OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog

We Moved

2010-09-29T22:46:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone,

some of you may know that I moved; we really needed more space, so we rented a nice flat only a few hundred meters from our old location. So, yesterday, we returned our keys to the owner of the old flat ... now it's time to decorate the new one and to start to feel at home.

Is this a true story? Yes, it is. We really moved ... and this was a real challenge, since it was the hot phase of the preparation of The Document Foundation you all are aware of. By the way, my deepest deepest thanks to all my friends who supported me to make my life a bit easier during that time ... they helped by e.g. painting our old flat. You are amazing, really!

Okay, back to amazing #2 and The Document Foundation. It seems that the dust settled a bit, and now it seems that our move to towards a more libre project is a bit similar. We already started to plan the interior, put some furniture in and started the decoration process ... to make our guests feel comfortable :-) So who are our guests? At the moment, there are a lot of people who seem to like the idea. It's incredible ... I really hope that Oracle sees the potential, too, and accepts our invitation to support the foundation and to finally get a better product.

Who is Oracle? In fact, it is the people ... I - being a volunteer - had always a more than great relationship with the guys being paid for the work on OpenOffice.org. In fact, I consider some of them to be my close friends ... and I really (really) respect their work and their great engagement for the community project. So I'm looking forward that LibreOffice - as referred to in the FAQ - is a temporary name, but the foundation will become the new home of a more open development for all contributors. Either companies or individuals ... let's hope for the best!

Cheers,
Christoph

Stuff on the Shelf

2010-09-08T23:03:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone,

as some of you know ... we are currently in the "hot phase" to prepare our upcoming move. After the flooding of parts of our house some weeks ago, the preparation for and being at the OOoCon, this is something that keeps us very busy at the moment.

However, I would like to share with you. I found something on the shelf: ancient StarDivision software that was my start to StarOffice, and later OpenOffice.org.
Something I even mentioned in my very first UX blog posting.

If I had a computer with a floppy disk drive ... I'd try to install it.

Cheers,
Christoph

Budapest, Day 2 and 3

2010-08-30T23:43:00.000+02:00

I already proposed two days ago, that - if you like - we may have a look at Budapest together. Yesterday, I wasn't able to publish anything, so let's continue with a small photo series taken during the last two days.

What we found out: Budapest is absolutely amazing ;-) You may look at any house, any street light or any handrail - you will find tiny but interesting details. So if you are here, too - pay attention!

Something we didn't manage to see on Saturday was the Dohány Street Synagogue. So we went back on Sunday - here is a small picture showing some of the "leafs" of the memorial in the garden.

Where to go now? We decided to go to Buda Castle to enjoy some of the sights having a greatly improved weather situation. To avoid walking all the time (and we walked a lot ...), we used the famous Budavári Sikló (a hill funicular). Look down, but only this time :-)

Once we arrived at the top, we had to return to the Matthias Church (same game like the Synagogue) to get inside ... or better: insight. Although it has been said that both the interior and the exterior are astonishing, I slightly prefer the look of the latter one. But see for yourself ...

Once we finished that, we spent our evening with some community members. Delicious! The meals, of course.

Today, we started our tour with André and we decided to visit something that (most probably) won't be part of the usual tourist tours: the Szemlő-hegyi-barlang (flowstone cave). Maybe some pictures help to describe how amazing some parts look ...

Hint: the small lower part is the hiking route ...

Hint: his picture shows a ladder towards to top of the cave ...

Okay, let's finish this small excursion - most probably I'll be able to tell a bit more after our OOoCon Budapest City Tour that will take place tomorrow.

Good night!

Christoph

Budapest, Day 1

2010-08-29T10:35:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone!

Well, a few weeks passed by without providing any life signal. Sorry! To summarize it: many things happened that required to focus on the "real life".

Now I am already in Budapest and I'm looking forward for the OpenOffice.org Conference, especially to meet all the community members (again). Until that finally happens, there will be a few days for vacation ... if you want to join, here is a picture taken from the Géllert Hill.

See you!

Christoph

Informal Meeting "FOSS and Usability"

2010-06-01T23:57:00.000+02:00

LinuxTag 2010, anybody?

We invite you to take part in an informal meeting to share thoughts, experiences and other information covering the topics Usability and User Experience in the Free Software world. The meeting is organized by Björn from OpenUsability.org and Christoph from the OpenOffice.org User Experience Team.

You should join if you are interested in:

Integrating User Centered Development into the development of your FOSS project
Wanting to add your UX expertize to a FOSS project
Wondering how to take benefits out of community work with real users
Some usability tips for your FOSS project
...

We are looking forward to see you at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany!

Go ahead and find more information on the Informal Meeting Wiki page. And if you would like to know how this event looks like, have a look at the last year's LinuxTag blog posting.

Cheers,
Christoph

PS: Of course there will be a presentation on current Renaissance topics. I'll provide some more information soon ...

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words!

2010-05-13T16:35:00.003+02:00

You definitively know the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words", don't you?

Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity

Generally speaking, the saying is absolutely true! But why do some of our drawings, sketches, GUI mockups or software prototypes do cause such an amount of discussion ... afterwards? Very often it turns out, that some of the discussions don't focus on what the original author intended.

I would like to show you two examples to guide you towards what the main intention of this posting is ... Tell me, what of the following mockups has the higher fidelity?

Do you think the right one? My answer: Nope.

The right picture might look better, because the there has been more attention to visual detail. But when looking at the interaction quality of the dialog designs (taken from the printerpullpages effort by the way), the left drawing offers nearly equals the interaction quality, maybe it even uses a better approach of visualizing content (the print page preview).

Got the point? When looking at ideas, it doesn't work better if it just looks better. Moreover, strange guys like the UX people do even try to avoid keeping too much attention on visual design (in the first run). Mostly we use something called "wireframes" to present our ideas. Why? Because otherwise you might easily run into something called "taste war" :-)

Problem solved, and now?

Not really! Now it gets even more complicated. As you may have noticed, there is an effort to improve the StartCenter. The original idea was to apply the refreshed the branding, then changes have been added which address the handling. Well, many people already brainstormed and presented ideas for this and that ... but what's the problem?

Now, it is really easy to mix up the "visual design" and the "interaction design". What is your idea about? Terminology also unchecked yet? Then, you are in real trouble ;-) At least if it is just intended to show your "visual" ideas.

When I was at the CHI (see CHI 2010, Day Four) I attended the course "Developing an Effective Prototyping Strategy". The guys proposed to address such problems with an fidelity matrix which is supplied to each design artifact. To me, being the author of the pictures above, it would have been easy to rate the intended fidelity of the content. Have a look ...

Of course, the example pictures have been discussed in detail and the intended use has been described. But does everybody like reading that? I assume not :-)

So, if people would like to discuss the graphical content of something like the StartCenter, then simply add the matrix. For example, it might then be very unlikely that get "hit" by UX comments about unfinished interaction design or sub-optimal information design. So, it also deals with your comfort ;-)

Another thing the guys in the course proposed has been the expiration date. Simply speaking: things change and you cannot do anything against it. In the first months your ideas might be great ... but then technical constraints change and your design might look like the wrong approach. Take care of that. So here is how this might be avoided ...

Summary

At work, I found this "fidelity matrix" and "expiration date" approach work very well. So I propose to add at least the former item to each of our proposals - website design, software mockups, marketing stuff, ... And then, let's keep focus! Then, a picture is really worth a thousend words. And doesn't cause a thousand lines.

Cheers,
Christoph

PS: Is there anyone who can help me to work on a small template for our wiki? I don't have any clue ... Currently, I think of replacing the fidelity numbers by little stars or dots.

Update: I've added a SVG template to the OpenOffice.org User Experience Tools Page.

Departure ahead!

2010-04-22T18:43:00.000+02:00

I was wrong. Simply wrong. In my last posting, I announced to go back to Germany ... but the "vulcano ash situation" changed the schedule a bit. The flight has been delayed by 6 days ... so I will leave today. Most probably.

But I wasn't the only one. Some people of the Georgia Tech University did start to organize stuff. Managing events and keeping us up-to-date via Twitter, Facebook (there is an own group for people "stranded" after the CHI 2010), Google Documents ... they have been just great. The lists contained about 160 people who - partly - needed help. Imagine all the students and their limited financial resources. Or all those business people who required a simple desk. They took care - thank you so much!

Yesterday for example, the guys organized a movie night ... we all watched The Terminal. To be honest, this has been fun because we already knew that things are moving on in Europe.

Europe. There have been many people from Germany, so we went out on Sunday to hang out at the Dogwood festival. And, some of us spent also some time in the Fernbank Museum of Natural History. Funnily, they had an exhibition called "Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters" ... and they had some control boards to "build your own vulcano". Strange. At least in the current situation.

However, I've learned a lot in the last days. Most important: sleeping during the waiting loop when calling the airline support hotline :-) Please keep your fingers crossed that I can avoid that in the future.

Cheers,
Christoph

CHI 2010, Day Four

2010-04-16T13:33:00.000+02:00

Finally, the last day of the conference CHI ... so what happened?

Conference Stuff

I attended the course "Developing an Effective Prototyping Strategy". As far as I understood, the term "prototyping" comprised everything from idea creation phase until the start of the implementation phase. Personally, I tend to think a bit different about that ... I prefer to distinguish between idea generation, requirements engineering, design proposals. The latter one may be prototyped via paper, computer graphics, ... whatever is available :-) And this is already an important information - use whatever is appropriate for a certain problem.

One of the trainers published the book "Effective Prototyping with Excel". I am not kidding; he presented astonishing results of famous web pages and their Microsoft Excel counterparts. However, they affirmed that they had been using Calc for that purpose, too.

Two nice things popped up in the course: First, they use fidelity matrixes and and mockup expiration dates. I think I'll cover that later until figuring out how to make use of them.

After that, I went to a few presentations and joined a discussion group ... day job related. Finally, the conference ended with the Closing Plenary and "Doing what’s right with robots: an ethical appraisal of robot application". Very interesting.

Open Source User Experience

Later, I had the chance to talk with Paula Bach (Pennsylvania State University, Microsoft; I mentioned her in the previous blog posts) and Alex Faarborg (Principal Designer on Firefox). We went out for dinner and I introduced them the project and our UX team a bit.

Alex asked some very good questions about our goals and the overall strategy ... but since we (whole OpenOffice.org Community) haven't commonly agreed on anything, it became (again!) clear that there are still major issues within the project. At least when it comes - he also asked questions about that - the kind engagement of our volunteering community members. However, we will stay in contact since they (and others) are interested in a general open-source usability / user experience / human-computer interaction / ... activity. Cool!

Sorry for the picture of us three. I mean, not for the picture itself, but for the low quality ... there is always a risk when asking strangers to help out ;-)

So, to sum up the nice guys I've met in the last few days:

Máirín Duffy (interaction designer, RedHat)
Paula Bach (open source researcher, also working for Microsoft)
Roshanak Zilouchian (open source researcher)
Alex Faaborg (principal designer, Firefox)

Cheerio

Today I will depart - unless the recent activities of the vulcano Eyjafjallajökull will again cause delays or cancellations in the European air traffic. But even if everything wents fine, please don't expect further messages to soon ... I'll cure a bad jet lag ;-)

Bye,
Christoph

PS: By the way, the next conference is the LinuxTag in Berlin. My proposal "Project Renaissance in the year 2010" has been accepted. Great, isn't it?

CHI 2010, Day Three

2010-04-15T14:09:00.000+02:00

The Pictures Post :-) I'm sorry to throw so many pictures at you, but many things happened and I think it is worth looking at it...

I noticed that I completely missed to show you where the conference is located - it is a big hotel in the dowtown. Although I live nearby, I would like to share the great interior of the hotel lobby.

The first item that day was the panel "Managing User Experience ... Managing Change" - insanely good when looking at corporate environments. Managers from Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Plaxo.com (...) talked about their experience bring User Experience into the company. The funny thing was, that these people had also worked for Yahoo! or Oracle - so the attendees could greatly benefit from their experience.

As I said yesterday, I tried to attend "Involving Reflective Users in Design" by Paula Bach. I didn't knew that she made a study of the posts on our mailing lists, more precisely how our UX team members (she called them reflective users) describe problems and potential solutions for OpenOffice.org. The thread she cited was the one about "showing or hiding rulers per default in Writer" (sorry, no link). I'll ask her to provide the text (the "real" paper can't be shared, it is copyrighted by the conference organization).

The absolute "wow" came with the hospitality event in the evening. It took place at the Georgia Aquarium: Sharks, Whales, Small Fishes ... similar to the participants in an open-source project (just kidding).

IBM Research provided sweets and coffee - and announced that with a sign. But when the perspective is changed slightly ... see for yourself :-)

As I said, the real "wow" came with the aquariums - here just two examples. You could walk trough a tunnel and look the fishes from below!

Another great thing was the widescreen aquarium with a huge glass front. Unfortunately the time was up already, so we had to go. Chatting with others and watching the fishes are two things which compete too much.

In the late evening I wanted to talk a bit with Paula, but I didn't see her in the masses. Instead, I've met Roshanak Zilouchian and her supervisor - great! Roshanak is an open-source community researcher and we talked about how we develop and how we interact with the corresponding tools (wiki, issue tracker, ...). Maybe you remember - there have been some mails by her on our mailing lists.

However, I was happy to join them and we went to a revolving restaurant with a great view ... enjoy!

As you might guess - I have to hurry up. The last day of the conference is today ... and I don't want to miss that.

Christoph

CHI 2010, Day Two

2010-04-14T13:57:00.001+02:00

Wow, time is running ...

As already said, yesterday I attended the course "Storyboarding for designers and design researchers". It was just great. But storyboarding? Isn't that the thing used for making movies? Doesn't it look like comic strips? What is it for?

Basically, storyboarding is a tool to share and idea within an interdisciplinary team. Okay, we assume that if you want to build a good solution for a complex problem, then this requires people being experts in different areas (e.g. our I-Teams). But that doesn't necessarily mean that they understand each other - each domain has a different language, a different understanding of things. (Ever watched a discussion between a psychologist or cognitive scientists with a computer science guy? Sometimes like being in a cabaret show.)

One proposed solution is storyboarding: a graphical way to look at the problems of one or more persons. It may look similar to a comic strip which explains situations and how the new "thing" (whatever it will be) has (a good) impact on the life of the user. It is not about discussing the final product ... it is about to get an understanding what the problem is about. To be absolutely clear: It is not about drawing comics! There are important rules which make it work ... or completely fail. End of disclaimer :-)

In my day job, we started using storyboarding with the help of a colleague with great design skills. Working in another department, we can rarely ask him to help us ... but the solution is so simple: Act with a group of people, take pictures, and add the things you need by simply drawing them.

We have been told to work out a remote control for several people watching TV. I proposed to consider the place restaurant, because I am sometimes a bit annoyed by all the TVs showing up here (yesterday, "our" restaurant had about 15 TVs running .... grrr). Other people decided to go for a family home, the gym, public places, ... We planned our scene and acted accordingly. After the planning, the simple "doing" took not more than 30 minutes - including enhancing the scenes by objects and adding sub-titles etc.

Here is the result...

You see that the tables, the TV and some other items are simply drawn. After showing that to other people, nobody had any question with regard to understandability ... which means that our team (Thank you members!) did rather well. Here is a picture of the teams showing their results ...

So is this something for OpenOffice.org? Sometimes yes, sometimes not. I think, if we go for more "unknown" topics like advanced collaboration and use of documents in (more) daily life, this could be something to consider. It worked very well - and providea information visually instead of having a lot of detailed text (which is sometimes mandatory).

The rest of the day is less important to you, I think. Except that I have been able to talk with Paula Bach (from Microsoft) who was one of the organizers of the FLOSS usability workshop I've talked about yesterday. Unfortunately, we had only a few minutes, but it is really nice. She told me that she will give a talk with some references to OpenOffice.org. If possible, I'll try to attend ...

The rest of the evening was spent with my colleague ... in the cinema. The media-showcase, where people showed their new solutions in short films. Hey, and the conference team provided popcorn ... this is how learning new things should work all the time ;-)

When I went home, I've met another guy staying in the same hotel. Okay, another two hours of intensive and funny talk. He turned out to be a usability professional for software APIs. I am not kidding ... he is a researcher/consultant to make software programming as efficient as possible. Interesting ...

That's it for today! As usual, I have to hurry up :-)

Cheers,
Christoph

CHI 2010, Day One

2010-04-13T13:55:00.000+02:00

Many people might think that providing a good User Experience doesn't involve any "rocket science". Well, that is true. But - in fact - it requires the work in many other research areas. Many of the researchers and practitioners working on these topics meet at the CHI 2010, the premier conference on Computer-Human Interaction.

I'm happy to say that I was able to join for reasons of my day job - last time I have been at the conference in 2008. However, these topics are also related to the User Experience in OpenOffice.org, I would like to share how it feels to be here. Here? Atlanta.

The next picture is about my way to the place where the conference takes place. The most important reason for providing the picture is to tell that there is some day light - before we get into the deep and dark conference rooms :-)

The opening session of the conference - you might notice that there is room for quite a number of people. As far as I remember there are about 2500 HCI people from all over the world. The conference will provide over 200 events like talks, workshops and courses. And here you might grasp the main problem - there are so many interesting things (still, we talk about my day job) that it is nearly impossible to grasp everything. Sigh.

I talked about my day job - but here is something remarkable. There has been a workshop on "The Future of FLOSS in CHI Research and Practice" on Sunday. I was able to meet one of the participants - Máirín Duffy, a (formal) "senior interaction designer with Red Hat, Inc.". We discussed a lot similarities and differences in the communities - now you know what lunch breaks are meant for :-)

The next noteworthy event (both for you and me) might be the "visit" in the Hard Rock Cafe - together with a colleague of mine, from the Palo Alto team, and some other extremely nice guys from e.g Volkswagen Research. Besides many (!) HCI related topics, I consumed my first "real" American Burger. More detailed, a cheeseburger with American cheese.

That's it for the moment. I have to hurry up to get my course ... storyboarding. See you tomorrow...

Bye,
Christoph

Happy Easter!

2010-04-02T12:26:00.004+02:00

I wish everyone a Happy Easter*! Please enjoy the time with your family and friends ... And maybe it is even more enjoyable (for some) that I will be offline for a few days :-)

Cheers,
Christoph

*) where appropriate

CeBit2010: The Ribbonator

2010-03-10T19:58:00.006+01:00

OpenOffice.org

Phew, last week I attended the CeBit and I was greeted with "Finally, the Ribbonator is there!". Jacqueline, one of the German project co-leads, told me how glad she was that somebody of the UX team arrived to manage the Renaissance related questions. Many people had already asked for the changes to come in OpenOffice.org - being driven by interest or pure fear ;-) To me, it is still surprising how many people believe in the press coverage that OpenOffice.org intends to "copy and paste" a competitor product ... ts ts ts. It seems that the presentation I did last year was less sucessful ...

However, I was glad to join the German team on the fourth day of the conference. Team also refers to some friends who are usually present at the trade fairs: Sun/Oracle, SCAI, Teamdrive, FOSS Group, ... And surely, there have been many questions concerning Renaissance, but I was able to answer many of the questions with the help of the video coverage that sheds some light on the current development (e.g here or here). But also the current printer improvements have been interesting to some of the attendees. Finally, everybody agreed that this will bring OpenOffice.org a step forward :-)

Forward? Fast forward! There have also been other great meetings / discussions / events ... Jacqueline was so kind to sum it up in her (German) CeBit 2010 Summary. Really worth to check it out! Personally, I would like to thank all people involved ... especially Liz and Rosana who had been sick and therefore weren't able to attend :-(

Lotus Symphony

The IBM stand - mmh, it covered nearly on fourth of the exhibition hall - was not too far away from the OpenOffice.org booth. Since we have been asked to provide some feedback on Symphony (which is based on OpenOffice.org), I took the chance to check it out. So, if you want to know what I encountered in the short period of time ... have a look at the mail on the UX discuss mailing list.

Although I was the nit-picker, I got a "stress ball" which will be more than helpful to cope with some current OpenOffice.org topics :-)

KDE KOffice

Another cool thing was the in-depth discussion with the people from KOffice who were also present at the CeBit. The talk started with some questions concerning our change tracking system, but since I lack the knowledge how it is implemented, I was able to slowly change the discussion towards comments ;-)

To be honest, they seemed to be very interested in what we achieved since they are currently working on bringing both change tracking and comments into KWord, the KOffice word processor. Thus, I presented them what we documented in the wiki during our great Notes2 time. Maybe I paid a bit too much attention to detail, but I was more than happy that somebody might pick up some thoughts, since many (!) of the detailed feature proposals and rough ideas still have to find their way into OpenOffice.org. But also the discussion of basic behavioral questions brought some lengthly Notes2 I-Team discussions to mind :-)

Finally, attending the CeBit was much fun - although the other community members and I had only a few hours to share ...

Bye,
Christoph

Back me up, Scotty! Aehm, BackupPC.

2010-02-13T22:58:00.004+01:00

What a week. After the Community Council Meeting...

I visited my family (for e.g. 70th birthday party),
came home (and fought against my Inbox *g*),
went to a two days business trip (exhausting and the current train situation a bit annoying...),
spent a nice evening with my colleagues (oops, I totally forgot about our Indian style dinner),
in the same night, I helped my neighbor since her husband had a hypoglycemia and required emergency medical services,
then overslept the day after,
tried to support some colleagues with their pilot study (some computer in the network did say goodbye), ...

... and finally I got called by my girlfriend who told me that her computer had been stolen. Oh dear, what's next?

Unfortunately, she requires the notebook computer for her day job, so there wasn't that much time find a suitable replacement. Now, about 24 hours later, we already bought another one, set it up with Ubuntu Linux, and restored most of the data.

Why is that so important that I wanted to tell you in a blog post? The reason is to say "Thank you!" to the people in other open-source projects who do a great job to make others' lifes easier. For example BackupPC - the system that saved (most of) my weekend :-)

BackupPC resides on a little server and scans the computers in the local network. If it detects a known one, it connects via a SSH tunnel and syncs the files to RAID disks. The file history can then be accessed via a web interface which also provides to (usually) easily restore them including access rights. The goood thing is, no one has to worry about doing the backups manually.

So please guys, keep an eye on your data. Usually, one realizes how important it is once it is lost... :-)

Bye,
Christoph

CC F2F Meeting in HH

2010-02-08T21:36:00.007+01:00

The heading seems to be a bit cryptic, isn't it? It is about the "Community Council Face-To-Face Meeting in Hamburg".

We, the Community Council, had the chance to meet each other in the real world. Two days to catch up with all the tiny bits and pieces which are sometimes so incredibly difficult to discuss - mainly via IRC and in parallel with the "competing" usual project work.

The folks at the Hamburg office offered a warm welcome - many thanks to Jürgen and the members of the Team OpenOffice.org e. V. who cared about our creature comforts.

This is how the participants looked like - just a snapshot since we missed any opportunity to posture ...

There were some interesting information and sometimes even strong discussions. Hardly surprising, since each of the council members has a certain viewpoint. As you may know, each of the members is elected by a special constituency, so that the person can represent the interests of a certain group in our whole community.

Besides he official discussion there were - maybe even more important - the lesser official discussions until late in the night. I can just repeat my request to everyone to use any chance to attend such a local meeting or even conference ... :-)

Here is a picture of what happened with the results ... aehm ... the media which was used to collect the results.

You may take the chance to have a look at the draft minutes John was so kind to prepare. Most probably, there will be some more information in the near future. Until then we have some more Action Items which have to be resolved ... let's go!

That's it - many thanks to all the people who were directly and indirectly involved!

Christoph

Brainstorm New Ideas: Contextual Undo

2010-01-31T22:11:00.002+01:00

Last year I started a small series of brainstorming ideas for improving OpenOffice.org. So maybe you remember the idea Document Check which was targeted to make finalizing documents more easy. Now let's continue with...

Contextual Undo

Idea Summary

The central idea of "Contextual Undo" is to let the user revert changes in a certain part of the document only. Thus, it overcomes the basic limitation of the conventional undo functionality which basicly is a linear list for "editing steps" for the whole document.

Rationale

Productivity software like OpenOffice.org provides different functionality to revert changes in a document. A very common one is "undo" which enables the user to revert changes of the current document editing session step-by-step. When looking on the following - rather simple - document workflow, then we'll now focus on the step "Modify".

Let's first have a look how the today's "undo" functionality is presented to the user. The following screenshot, which shows the expanded "undo" drop-down in the standard toolbar, will be used to explain the behavior.

The current "undo" functionality ...

