LinuxTag WrapUp

The LinuxTag in General

From 24th to 27th the LinuxTag, “the most important place for Linux and open source in Europe”, took place in Berlin. I was able to join the other German community members on Thursday, the second day of the event. So there were still two and a half day to go; filled with (strong) discussions, presentations … and fun.

The fun (first). What luck, I was on time to join the LinuxNacht (the Linux night) – yummy dishes, live music (very good but also a bit loud for people who wanted to chat). Professional pictures of that event can be found – among others – in the press pictures corner. Here is one example...

The work. Besides providing help and support for everyone at our booth, there were numerous talks given by our community members. In the whole program, there were 10 presentations planned for OpenOffice.org. Remarkable, I think.

Unfortunately, I missed the change to attend other projects' presentations. The one which I remember best was the one I held ;-)

Project Renaissance

The presentation itself did run rather well, except the application which demonstrates the dynamic prototypes. It froze completely – before I was able to demonstrate anything. Fortunately, one of the attendees tried it for himself and announced that it works smoothly; except the button I clicked on :-) Besides this little issue, the software is absolutely amazing – try it!

After the presentation, there has been an interesting Q&A session – one question by a representative of the administration of a German city should be mentioned. It seems that there is some uncertainty for both large businesses and government what kind of influence Project Renaissance might have on the re-training effort of their users. Why is that important? Many people rely on what they know from previous software versions, so changes in general might have influence on the people's efficiency. If the change is huge, then re-training is necessary – costly in large scale deployments. I answered that it is currently planned to integrate interface elements step-by-step. So we will be able to provide a well tested system which will improve the efficiency in the long run. Even if these organizations upgrade the software after years (it is usual to stick with one version for a long time), then the improvements intended for all users will have a positive impact on their employees.. Fortunately, I got the feedback that the question was “well answered” - which hopefully is an indicator that the Renaissance really cares about things that. We definitively should not forget about that.

Another feedback I got from one of our own community members was about the goal being communicated a bit unclear. Although UX loves to be precise, being a bit less abstract might help here – when compared to mission and goal statements . Maybe we should include the Design Directives (which Andreas developed some months ago) in all future presentations:

• Discover essential functionality at first glance: a clearly structured UI with self-explanatory icons and labels
• Gain in experience on the fly: explore and use more advanced features with less mouse clicks
• Create eye-catching documents in less time: don't feel like struggling with styles and formatting, just pick a beautiful template

So these directives might be a nice complement to the presentation slides (German) which are now available at Project Renaissance presentation page. Also available is a short article about Project Renaissance which was written during (!) the talk by a nice guy from the German Linux Magazin.

Other Projects and Contacts

Of course, one of the central ideas of such an event is to meet other people. There were numerous very interesting people... For example, there was Björn from OpenUsability.org. We talked about e.g. how to promote OSS so that more usability expert join these projects. A real pleasure to talk to him, so I hope we will stay in contact!

Other nice contacts have also been established with people from KDE. André and I visited their booth to have a look at KOffice 2.0 which has been released recently. Although the underlying technology seemed to be very capable, we wondered whether the software is intended for end-users. An example: The software lacks some features although the buttons are there. It “halted” once and behaved a bit strange – when looking from an end-users point-of-view. Later, it was explained to us that the 2.0 codeline is a “platform release” which means to be targeted at developers. Okay, that cleared things up... (By the way, further information in given in the blog post "starting the 2.0 series".) Personally I have to say that the KDE folk is absolutely nice and I'm really much looking forward to meet them again.

UX in the Physical World

Similar to one of my blog posts of the last year's OOoCon, I noticed two nice UX related real-world-examples. First, the urban railway service in Berlin did chose a nice label for their recycle bins for collecting paper...

Did you notice it? It seems that the symbol for paper wasn't clear enough, so they added the word “Newspaper”. Due to the space restrictions, the seem to have it shortened to “New”. Looking at it now, it seems that only new paper is accepted. The good thing is, there is no need to ever empty the recycle bins :-)

Another thing we discovered were the salt and pepper shaker at the LinuxNacht. Some weeks before, a good friend of mine told me about the problems to identify the salt – is it the one with one or more holes? A simple problem for somebody having a job in the scientific research. So how could this be addressed?

Still having salt and pepper in mind, I would say that the current LinuxTag was well spiced. I would like to express my deepest thanks to the “LinuxTag Crew” and the LinuxTag e.V. (a non-profit organization) for managing the whole event together with Messe Berlin. See you next year!

Christoph

Design Proposal Collection, Lessons Learned

The following text is an excerpt from Community Feedback...

Lessons Learned

So what can be concluded now that the Design Proposal Collection is over? After looking at the individual feedback we got during the proposal collection and thereafter, it seems to have worked well. The weakest points seem to be the schedule and some parts of the documentation.

The initial schedule – two weeks for the working phase – was simply too tight. To be honest, some of us were unsure about that even before we announced the call for proposals. On the other hand, the decision to run it for another week gave us the opportunity to publish more information and to – hopefully – gain more interest in joining our Design Proposal Collection effort.

Concerning the documentation, there were mainly irritations about how the two templates (Impress file, wiki page) relate to each other and what level of detail is required. One idea of a solution could be to use the wiki to announce and point to the proposals, then only fill in the actual idea in the Impress-based template (which we would subsequently extend to include more). Then, somebody could have transferred all the content to a harmonized wiki page.

In a broader view, what are the alternatives to avoid confusion?

• Simply, reduce the formalism to – hopefully – gain room for further creativity. But this definitely requires more effort to collect, analyze and discuss the ideas.
• Increase the formalism and the documentation. Although this might restrict creativity and “scare” contributors, it will ease the post-processing of the results.

At the moment, it is unclear which tact would be best, so we'll leave it to be decided anew for each coordinated effort – looking at the focus, the complexity, the resources, etc. each time.Even if we put more emphasis on an effort's focus – there will always be a wide variety of response types from individual community members. In general it can be observed that community members want to share all the ideas they have and they often do so even if they do not fit the question posed. Even for a new Design Proposal Collection it seems that we can only set the expectations. The UX project is happy to serve as a multiplier to stimulate the overall brainstorming process :-) But, having in mind the constantly incoming general UX ideas, the OpenOffice.org project still lacks a central point to easily collect big and small ideas (not requests for enhancement or feature requests), which can be assessed by the whole community.

Another item is the communication channels – mostly we used blogs and mailing lists. Although this information was somehow “automatically” spread in the open-source community, such natural dissemination takes time. If we plan another effort similar to this one, and especially if there is a rather challenging schedule, then we should directly address the most important online news sites. This might save time and attract more people to join the effort.

Finally, the UX team to express its deepest thanks to all the people involved!

Want to read the full text? Check Community Feedback...

Transparent Decision Making

Did you ever experience that? You quickly want to print your presentation slides, so you select File – Print and then you go to the printer to grab the paper. Being at the other side of the office you might wait forever... The reason might be the following modal dialog which waits for your input until printing gets started.


Unfortunately, there are technical reasons for OpenOffice.org to be not that efficient when it comes to printing certain object types. So instead of consuming an enormous amount of resources, these dialogs have been introduced to let the user decide how OpenOffice.org should handle these objects. But, as we saw before, these dialogs interrupt the user's work flow. So my question is, whether this behavior is still acceptable...

How to answer that? The good news is, that our User Feedback Program provides a first insight in the real use of our product. I had a look at the user feedback raw data which is available for Impress and Draw and looked up all the items related to the transparency warning. I know, the current data basis might not provide significant numbers and there are still some issues, but let's just have a look at it... How is the dialog used?


Interesting, isn't it? If I got it right, then the dialog appeared 81 times and our users never let OpenOffice.org reduce the transparency during output; there are no numbers for the button „Yes“. Moreover, 9 decided to avoid this warning in the future, since the checkbox has been checked 10 times and unchecked 1 time. Similar settings are available in Tools – Options... – OpenOffice.org: Printing. There, one user deactivated „reduce transparency“ which seemed to be active before User Feedback was collected, so no activation has been tracked.

Can these numbers tell the truth? An Issue Tracker query done quickly (Query 1, Query 2) revealed only the rather new issue 101479 which refers to a confusing error message when printing transparent objects. Although this issue has no votes, and is therefore only confirmed by the reporter, this is an indicator for people being irritated by the given text... May that be the reason for 81 times clicking on „No“?

Or, are today's computers fast enough? To check that, I looked up some data in the currently active User Survey 2009 which currently contains 164818 full responses. There, 75.25% of all users run OpenOffice.org either on a PC or a Notebook (21.05% didn't answer that question). Being questioned how satisfied these users are with the speed of the computer system (the computer, not OpenOffice.org), 48.05% are satisfied or very satisfied (no answers by 37.52%). So it can be concluded that the majority of our user base which answered that question perceive their computer to be rather fast.

Summary: The User Feedback data tells us that our users always activate printing with transparency. There is currently only one issue related to the printer warning; it is about the understandability of the dialog text. And, the largest part of our user base are at least satisfied with their computer's performance. Did you expect that?

Conclusion: If OpenOffice.org will keep its printing technology, and the ongoing collected user data will show similar results, then we should at least hide the transparency warning per default. Most of our users will be affected in a positive manner – less distraction by modal dialogs and therefore an improved perceived behavior of OpenOffice.org. Okay, there might be users/administrators who think the decision is beneficial to them and who know clearly understand what it technically means – these people can easily activate the warning in the options dialog.

The Fine Print: Currently, the User Feedback system is active since the release of OpenOffice.org 3.1 in mid May. Thus, there a need for more data to confirm the current trend. In each case it will be near to impossible to clearly identify how often printing has been used in Impress or Draw, but I guess it is about 300 times for the current data which was exported 2009-06-05. So why is that important to me? As most of you might know from a previous blog posting by Philipp, I recently joined the i-Team for optimizing the new Printer Dialog in terms of User Experience. The collection of data what special options mean and how they are used is my first task, so expect to come more in the near future. If you want to know more, then please have a look at the cwsprinterpullpages in the wiki.

Finally, I think the data collection is a great chance towards more ... Transparent Decision Making ;-)

Happy printing,
Christoph

Feedback on OpenOffice.org 3.1

Hi everyone,

yesterday, we received a very nice email on the ui-ux mailing list. I think it is worth sharing, since it addresses to the whole OpenOffice.org community. So let's stop for a few seconds fixing bugs, think about the newest CWS or translating strings...

>> I am using OOo from its early days. With 3.1.0 version is the first time I feel *maturity in all aspects* of the OOo suite. BRAVO and again BRAVO to all members of OOo community! Though a sympathizer of OOo, I admit that I am (from now: I was) still using mostly MS Office 2007. But today I can say that I was not able to find any of the things that were *annoying, especially for a multilingual user.*

So please take my DEEPEST THANKS for your excellent work. << Nikos Komatselis

Thank you Nikos! I'm sure that many of the community members share my opinion that feedback like that this is the - highly ecologial - energy which drives us!

For those who stopped working, you may now go on ;-)

Cheers,
Christoph

Vacation the UX way

After Easter, I spent three days with my second family … namely the Sun UX team in Hamburg :-) As always, I enjoyed to share my time with them very much since everyone was so unbelievably kind. An example? Frank, the UX lead, interrupted his vacation for one day to join me at their office to work – and joke – with us.

Since there are no group photos like last year let's start the blog posting with “Hamburg at night”... :-)

As you may have figured out, our primary goal was to work on the “Design Proposals for Accessing Functionality” which was announced by Liz one week ago. Together, we worked out the motivation, the goals, the design principles and the procedure in general. Funnily, the procedure we had in mind originally was much more cumbersome.

In the beginning, we came up with a rather complex but powerful status indication for each of the design proposals. Several state transitions, some roles (e.g. author, reviewer), etc. But when we looked at it midways, the whole concept seemed it would hinder the contributors instead of being fun. So our whole concept got a diet and the slimmed down result is online at Design Proposals for "Accessing Functionality".

So please, this is your opportunity to improve OpenOffice.org - like Liz mentioned some days before. Because ...

Another topic we discussed was the User Experience project in general. We tried to sum up our current status: How successful are our contributions? Is there room for improvement? How do other projects integrate UX in the development process? Are there any lessons learned we can benefit from? Are our contributors satisfied? How to integrate established UX methods within our team? Many questions...

Until now, there is no conclusion to this discussion. But it might be interesting for you to look how the other open-source projects work, e.g.: The Drupal 7 User Experience Project, The Ubuntu Desktop Team, The KDE Usability Project, … Feel free to make comments or share your insights on what you think is good or bad, either by using our mailing list ux-discuss or by dropping us (Frank or me) a mail.

One thing that still drives me, is to get much more people to participate in our community. People who simply want to share their thoughts and give us some feedback, but being unfamiliar with e.g. the Issue Tracker (which is a great tool for experts) or mailing lists (which do not only provide qualitative data but the required quantifications). So in Hamburg we also talked about the pros and cons of IdeaTorrent, which is also covered in the Wiki at OpenOffice.org Idea Handling. (For the lazy ones like me, here is the shortcut to a mockup once made by Ivan.) We came to the conclusion that we might just try it... But beforehand, I will do a heuristic evaluation to judge the usability/usefulness of the tool. Stay tuned!

Next topic, we discussed how we could further promote Project Renaissance to inform our user base, to attract more people to provide their ideas, and to ask developers to support our tooling. Here are some ideas for topics we came up with:

• How was Project Renaissance organized withing the whole community and communicated via the press

• How did we address User Centered Design (UCD) in Project Renaissance

• What are the results of the UCD in Project Renaissance (e.g. Surveys, User Feedback Program, …)

• What does prototyping mean and how is it used in Project Renaissance?

• How to collect further ideas in the community via IdeaTorrent (if we give IdeaTorrent a try)

During those days, we worked out a proposal to present some of our work at the LinuxTag in Berlin – one of the most successful open-source conferences in Europe. From my point-of-view, this would be a great chance to present OpenOffice.org and some of our current activities to a broader audience. Keep your fingers crossed! *g*

Phew, what else? I had the chance for some great (and sometimes intensive) discussions with e.g. Stella Schule, Mathias Bauer, Martin Hollmichel, Oliver-Rainer Wittmann, Malte Timmermann, Christian Jansen, …Thank you all! Of course, the main topic was (guess!) Renaissance and the way we currently collect and analyze the data. But there were also other more general discussions, like how to drive the whole community – and why I think we are lacking general goals. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then please answer a little question: What are the main goals of the community and the software OpenOffice.org? I'm sure you understand ;-)

Looking back, it was the right decision to take some days off to work closely with the Sun UX team – sitting next to each other instead of being virtually connected. Not to forget the great pleasure of getting to know Liz and her great sense of humor. So knowing each other even better, I'm confident that this stay will help us to better work within the community.

Community? Next time, my personal wish is to get more community participation. Maybe there is a chance to organize one or two days dedicated to UX before or after the OOoCon this year. Opinions, anyone?

That's it! Have a nice day,

Christoph

OpenOffice.org Easter Eggs

You may know that there are some easter eggs in OpenOffice.org, don't you? But as we currently celebrate Easter in Germany, it seems that the easter bunny placed some OOo eggs in the garden...


Personally, I'm using the official holidays to visit my family which is usually spread all over Germany. So, whatever you do...

Happy Easter!

The OpenOffice.org UX Team

OpenOffice User Survey 2009: Performance Findings

Today I post the performance finding from the OpenOffice.org User Survey 2009 (OOoUS2009). The OOoUS2009 can be accessed via the registration landing page of OOo linking to our LimeSurvey tooling.

Currently more than 64K users have started the survey and more than 44K finally submitted their votes.

The survey has a performance part asking our users how satisfied they are with OOo's current performance. Performance is something that is perceived differently from person to person. It depends on the system environment used to run OOo, personal skills, the tasks that are performed with the software and external interferences like time pressure. Therefore we have also asked for the overall performance satisfaction with the computer system used by the user to have something that we can compare with OOo's findings.

We have asked our users to rate on the following performance relevant tasks using a 5 point scale from very bad [(-)(-)] to very good [(+)(+)]:

• starting the office suite
• creating new documents
• opening and saving documents
• working with the word processor (Writer)
• working with the spreadsheet application (Calc)
• working with the presentation application (Impress)
• working with the drawing application (Draw)
• working with the database (Base)
• working with the diagram module (Chart)
• working with the formula module (Math)
• closing the office suite
  

In general the overall satisfaction in terms of OOo's performance is good. 3/4 voted positive (+) and very positive (+)(+) on:

• working with Writer (84%)
• creating new documents (83%)
• opening and saving documents (81%)
• working with Calc (80%)
• closing OOo (80%)
• working with Impress (75%)

Furthermore very few people (4%-13%) rated negative (-) and very negative (-)(-). Neutral (o) ratings are hard to rate, but I think we could say that those users are not (really) satisfied with OOo's performance too. Otherwise they would have chosen a clear positive rating.

Compared to the overall system performance rating we can identify the following tasks that are rated significant worse:

1. Program start-up
2. Base
3. Math & Chart
4. Draw

Impress could be named as no. 5 but it is not really significant and 75% rated it good or very good.

Please see also the state of the Renaissance project presentation for March (performance part: 19ff).

For a deeper analysis, i.e. what tasks people did who have voted negative on OOo's performance, requires additional tooling and some more time.

Feedback welcome!

Best regards,

Frank

An overview of Project Renaissance presentations can be found at the OOo wiki.