you have a lot of such small annoyances piled up somewhere
in the back of your mind :-) [ at least I know I have, though they are
hard to specify ].

        Any chance of some love there ? I think we can make a real difference
and avoid our new hackers from duplicating work, and get them sucked
into UI improvement with a little love here. Please ping me as you add
them so we can do the deeper research needed to make them easy for
programmers.

        Thanks !

                Michael.

[1] - and yes I've read a lot of papers on usability etc. ;-) my
favourite was: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html
-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot