why.openoffice.org is used as a bad example for web design:
No clear points of focus are provided, aside from the large banner at the top; and the copy is grouped together in huge chunks, making it daunting to read.
And I am afraid they are right.
Smashing Magazine: 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design
Some minor design tweaks to GullFOSS', e.g.:
Dear OOo guys,
don't know if you have noticed yet, but the update notification mechanism does not work properly. It continuously informs me on new updates – while in fact there are none available. Furthermore, the menu bar icon never goes away.
I assume this is not the intended behaviour. I hope you agree and fix this. Issue filed: 102098
PS_ deleting the file user/LibraryApplication Support/OpenOffice.org/3/user/registry/data/org/openoffice//Office/Jobs.xcu solves the problem.
Beat Signer on PowerPoint Multimedia Presentations in Computer Science Education: What Do Users Need? /30' video at TU Graz
Structured interviews with 9 faculty members of ETH Zurich lead to the following desired features
Idea for PaperPoint: Use Anoto pen on hand-out of presentation to control the slide show. Very nice!
Publication: PaperPoint: a paper-based presentation and interactive paper prototyping tool. In: Tangible and embedded interaction. Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction
The Slide Sorter mode in OOo Impress can (and should) be improved. e.g.
But I like that OOo has a Slide Sorter mode. Surprisingly enough, this is a missing feature in Apple's Keynote.
I've added the OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog and this blog to the OpenOffice.org blog aggregation at planets.sun.com.
I've applied my proposed changes to the GullFOSS tag cloud.
Before_
After_
The new tag cloud provides more contrast by changes in color, size, and spacing. Furthermore the limit has been raise to ">2".
Each and every time I open an Impress window I have to close the task pane. No, I don't want it. I don't need it. It just consumes screen space. If I need it I want to be in control and open it myself and close it afterwards when no longer needed.
RFE: The state of the task pane should become a persistent Impress setting.
C. /IBM says: Indeed, this has annoyed me for years already; in search of the hidden option to turn off this "feature", I came across your post. Thanks for raising this!
Christian Jansen, Andreas Bartel, Sun Microsystems
Im Zuge der Optimierung der Gebrauchstauglichkeit von OpenOffice.org wurde das OpenOffice.org User Feedback Programm aufgesetzt. In dessen Rahmen wertet das User Experience Team die Benutzung von OpenOffice.org basierend auf quantitativen Daten aus. Christian Jansen erläutert, wie und warum dieses Projekt aufgesetzt worden ist, welche Fragen man beantwortet bzw. nicht beantwortet bekommt. Des Weiteren wird es einen Einblick in die Auswertung der gesammelten Daten geben.
It's that simple (at least to get venture capital for your startup)
Hey, the User Experience Project started its own blog. I hope that many of the project members will contribute, and that many of the OOo community members will stop by, read, subscribe and comment the articles - in one word: participate!
Despite all what's being said on OOo's porting page for Mac, you can find the really latest developer version OOH680_m6 (7 Feb 2008) at ftp://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/
It works fine on my PowerBook with Mac OS X 10.4.11.
Stefan and I have created a new version of the OpenOffice.org Menu for Firefox with better usability for the menu to quickly navigate ooo's sites from Firefox. However, problem is that we cannot replace v1.0.4 with the new v1.1. See the discussion at Firefox Add-on site. Who can provide any help?
I suppose I will be quite quiet in the mid term future.
I'd be happy if you continue the discourse in the ooo ux project. "We" are still in the early stages of a real community. The ux project needs to accomplish something "together" and tell the OOo community about it to prove "our" value.
The community council at OOoCon in Barcelona was an eye-opener for me. "Our" reaction was simply disappointing. Our response hardly existing -- with the exception of my overdue mail to the project lead's thread "ux project? and general confusion".
Please go ahead - set your priorities for the ux project, for the OOo community and for the OOo product. It makes a difference what the ux project can contribute to the OOo endeavor!
Wish you (all) a happy and successful new year!
//
// just wrote this in response to a thread on the project leads list
//
I cannot fight the impression that this thread is somehow related to the User Experience project on OOo. Let me try to catch up and start with a response to Bruce:
I was just looking around the UX project site. What is the role of this project in OOo development? It seems to me like they have some good ideas*, and I would love to see some of this in OOo 3.0. But if they're not now a formal project, do they actually impact development?
Well, we are part of the game. Each iTeam that works on a feature which impacts the user interface has a user experience engineer on board. We propose and design menus, dialogs, UI strings, interaction flow and take care for the consistency across the application. In doing this we represent the user in order to deliver a new feature that makes sense and is usable.
This is happening for years, at least since the specification workflow was formally introduced for OOo 2.0. In January this year we started to build up a user experience community on OOo, because there is much more to do than the original StarOffice User Experience Team could handle. Today, the 50th members joined our group. And some of them have already contributed to new features in OOo ? new notes and 2 page layout come to mind.
(BTW . I wrote an article for a British HCI magazine: "User Experience for OpenOffice.org")
As you can see, the incubator status for our project does not limit our effectivity. But you are right, after nearly a year we should propose to the community to change our status to 'accepted'.
Sophie:
...just because they allow for a lot of contributions without going into the process of discussing on the issue or understand the spec process.
Discussions on our list discuss@ux.openoffice.org are an important forum to exchange ideas and to learn from each other. From time to time specifications are posted and discussed in order to improve the design and to share the knowledge how to deal with specifications. They are the single most important tool to gain influence on the shape of OOo. I consider inspiring discussions -- sometimes even pushing the envelope beyond current constraints -- a necessary phase to provide guidance for future OOo development. It has nothing to do with not "understanding the spec process".
So everything is great? I suppose not.
The User Experience team should contribute to the grant concepts and vision for OOo. Where Kay was doing this bottom up -- User Experience has to provide the top down vision. For example, using File-Open to launch an extension does not fit into the user's mental model of an application. This needs to be discussed and considered, and even user tested. The radical component based approach sounds also compelling, but without designing a coherent surface for the user, OOo might fail like Apple's OpenDoc framework did in the past.
We've done a poor job in explaining our role to the OOo community. That's why the Community Council at OOoCon had nothing smart to say when it came to UX. (OOoConCommunityCouncilQA.odt)
Once more: I consider it our (UXTeam's) fault not to have sufficiently informed the community about our activities and potential contributions.
Another thought by Kay:
But what customers don't know can't be required by them. Even (very) big companies failed in the market (completely) while they were extensively listening to their customers
Sophie:
We miss the feedback of those professionals who offer services, development and support around OOo. They should be members of the user experience project to point the needs and what the future should be. By interacting with developers, who have the technology knowledge and the future of it, this could lead to good new features because they are between both.
Yes, acknowledged and agreed. User Experience can support the requirements engineering process. Either by just doing it or by educating others, maybe from OOo's marketing project. Kay is right. Users know about their daily tasks in the office. But this does not make them experts who create concepts and visions for their tools. Whenever you talk to them, shut up your mouth and listen. Say "Thank you!", go home, and consider what you have *not* heard. That's the sweet spot of user research.
(BTW - this is also the reason why I do not find the results from user surveys very useful.)
Kay:
So, we may want to make ease-of-use part of a vision ... or is it a constraint? ;-)
Sure, this is an sarcastic statement. This question wouldn't even come to my mind. Usability and usefulness (and robustness and performance and accessibility) should be key to OOo.
The current issue of <interactions> contains a special section on open source. Among other articles on project management and community issues you can also find an article on the Community Experience at OpenOffice.org.
Developers, scratching just their personal itch, are a well-known challenge for open source projects. [...] As a consequence, more-mature projects have established a culture that values—in addition to source code—contributions from other members such as quality testing, user documentation, globalization, and user experience. [read the complete article]
I'd be happy if your like what I wrote. In any case, join website.openoffice.org or ux.openoffice.org to help improving our project.
Chrsitan and I gave a presentation at OOoCon 2007 in Barcelona. Subject was "On-Site Requirements Engineering for OpenOffice.org"
Abstract. The user experience project (ux.openoffice.org) started in January 2007 with the intention to improve the usefulness and usability of OpenOffice.org for our users. Therefore we need to learn and understand how OpenOffice.org is actually used. We took the opportunity to meet with employees of VBG (a large accident insurance company in Germany which migrated to Linux and OpenOffice.org) and conducted several workshops to gain unfiltered insights into real life working contexts. The requirements engineering was done using a synergy effect with a parallel usability project between VBG and UID, in which more than 200 on-site interviews were done and served as initial input for our research. [slides and webcast]
