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