Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Merry Christmas!

Apart from all the hot UX topics like Project Renaissance, the New Notes in Writer, this post is dedicated to ... Christmas.

We wish all the people around OpenOffice.org a peaceful time. Enjoy meeting your family and your friends!



Frank & Christoph

Saturday, December 20, 2008

OpenOffice.org User Survey Data from 11-12/2008

I have uploaded the data from the OpenOffice.org User Survey. It includes 160981 responses from November 1 to December 18, 2008. 116313 are full responses and 44668 are not completely filled out responses. Survey language is English only.

Please find the Calc spreadsheet here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Image:OOoUserSurvey2008.ods

We will have a deeper look at the data to get answers for our OOo personas next year.

Best regards,

Frank

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Results from IsoMetrics-S usability evaluation survey of Writer, Calc and Impress

I uploaded the most important results to our project page. You'll find there average ratings, standard deviation, and a chart to compare the performance of Writer, Calc and impress as evaluated by the employees of VBG. I also left some comments and a view discussion points.

There is a lot more to discuss but I did not have time to write down all issues. The page will grow constantly when I am back from vacation next year :-).

Best,
Andreas

Sunday, December 7, 2008

OOo Con 2008 Picture Gallery

I just found out that our Chinese colleagues uploaded a bunch of photographs of the OOo conference. Here's the link.

Enjoy!

Best,
Andreas

Friday, December 5, 2008

Project Renaissance: JavaFX for prototyping

Hi folks,

As you might have noticed, yesterday the JavaFX 1.0 was released into the wild. I am impressed how much progress the JavaFX group has made after the first RC, the amount of samples is impressive. So is the website, I very much like the design.

Today, I just played around a bit with Netbeans 6.5 and JavaFX to see how useful this technology could possibly be for us during the Renaissance Project. Specifically during the design phase. So far, I have the impression that rapid prototyping of mid and high fidelity UI prototypes would work pretty smoothly with JavaFX. The API has now a lot of potential and a very good online documentation. Besides, drag & drop of elements in Netbeans works fine.

The next thing I was planning to check out is the cooperation with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop files. It should be possible to import images into JavaFX with a plugin. I’ve already seen the sample which is available on the JavaFX website.

So, any opinions how we could use this great technology for prototyping when the time comes?

Best,
Andreas

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Presentations of the World Usability Day 2008

I just want to let you know that the presentations (most in German sorry about that) showed at the Word Usability Day 2008 in Hamburg are now available online. The videos will follow within the next couple of days.

At this years World Usability Day in Hamburg we had a lot of interesting talks, but with respect to the Renaissance Project I'd like to recommend to a look a these four:

Kommerzielle Ethnographie - ein Ansatz für Innovationen
James Kalbach, LexisNexis

OpenOffice.org User Feedback Programm - Optimierung der Gebrauchstauglichkeit basierend auf quantitativen Daten
Christian Jansen, Andreas Bartel, Sun Microsystems

Pragmatisches UCD für die Neuentwicklung von bahn.de
Elena Shalman, Janco Zehe, Namics


Interaction Design - Grundlagen und Prinzipien

Dirk Platzek, Wunschfeld Interaction Design


Enjoy the slides
Best,
Christian

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Havy Traffic on the Wiki since project announcement

Holy cow! You might have noticed that our Wiki just went down several times in the last two hours. I mean the traffic is impressive! Since the announcement of the Renaissance Project, the page has been accessed over 10.000 times. However, as I was editing some project details, it was less amusing to lose content every now and then. The servers seemed to handle the run not that well.

Best,
Andreas