Information by Users (was: Re: Fwd: [libreoffice-marketing] BrOffice product and community will be called LibreOffice)

Hi Riemer, hi Italo, all!

This discussion starts to touch topics related to User Experience - and
since I feel very committed to UX, let's add some thoughts ...

Am Sonntag, den 24.04.2011, 13:13 +0200 schrieb Riemer Thalen:
> Hi Italo,
>
> Good Estern to you too. I was not talking about features. Somewhere in the
> menus they are all there. I was refering to reasons not to adopt and reasons
> to dump LibO. Those are not necessarily missing features.

As you know, there can be different reasons for not using a product -
whatever "use" means in this context. Do we talk about admins, real
users, integrators, ... let's assume end-users. There has been quite a
lot of research about usefulness, usability, enjoyment, aesthetics,
image, prestige ... so let's focus.

For end-users, we can achieve a lot by improving "how the current
functionality works", and not by "what functionality is missing". Two
completely different examples:
      * Template: LibreOffice has full featured template functionality
        for almost all applications - and ships some. But its hard to
        start with LibO because they lack good quality.
      * Shadow: LibreOffice supports to draw shadows in Draw/Impress,
        but are they looking good (default)? Can they easily be
        adjusted?

> I think those complaints are important because "behind every complainer or
> quitter there are 10 people not contented either".

[... different examples why LibO has not been used ... ]

> I think little things like these are extremely important. As architect Mies
> van der Rohe put it: "God is in the details".

True.


> Some time ago, Ubuntu/Canonical ran a "100 paper cuts" campaign. Users could
> report little things that annoyed them and could be fixed easily. I think
> LibO should follow that example (apart from the former users survey).

Well, our developers asked for such kind of fixes - so its possible to
provide such feedback although there hasn't been an initiative for that
yet.

But, in comparison to Ubuntu/Canonical (who pays some developers, even
full-time user experience guys) who decides that the proposal is an
usability issue, and does not relate to the personal preference of an
individual? Some of those questions can be answered by experience
(usability), or data (being carefully handled).

By the way, during the OOo times, a similar effort was called "Better
Defaults".


> But you know best, so I guess it is not going to happen.

Mmh, here I'd like to cite Italo: "the community needs a helping hand".

Example: Lately, the OOo UX team used a lot of sources to gain
knowledge. One example: The "OOo Uninstallation Survey" which explicitly
asks for the reasons to quit via different questions. I'll skip the
details, but you may know that analyzing hundreds of thousands text
fields is ... much work. (Chance to do that via automatism is close to
zero, and I've never met a computer linguist who provided a helping
hand.) If you want to have a look at an example I've created some time
ago, see [1].

But, of course, you can start with more simple things. Since we've
started LibO:
      * we asked for help about a brainstorming site (which will provide
        some numbers for prioritization) --> no help yet (because: the
        few available guys focus on the more important infrastructure
        for this project)
      * we proposed to set up a survey server for running questionnaires
        --> no help yet (because: see above)
      * we asked the developers to keep the user feedback data component
        in LibO (kept), but we miss the back-end to collect usage data
        in LibreOffice --> technical problem, legal issues
      * the developers worked out a concept to let less experienced
        users submit high-quality bug reports --> in work

So, I totally understand your feedback ... about missing information and
background. But I hope you also got the impression that we are very
aware of that. Thus, it doesn't help our users to highlight the issue
several times :-) We simply need help in doing things.

As a first step, you may reply to my earlier invitation helping with
small surveys ... this would be a first step:
http://www.mail-archive.com/marketing@libreoffice.org/msg02820.html

> Bye,
> Riemer

See you (here, or on the Design Team mailing list,
Christoph

[1]
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/images/f/f4/2009-05-26_OOoUserSurvey2009_Export_CommentsAboutImpress_Cleaned.odt

> 2011/4/24 Italo Vignoli <italo.vignoli@gmail.com>
>
> > On 4/24/11 2:31 AM, Riemer Thalen wrote:
> >
> >  To achieve this, the developers and policy makers need to look outside the
> > > community. Test users and focus groups of dedicated users can name new
> > > functions that are "nice to have". IMHO, now it is more important to give
> > > priority to the missing features that average non-committed users "need to
> > > have". To identify those features, you'll need to ask former users. That
> > > was
> > > the initianal point I tried to make. It turns out the opinion leaders in
> > > the
> > > community do not agree with me. So be it.
[...]


-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+help@libreoffice.org
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/marketing/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted