ux•••

Omm

2011-02-14T14:36:00.001+01:00

more videos from herraizsoto&co on Vimeo.

Ommwriter, the zen of text editing.

(colorpro 13-Feb-2011 : Schöne Alternative zu OmmWriter ist iA Writer auf dem iPad.

Renaissance Slide Sorter Comments

2010-04-16T17:47:00.001+02:00

some comments on Renaissance’ Slide Sorter @slide 21:

hurray, the slide titles are gone! This saves a lot of space.
you might consider to remove the slide numbers as well. This saves even more space.
They might be displayed on mouse over.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=110886
What matters though is the total number of visible slides. But there are some unused fields in the status bar...
I really like the gray stripes for skipped slides.
you should make sure that they are also visible for gray stripped slides -- well, I'm kidding. But they should be visible on dark backgrounds.
I think you should iterate on the visual design of the selection. Much too prominent. I would try a connected area to keep the display calm. A quick mockup:

Götz@CeBIT

2010-03-26T08:59:00.001+01:00

Götz rocks at CeBIT 2010!

On creating slides

2009-12-10T17:56:00.001+01:00

Re: Project Renaissance Impress Improvements - Found the required slide layout yet?

Hi Andreas,

FYI_ I've developed the habit to use the context menu to create new slides. And I do it in the context (read the location of the click) of a slide that already uses the desired layout. Then the only operation I have to do is to drag the slide to the final position (if it is not already there.) So please consider the following:

do not open the task pane if a new slide is created. I do not need it. It is just annoying.
select the new slide if a new slide is inserted in Slide Sorter mode. Currently --in Mac OOo 3.1.1-- the first slide gets selected and the slide sorter scrolls to the top. Grrrr. Did I mention that the task pane opens as well. Grrr²
I appreciate that you want to reduce the number of different layouts. Do you? I hope so. I typically just use #1, #3, maybe #4 or #5. Do you have statistical data which layouts are actually used? The empty slide is the best in stock to place a full screen image --BTW_ this is the only layout that is currently missing, a full screen image.

cheers
Matthias

Powerpoint. Macht und Einfluss eines Präsentationsprogramms

2009-12-03T13:14:00.001+01:00

Powerpoint. Macht und Einfluss eines Präsentationsprogramms. Herausgegeben von Claus Pias und Wolfgang Coy im Fischer Verlag, 2009

OOMouse is not an OOo Mouse

2009-11-11T12:31:00.000+01:00

I quote a Press Announcement from Nov-10

OpenOffice.org Clarifies Status of the "OpenOffice Mouse

The OpenOffice.org Community and WarMouse today issued the following statement to clarify the relationship between the two organisations

(PRWEB) November 10, 2009 -- Contrary to recent press reports, the OpenOffice.org Community has no plans to ship a multi-button office application mouse by February next year. The "OpenOffice Mouse" demonstrated at the Community's Conference on 4th November will be produced by WarMouse, an independent company with no business relationship with either the OpenOffice.org Community, or with Sun Microsystems, the owner of the OpenOffice.org trademark.

Louis Suarez-Potts, OpenOffice.org Community Manager
Theodore Beale, WarMouse Lead Designer

I am glad that today is 11-11, in Germany the begin of the "Närrische Zeit" (please comment if you know how to translate). That means that I do not have to write a rant about the potential bad impact the OOMouse can have on OOo.

Dear users, you do not need this 18-button mouse to use OpenOffice.org efficiently because OpenOffice.org is so complicated. No no! Please consider this mouse only if your hand has 13 extra-fingers or more.

(via) – sorry, too few fingers.

why.ooo as bad example for web design

2009-07-22T09:37:00.001+02:00

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

"Hey Katja" and other GullFOSS improvements

2009-06-03T23:04:00.010+02:00

Some minor design tweaks to GullFOSS', e.g.:

removing clutter from right column, like headings and the calendar
moving GullFOSS authors with blogs up to the Blogroll section
adding large random image from flickr tagged with 'ooocon'
keep aspect ratio for oocon image.
lighter background color in right column
display only tags '>3' in tag cloud
limit width for images in main column
automatic link icons for ODT, ODP, and PDF
fixing the diggit links
adding a retweet button
fixed the title for the permalink pages to make the retweet button work properly.
adding user-experience articles to planet Sun & Oracle UX Design
prominently display the commenter`s name in the list of comments
fix anchor for comments

Wrong Update Notification

2009-05-20T17:05:00.009+02:00

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.

PaperPoint

2009-05-14T08:05:00.011+02:00

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

Highlighting and annotating slide content
Use blank "sheets"
Use video controls
Use system mobile
Orientate efficiently within slide collection
See content of current and nearby slides

Idea for PaperPoint: Use Anoto pen on hand-out of presentation to control the slide show. Very nice!

PaperPoint Presentation Tool

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

SpatialKey

2009-03-28T07:09:00.001+01:00

Götz on StarOffice 9

2009-03-01T11:22:00.002+01:00

Improving the Slide Sorter mode

2009-02-01T21:16:00.001+01:00

The Slide Sorter mode in OOo Impress can (and should) be improved. e.g.

the thumbnail generation is too slow
the resolution for images on slides is too low
the seams between the slides are too wide
slide number and title are most of the time redundant information. It saves horizontal space if the info is placed in one row below the slides; or even combined if the default slide title is used.
hidden slides could be grayed out.
the entire width of the window should be used.
the maximum size of the slides should be increased.
keyboard navigation with arrows should be supported
what about a cool canvas backgroud?

But I like that OOo has a Slide Sorter mode. Surprisingly enough, this is a missing feature in Apple's Keynote.

pick your chart

2009-01-26T15:41:00.003+01:00

Nirmal Patal found (Jan 2009):

OOo Planet

2008-12-29T12:06:00.000+01:00

I've added the OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog and this blog to the OpenOffice.org blog aggregation at planets.sun.com.

GullFOSS tag cloud updated

2008-12-22T11:31:00.005+01:00

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".

Impress Task Pain

2008-11-20T13:34:00.005+01:00

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.

ISSUE# 95600

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!

OOo User Feedback Program at WUD Hamburg

2008-11-12T16:46:00.006+01:00

last week in Bejing -- this week in Hamburg. Christian and Andreas will present at tomorrows World Usability Day in Hamburg:

OpenOffice.org User Feedback Programm - Optimierung der Gebrauchstauglichkeit basierend auf quantitativen Daten

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.

10/20/30 rule of powerpoint

2008-04-18T14:35:00.000+02:00

It's that simple (at least to get venture capital for your startup)

10 slides in less than
20 minutes with at least
30 point text

blog: blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

video: youtube.com/watch?v=liQLdRk0Ziw

New OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog

2008-03-21T10:43:00.000+01:00

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!

Technorati Tags: blogs, uxooo

Native OpenOffice.org build for Mac

2008-02-16T09:14:00.000+01:00

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.

How to update a Firefox Add-on?

2008-02-10T21:35:00.000+01:00

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?

quite quiet

2007-12-20T17:58:00.000+01:00

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!

ux project? and general confusion

2007-12-06T15:39:00.000+01:00

//
// 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.

Developers are users too

2007-11-06T15:26:00.000+01:00

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.

OOoCon 2007

2007-09-19T21:57:00.000+02:00

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]

Inhouse und Open Source Projekte - MuC 2007

2007-09-04T21:16:00.000+02:00

Ronald Hartwig, Maren Mäuselein, Christian Jansen und ich hatten zur Mensch und Computer 2007 in Weimar den Beitrag "Inhouse und Open Source Projekte Usability verankern und Synergien nutzen".

Abstract: Usability Engineering kommt in länger bestehenden und sehr großen Projekten nur dann zum Zuge, wenn man sich an die Gegebenheiten der Projekte in Bezug auf das gewählte Prozessmodell anpasst und die Möglichkeiten in Zusammenarbeit mit den beteiligten Entwicklern auslotet. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt zwei sich ergänzende Projekte im Umfeld von OpenOffice.org und einer Inhouse-ERP-Software, deren Benutzungsschnittstellen in einem gemeinsamen Vorhaben optimiert werden sollen. [weiter lesen]

it is the user's itch that needs to be scratched

2007-05-24T15:04:00.000+02:00

The Summer 2007 issue of interfaces contains an article on our User Experience Project. If you are not a member of the British HCI group, you can read “User Experience for OpenOffice.org” on my website.

Quote:

The first rule of open source development is also the reason for an inherent usability problem: "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."
The result is a self-referential system – developers develop for themselves rather than for the average user or the target audience. Usability engineering is considered as superfluous extra. However, to provide a good user experience, it is the user's itch that needs to be scratched.
This article presents user experience activities in the context of OpenOffice.org. The author – co-lead of the User Experience Project – will discuss the status of building an open source community of usability professionals to improve the usefulness and usability of the application.
(read more...)

McLuhan was an Information Architect

2007-02-16T15:23:00.000+01:00

Q for today: What's the relation between Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message”, and Information Architecture?

With my recent posts I've presented a couple of communication channels and “cyberspace dimensions” that need to be filled with life. Each of those channels can be seen as a medium that transforms the message that is transmitted. This means in turn that there are good and bad media channels for certain kinds of messages. I call the choice of well suited spots where communication and collaboration can happen applied McLuhanism.

The term Information Architecture is used for the organization of content, functionality, navigation and usability of a web site. The following illustration uses Jesse James Gerrett's visual vocabulary to outline the architecture of the user experience space on ooo.

Top left we have the website at ux.openoffice.org, The message that changes every piece of information is: “This is graved in stone”. Well, more or less. At least it is a space that is not very hospitable because just a few people have full write access to the site. Nonetheless, it is an official site where we will put official information that does not change every other week like our charter and some general How-To guides. Links point the visitors to related projects, e.g. to the specification project and the accessibility project.

The wiki (top right) is by design a collaborative space. And our pages shall be no exception. Working documents and pages where everyone is invited to contribute are here. The stack of guideline documents that seem to be hosted outside the wiki is a nice example that the index page to guidelines can be well done as a wiki page regardless where the actual guidelines are located.

Of course, the details will be filled in over time. But on the way this map provides guidance for informed decisions where pages should go best to foster participation.

User Experience Cyberspace Has 7 Dimensions, maybe 8

2007-02-12T15:21:00.000+01:00

Thanks for the responses to my Friday article on the 4 dimensions of User Experience. Esp. to Sophie, Bernhard, and Frank. (As long as we are a limited sized group, everyone will be greeted by a virtual hand-shake.)

Bernhard indicated that there are some more dimensions to consider. You know what? He is right. Today I present 3 other important communication channels that matter in the user experience cyberspace.

First is IssueTracker (aka IssueZilla). This is the task tracking system used for OpenOffice.org. Lots of our UX contributions happen in IssueTracker. We submit bugs with a special focus on usability. We evaluate and comment on issues. And in cases where we write the specification, we add the URL to the task. To sum it up, IssueTracker provides the infrastructure for the development workflow. No feature, no bug fix goes into the product without an associated issue in IssueTracker. For us it remains an ongoing challenge to keep on top of it; and to gain the big picture of what is changing over all in the product.

We already had some initial conversations over our new IRC channel: irc://freenode/ux.openoffice.org. IRChats are a very synchronous medium. Very fast. High energetic, Very much fun and very prompting. I attended a meeting of the Mac porting group some time ago. So even moderated meetings are possible. We might try this for the User Experience project as well.