... provides a list of editing actions in reversed order (e.g. "Insert graphics" was the last one)
... is rather independent of the kind of actions (e.g. typing, inserting, deleting)
... already merges 'atomic' steps into more logical larger ones (e.g. typed words instead of single letters)
... helps the user by showing the number of actions to be undone (e.g. "Actions to undo: 5")
... has only a limited number of actions to be undoable (see Tools -- Options -- OpenOffice.org -- Memory -- Undo)
... is a document-centric functionality and therefore e.g. available in the standard toolbar

There are many little things to be improved with regard to the OpenOffice.org "undo" functionality, but at the moment the very last last statement - being document-centric - is the one to be adressed. Thus, you may have noticed that the user (you?!) can only undo his actions step-by-step. Even if the user choses to go back five steps, then OpenOffice.org executes "undo" five times one after another. It is impossible to only revert one step (or a series of actions) which has been applied in the past.

Goal: The user is able to simply revert changes to a certain element in the document without affecting the other changes made during the document editing session.

Use Cases

Use Case 1: Reverting Unwanted Changes in a Calc Sheet

Sara uses an OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet document to do her private accounting. The information is spread among different sheets, so she works on some parts of the document. Unfortunately, she made some little mistake in the one sheet she worked on several minutes ago. Since she doesn't want to loose all her work, so she decides to use the "contextual undo" functionality which makes it really easy to revert the changes in the selected sheet. She can continue to work on seamlessly and focus on the topic.

Use Case 2: Reverting Changes of Pasted Content

John works in a large company. His boss requests to create a new presentation which presents the project he currently works on. He collects the related documents - texts, diagrams and graphics - and starts to compose the presentation. To keep the presentation document in a reasonable state, he first adapts the information and formatting in the source documents before pasting the content in the OpenOffice.org Impress document. For example, he adds some text which better explains the information in the given context and adds it to slide 3. Later he notices that some of the information is somehow doubled on slide 12 - it seems that the current source document already contained it. Thus, he wants to revert the changes on slide 3 with "contextual undo". Luckily, OpenOffice.org keeps the full editing history of the text which has been pasted and so he simply reverts some of the text changes without affecting the rest of the document. He is happy that this saved some time, since his boss needs the presentation in less than one hour.

Use Case 3: Working on the Bachelor Thesis

Michael works on his bacholor thesis in OpenOffice.org Writer. Since he lacks a bit concentration today, he jumps back and forth in the document and works on different sections. After a break, he briefly scans the changes made to the document and wants to revert some text he worked on some hours ago. He selects the modified paragraphs and executes the "contextual undo" - he browses the history of the changes and reverts all the unwanted changes with one click.

Detailed Description

Read on in UX Idea Contextual Undo (Wiki) ... here is a first "sneak preview".

Closing Words

My girlfriend loves fortune cookies on the New Year's Day and so I picked one, too. The message was: "Your head is full of new ideas. Apply them!" Okay, I do. But you, please don't forget to rate them ... or even better ... add your own!

If you are interested in more ideas, then please check out the Wiki category UX Idea.

Bye,
Christoph

UX meeting in Hamburg, Day Two

2010-01-15T22:17:00.006+01:00

Introduction

This is my second – and last – posting which covers my two days stay “UX meeting in Hamburg”. In the last posting, I've talked about non-disruptive messages and the common goal for OpenOffice.org. Now, we will have a look at Impress and the printing improvements.

Christian and “What is going on for Impress?”

I had the chance to attend the meeting of the Renaissance team which currently works on the thinning out process for Impress. As discussed earlier, this process is intended to “clean up” the current user interface of Impress with the goal to ease the work on major improvements planned in the future. So let's state that we currently talk about how to improve the already well-known user interface.

The design principles are currently a bit implicitly stated, therefore I would like to turn it into something more explicit (as it has been explained to me)....

Only important things (I repeat, important things) should be made available in the toolbars
Some (currently unnecessary modal) dialog content might be considered for being used in the task pane
The task pane will be improved to be more usable on small screens

At the moment, I want to talk about the last item – how to improve the task pane. So why is this required? There are several reasons, but let's pick out two of them which mainly deal with the task selector elements:

They eat a lot of space: Each element is presented and therefore reduces the available space. Especially for the vertical arrangement of user interface elements, this is problematic. I've added a screenshot below how Impress looks on my 1280x800 notebook screen. You may notice (highlighted area) that the space being available for animation effects is … limited.
They require large mouse traveling: Especially if people search for a certain option this is even worse – they may explore the interface by clicking through each available task selector pane. Although we try to take care of how things are named, people might not be aware of the meaning of “Layout” and “Master Pages”.

But there are also advantages with regard to the current solution – the reasons for which they had been selected initially. For example, each task pane name is directly visible (e.g. “Layout”). If we would use icons alone, we might end up with the problems of the navigator and stylist. Many similar looking icons for context change and – at the same time – many clueless looking eyes ;-)

Okay, how to improve that? Some days ago, Christian Lippka already published an early visual example on Youtube which saves much space and which has been discussed in the Renaissance team. Finally, Christian Lippka, Frank Loehmann and myself ended up in discussing advantages and disadvantages of this and alternative designs. And, luckily, we were able to use the solution proposal by the IBM Lotus Symphony team which has been added to our wiki some time ago.

Within the discussion Frank sketched a proposal which presents versatile task pane content which might be docked on different places. It may be even present at “context” locations, e.g. selecting the slide layout directly on the slide. That leaded to the question whether toolbar content and task pane content etc. have to be technically different (with regard to future developments). If not, then this might ease the realization of an even more optimized UI in Renaissance.

We started to summarize the ideas in some wireframe mockups which also contain some explanations how it might finally behave. This time, I was in charge to produce something – and Frank took to opportunity to take a picture.

Please click on the graphic to explore the details.

I think, one of the most elegant ideas is the (decent) fading of the task pane content during mouse over on tabs. That would make it possible for the user to simply move the mouse pointer down (on the tabs) until she or he finds the appropriate element (in the contents area). A simple click makes the tab persistent. For most users, this might be far more efficient than looking on the headers only – since people usually search for visual clues (like the slide designs).

Like usual some of the ideas aren't technically feasible, but we agreed on some basic behavior which may even be realized for the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.3. Stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed ;-)

Philipp and “Printer Pull Pages”

One thing I'm particularly happy about was the meeting with Philipp Lohmann, the guy who is the I-Team lead for the printing improvements for OpenOffice.org (printerpullpages). We are working on this topic since several months but we've met never before … a great opportunity to change that.
But, I am sure that we talked about many – to you – less interesting details, I'll skip much of the discussion. The main message is, that we will further work on improvements for the printing. For example, we discussed the necessity of the small “Print in progress” dialog which is shown after clicking “Print”. This modal dialog be even replaced with a non-disruptive message (see above). You may notice how well things fit together, don't they? ;-)

The End

That's it for now. I hope you enjoyed some – if not all – of the topics...

Bye,
Christoph

UX meeting in Hamburg, Day One

2010-01-13T22:08:00.003+01:00

Introduction

Last week I was on holiday from my day job so I went to Hamburg to spend time on my hobby: OpenOffice.org. I experienced the kind and warm hospitality of Sun, especially the Sun User Experience team and had the chance to get in contact with some more “new” people and discuss some topics which have been around for a while. I will report on my visit in two parts. Today is Part One.

Malte and “How to Use Non-Disruptive Messages?”

One of the first meetings was a surprise: Malte Timmermann asked me to discuss some details of a non-modal information bar which I wrote about two years ago; you may recall the Direct Manipulation Snippets for Documents. In general, this kind of non-modal interaction/information elements are used in many different applications like Mozilla Firefox, Gnome Desktop, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft File Explorer (Vista), Ubuntu Desktop, … For OpenOffice.org you may simply think of an information bar above the document view port which communicates simple information or warnings. During our meeting, Malte referred to one of my use cases which I would like to quote again (to be found in the wiki):

Example 2 “Macros”: If a user opens a document containing Macros, she/he is asked to confirm the execution of the macros. Until the confirmation, the user has no chance to see the document content. So why not loading the document without executing the Macros and asking the user afterwards for the permission?

If you read the wiki page thoroughly, you may have noticed that these “additional” Direct Manipulation Snippets for documents don't yet consider all kinds of situations. This was the reason for Malte to ask:

What if several messages shall be shown at the same time? For example, four messages would cover large parts of the document or may be bigger than the whole OpenOffice.org window. How to present them?
What if a user wants to recall a message which has been shown to him some time ago? For example, do we require some kind of message stack to be accessible afterwards?
What if a message is rather large, e.g. a user shares a document in a Document Management System and adds a rather large comment? How to show this message to the user – instantly – without requiring a large part of the window area?
What if a message is related to OpenOffice.org in general, e.g. the invitation to join our OpenOffice.org Improvement Program or to inform about software updates?

… and much more. You see, the discussion isn't finished yet. The funny thing is that – during the discussion – we collected more and more ideas for using this kind of non-modal interaction to make working with OpenOffice.org more pleasing and more efficient. Some examples:

If users add comments/notes without having entered a user name, we may ask him to add this information when required.
If users open signed documents we could explain to them what signed documents are. Today, many people don't know much about that.
If users add extensions we might inform them about the newly added functionality.

I think you got the point why I think it is worth to work on it. Let's see if Malte and his colleagues share that opinion.

Kay and “What is our common goal?”

Kay Koll is the friendly marketing guy who, for example, publishes the monthly newsletters to the OpenOffice.org community. During lunch, we started a nice discussion about what goals exist for working on OpenOffice.org. If the goals are inconsistent or unclear, for example when working on the core functionality, documentation, web presence, etc, we face inconsistency and diverging development. Thus, we talked about how to make working on OpenOffice.org more target-oriented.

For example, we talked about the current improvements like “release mottos” for upcoming versions and the current – rather technical – mission statement. You may know that large organizations, both non-commercial and commercial, invest a lot of effort in developing a common mission and goals to be used in all their projects, teams,etc. Personally, I think that this kind of “tool” might help to ease development decisions. However, our discussion ended up generating some ideas for an upcoming visual design and branding meeting , so, we decided to wait for the outcome of that meeting.…

The Small Print

I would like to say a bit thank you to Liz who took care of me, like she did for other community members some months ago :-) She provided (as she called it) a warm and dry place to sleep and (as I would refer to) some delightful discussions apart from OpenOffice.org and all the development stuff. The same is true for the hospitality of Frank who arranged many tiny things to make my stay as comfortable as possible.

Besides that, many thanks to all the people (Christoph Lukasiak, Christian Jansen, Matthias Huetsch, Eric Savary, …) who discussed all the ideas and thoughts – or just dropped by to say hello! I hope to see you again, soon...

Have a nice day!
Christoph

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T21:43:00.004+01:00

Also from my side a happy New Year and the best wishes for you and the whole OpenOffice.org community in 2010: health, happiness, success, luck ... and an increased market share for OOo :-)

Christoph

Brainstorm New Ideas: Document Check

2009-12-06T01:08:00.002+01:00

Hi everyone,

although Renaissance keeps me sometimes rather busy, there are still some ideas to make OpenOffice.org more user friendly, making working with it more efficient and reduce potential document issues right from the start. Since we currently lack a common idea handling, I feel free to publish some of the ideas in this blog. Let's start with ... tada ...

Document Check

Idea Summary

The idea is about a "Document Check" functionality which checks the document for typical issues with regard to security, compatibility, content, understandability, graphical design and accessibility. The document check result provides central information on issues which have been found, where they have been found and - if possible - proposals to correct the issues. Usually, the functionality may be called manually by the user, but it may be also executed automatically.

Rationale

Today's documents are created for various purposes and published in different channels. Even with the numerous functions available in OpenOffice.org or being available in extensions, it still requires some experience to make sure that each document can be shared without problems. The following - rather simple - workflow shows the steps required to create or to edit any kind of document. Here, we want to focus on the step "Check".

In this step, prior the document is shared (e.g. printed, uploaded, converted to PDF), experienced users check the document for various issues. For example, a user may search for missing references indicated by the field text "Error: Reference source not found", look up non-embedded graphic files in the menu "Edit - Links...", and check whether there are hidden comments with "View - Comments". In any case, these steps require both experience and effort to look up the different places. What seems missing is a central place to check the documents for common issues prior the document is shared.

Goal: The user is able to simply check the document for common issues. Most of these issues can be resolved with the help of functionality available in OpenOffice.org.