Real Life. Remember that? The stuff outside when you leave the Matrix? We hope to meet you in person on many occasions. Of course, OOoCon is the first choice, but other events like the World Usability Day might fill the time in between.

There is more (collaborative) space to explore and to utilize for our purposes. And I keep in mind, that I haven't answered Bernard's question yet; that was: "You should think of a place for graphical contributions." Yes, right. Let's discuss if we have a well suited spot for media files in our user experience universe, or if we need to add an 8 ^th dimension to our ecosystem of communication channels.

User Experience Cyberspace Is 4-dimensional

2007-02-09T15:20:00.000+01:00

Gee -- catchy titles seem to work. I can see the question marks all over your heads. OK, back to the serious stuff. We are working on a strategy for the new User Experience project on OpenOffice.org. Several communication channels need to be balanced in order to use our energy efficiently to achieve an optimal outreach and involvement of the open source usability community. And now let me introduce the 4 dimensions of user experience communication:

The page at ux.openoffice.org is our official home. The way this site is hosted makes it a bit cumbersome to grant write access in a way that supports contributions. Therefore we will use the OpenOffice wiki as a space that invites people to collaborate on topics that matter to improve the usability of OpenOffice.org. A third channel of communication is our mail alias (and newsgroup) discuss@ux.openoffice.org. This medium is well suited to actually drive the discussions because the messages find you and tend to start glowing in your inbox. Last not least, blog postings on user-experience shall also be used to inform the OOo community and to attract folks from the blogosphere to our project(s).

User Experience Project Proposed

2007-01-22T15:18:00.000+01:00

Nearly a week ago Lutz has proposed a new project for OpenOffice: a User Experience Project. The discussion shows, that it is time to give a proper home (page) to all the user experience work that is scattered all over the project anyway. We like to make our contributions more transparent (in the better sense of the word) and like also to foster contributions in this area from usability professionals and HCI experts outside of Sun.

The discussion will go on for another couple of days before an informal voting will give us a go for an incubator project at ux.openoffice.org.

FSOSS 2006 /webcasts

2006-11-10T04:11:00.000+01:00

webcasts of 2006 symposium on Free Software and Open Source Software. Topics include OpenOffice.org and Sun's open source strategy.

Technorati Tags: openoffice, Sun, FSOSS

OOo Mac Port: IRC'ing till midnight

2006-10-19T15:15:00.000+02:00

Last Friday I was invited by the OOo Mac Porting guys to present a first shot of an UI assessment of the current Mac port of OpenOffice.org. The meeting was a 100% pure IRC meeting from 10pm until midnight. Eric did a great job as a facilitator. Yes indeed, it was a well structured IRC chat with an agenda!

After the meeting Eric put a text dump online. My Mac client created an XML file instead. Well, with some magic XSL it can also be displayed in a reasonable way with active hyperlinks; but read for yourself.

Requirements Engineering - MuC 2004

2005-05-01T14:50:00.000+02:00

Auf der Mensch und Computer 2004 gab es von mir den Workshop-Beitrag "Requirements- und Usability-Engineering für Standard-Software: Beispiel StarOffice/OpenOffice.org".

Später haben Frieder Strauß, Petra Kowallik und ich die Workshop-Ergebnisse für die i-com zusammengefasst: "Requirements-Engineering im Spannungsfeld von Individual- und Produktsoftware".

Vienna waits for you - OpenOffice.org at CHI 2004

2004-04-28T14:28:00.000+02:00

»But you know when the truth is told,
That you can get what you want or you can just get old.
You¹re going to kick off before you even get halfway through,
When will you realize . . . Vienna waits for you?« Billy Joel in The Stranger

Jiri, Calum, and I had a paper at CHI 2004 in Vienna: Professional Usability in Open Source Projects: GNOME, OpenOffice.org, NetBeans

OOoCon 2003

2003-03-21T14:15:00.000+01:00

At OOoCon 2003 in Hamburg we had a panel on User Experience for OpenOffice.org. Transcript and podcast are available online.