Use Cases
The following use cases are just examples. There are some more on the wiki page...

Use Case: Keep Corporate Identity

John works in a large company which really cares about the visual style of internal and external documents. Thus, the company provides in-depth information how templates, colors and fonts have to be used to ensure high quality corporate identity. But, John finds it difficult to keep all the information in mind, when working on documents. Especially, since his technical documentation or specification documents are based on various sources and content types. Thus, after finishing each document, he executes the Document Check which informs him about potential Corporate Identity issues and also provides some hints to resolve these issues. Usually, everything is just fine.

Use Case: Documents for Everyone

Jane is a very active member in a non-profit organization. Recently, she agreed to take over the work on the internal magazin for the members and other interested people. After finishing the draft, she executes the Document Check which provides useful information on the style of the document. She is told that the document might look better when using less different font types and sizes. Additionally, the readability analysis proposes to use less complex sentence structures. Finally, the Document Check informs her about some color combinations which might make reading very difficult for people with limited eyesight (color blindness) - approx. 7% of men are affected. She didn't know about that, so she jumps to the page with a click and changes the document accordingly.

Draft Mockups

Mockup showing a document without any problems identified...

Mockup showing critical issues. At least from the company's point-of-view...

Mockup showing one severe issue and other proposals to improve the document...

Proposed Items to be Checked

The proposed items to be checked are ... Okay, that might be less interesting for you. Not??? Then please continue on the wiki page dedicated to "Document Check"...

I hope you enjoyed the blog post. Please tell me what you think about the idea on the wiki page. And - of course - please add your own experience what items should be checked or how this proposal can be further improved.

Personally, I think this capability would be unique for office software and might just rock ;-) At the moment, it's just an idea without developer support...

Bye,
Christoph

Time Machine Reloaded - November 8th

2009-11-15T23:56:00.000+01:00

Hi folks!

It's the right time to set the time right ... This is the last day of my little Time-Machine-Blog which still covers the adventure OpenOffice.org Conference 2009.

November 8th

It seems that the today's weather wants to ease our goodbye - in the morning it rained and the sun (lowercase letters!) was nearly gone. There were still a few hours until my flight to Germany, so we decided to store my luggage at the main station and to see as much as we can.

Yesterday I talked about the time constraints and that we were not able to get into the Colosseum. Today, we joined a tourist group which dramatically reduces waiting time and provides some more historical facts. But here, the only thing that really matters is a picture...

Above, you see the inside of the Colosseum. Or let's say the remaining parts, since we already look at the basement. Many of the precious goods have already be taken away, for example the marble decorations. We have been told, that the walls have been completely covered ... and now we also know that the holes in the walls have been used to attach the marble tiles.

Although sometimes it might feel different, I think that theming the UI of OpenOffice.org is far more easy than to cover a zillion square meters with extremely heavy material :-)

Okay, we didn't only stare at holes ... we also moved on to get into the Roman Forum. To give you an idea that I had to hurry up, I will only provide one picture (Do I hear any relief for saving you some time? *g*). Funnily, the place had been a private "theater" for the emperor. Nice idea ...

That said, I had to hurry up to get to the airport. After saying goodbye to André, I went towards the main station. Due to my time buffer, I had the chance to enjoy my very last cappuccino. Sigh.

The rest went rather well and so everyone - and everything - landed safely. I mean, also my bag arrived without any further deformation :-)

Different to me. The last thing I thought was "bed, sleep, bed". Well, I had some nice dreams ...

Now

I hope you enjoyed the last days. If you have any comments, proposals or just critique, then please let me know! To me, it was a great pleasure, because i had the chance to experience some tiny details again. Details which have been covered by the whole buzz around the OpenOffice.org Conference.

Literally, see you next year! :-)

Christoph

PS: It may bother you, but for Planet readers it might be worth to have a look at the original blog posting which better preserves formatting

Time Machine Reloaded - November 7th

2009-11-14T23:23:00.001+01:00

Hi again,

the OpenOffice.org Conference is already, but when going 7 days back in time, we are still in Italy.

November 7th

Originally, some of us planned to reside some days longer in Orvieto and to eventually visit Rome by train. Some things changed after the announcement that there will be a strike by the railway employees. Jacqueline and André managed to get some rooms in Rome and to discuss the issue with our hotel. Fortunately, the hotel personnel was extremely kind and agreed to change our reservation. Thanks!!!

We moved on to Rome - and to my surprise - the neighborhood was extremely nice. As you will see on the picture, we saw a building with an orange tree (for everyone living in warmer regions, that is something special for us).

After dropping our baggage, we instantly moved towards the center of the city to visit some sights. Here is the well known Colosseum. I provide a picture without tourists - the amount of people there is a bit annoying ;-)

Besides the Colosseum, the whole site offers a lot to see. Due to the limited time - we wanted to continue our sightseeing tour by bus - we just had a brief look at the Roman Forum. Funnily, we've met Andreas who helped us to get some "inside" pictures. Mmh, the gate on the picture lets it look like a prison ...

As I already said, we continued the tour by bus and got of at special places. One example is the "St. Peter's Square" in the Vatican City.

As you can see, it is rather large. But that doesn't guarantee that you will only meet strangers - it seems that the OpenOffice.org people are just everywhere :-) That time, we met Rene who joined us...

Once inside, we decided to take the over 500 steps to enjoy the great view from the dome of the St. Peter's Basilica. Have a look at the shadow in the center of the picture - no, that's not my head ;-)

The building is absolutely impressive; outside and inside. Here just a brief look on the altar ...

Fast forward. We continued our bus tour until it gots dark ... and cold; as you may guess on the picture below. So we went back to our hotel and finally found a nice place to get our dinner. The very last evening with both Jacqueline and André. Somehow :-(

That's it. We will finish our journey tomorrow, after a short look inside the Colosseum.

Until then, please have a nice day!

Christoph

PS: The original posting with preserved formatting is located here.

Time Machine Reloaded - November 6th

2009-11-14T01:31:00.000+01:00

Dear readers,

even today we do fight against some time constraints. So let's have a look what happened on ...

November 6th

The last day of the conference. It might be good for you that most of the day has been spend with personal chats and discussions. That makes this posting a bit shorter...

The first presentation I attended was "A new logo for OpenOffice.org" by Bernhard of the Art team. You may remember the poster stand which had been organized for that - I talked about that earlier. If you are interested in some more information, the presentation material has already been made available here.

After that, there has been the excellent presentation by Jacqueline and Oliver-Rainer who talked about "Lists and Outline in Writer" to be found here. Although the slides are available, you might miss the live demo unless you have a look at the video (starts at 57min).

Then, the day passed by ... unbelievably fast. Especially since there were many private discussions, even targeting critical questions with regard to the development of OpenOffice.org or the communication activities of Project Renaissance. I'd like to say "Thank you" to these people, who hopefully already know about that.

At the end of the day, the organization team offered a "town walk". Great, since there were some small sights and musuems we had not known about. On the left you see a picture which had been taken in the "Pozzo della Cava".

Time went by and it got dark outside. Let's share one of the night views of Orvieto.

Finally, we made it to "San Giovenale", a veeery old church built in 1004 (the picture on the right). I'm still somehow surprised how good the original picture looks for not having a tripod, using a consumer lens and an exposure time of over one second.

Okay, since we are discussing pictures and cameras - here is Bernhard who also tries to capture some of the nice parts of the church.

That's all for today, since I don't have pictures covering a very funny pizza (and many more things we'd tried) dinner in the late evening.

Oh, by the way, I already said that this was the very last day of the conference. So I would like to express my deepest thanks to all people involved.

Thank you for organizing, attending, chatting, improving, ...

But to me, it's not over yet. There are still two days of sightseeing I would like to share. Tomorrow, we will move on to Rome. Stay tuned :-)

Have a nice evening!

Christoph

PS: The original posting and formatting can be found on OpenOffice.org UX Team Blog.

Time Machine Reloaded - November 5th

2009-11-12T23:47:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone,

let's go back the usual 7 days to re-experience the OOoCon 2009!

November 5th

From our point-of-view, it was "the day" of the conference. It was packed with User Experience related topics (conference program, page 2). Here are some highlights...

Ma Li from the IBM Lotus Symphony gave some nice talks, especially since he had used very entertaining and sometimes funny slide designs. Here, I can can only provide a picture shown the "default" design.

Basically, everyone talked about the same - how to better suit the needs of our users. Okay, we've also been reminded to avoid the impersonal term "user", so please exchange it with some person unrelated to OpenOffice.org but related to you. Then you better get the idea of what we are talking about.

Of course, Andreas talked about it, too. In his workshop "The role and the methods of user experience in product design" he took a more general approach why some products are more successful than others. Or let's say, what are the ingredients to develop a product which has the potential to be really successful.

After Andreas finished his workshop, there were about 10 people who attended our workshop "User Experience Done "Live" Based on Expertise and Usage Data". As far as I know, the attendees were volunteers and employees of Sun Microsystems and IBM. Since the workshop did take place in one of the usual presentation rooms, the equipment was somehow optimized for presentations instead of workshops. So we had to rely on the funny ODF note pads we brought with us - and the PLIO people, who were so unbelievable kind to provide a second data projector in the last minute. Thanks a lot for that!!! Unfortunately, there was somebody missing ... Mr. Internet Connection left the room right before and so we had only very rarely access to the Internet and the web sites we wanted to work with. What a pity, especially since some time we kept trying to get it working. However...

First, we presented our backup topics to let the attendees chose what to work on. Backup topics? Yes, because although we did some requests on mailing lists and in blogs, we didn't get any worked out proposal. Maybe our ideas were so bad that - at the end - the people in the workshop presented their own ones. So we got three excellent ideas to work on (described here). Due to the Internet connection problems, the attendees chose to work on "How to improve the quality of search results on the extension website?". Funnily, this idea had been brought in by Frank Mau (Sun Microsystems) who is also responsible for the User Feedback Data tooling. This data could have been used for questions dealing with the core product OpenOffice.org.

Frank explained the problem "offline" - if the user searches for extensions, the search results were sometimes sub-optimal which is related to the underlying search algorithm. Before starting to work on that topic, I gave a brief introduction of "user search strategies" and how this related to todays website features like: hierachical menus, tags and tag clouds, text search with synonyms. Concerning the search we worked out that a plain "text search" does not work well if a) there are far too many search results which might even be unrelated, and b) it doesn't work well if the user does not even know what term to search for (we tend to think technially, but most of our users are technically unbiased).

After some discussion it was raised that there were - literally - no resources to realize huge changes for the Extension Website. Keeping that in mind, we worked on some tiny but powerful proposals how to proceed (see here). If there would be a little bit more support, we also discussed how to re-arrange the elements on the website to provide access to the elements which were rather suited for the search (e.g. moving the tags a bit up). Finally, we had some intermediate result to further work on after the workshop.

Time was running - and still no internet connection - so we proposed to further inform about User Feedback Data and how to use it in the daily work. Agreement - and so Frank Loehmann gave a short presentation and I added a bit more "playing detective" with the source code browser OpenGrok to better understand the raw data. This could also be used for reference in the further analysis in the Project Renaissance.

Result: The workshop itself was quite interesting, especially for me :-) There has been positive feedback after the workshop, so most likely we will offer it again to further strenghten the cooperation in the community.

If you want to know more, here is the workshop wiki page, the videos / video streams and the presentation material.

And what is a day without a closing event? We enjoyed the party which has been organized by the NLC. Many thanks to the whole team!

That's it. You may now enjoy your very personal espresso - just go on. We'll see each other tomorrow!

Cheers,
Christoph

PS: Not to forget the reminder for the planet users, who want to see this posting well formed.

Time Machine Reloaded - November 4th

2009-11-12T00:18:00.003+01:00

Hi TimeMachineFriends,

we already explored the November 2nd and the 3rd, now it is time for the first day of the conference ...

November 4th

The first "real" day of the conference started in an unbelievable room in the Palazzo del Capitano, which mixed both historical and technical elements. Here, we heard the welcome speak and the keynotes - especially the first one was very interesting to me.

If you are interested in any of the talks, the video streams can be found here. Unfortunately, they don't work well on my computer, so I cannot further comment on it...

However, you may notice that some of the folks (especially the people from the German community) have been quite busy during the talks. Maybe they already typed a live-transcript? ;-)

After the that, we moved on to hear Louis speaking about the state of the project in 2009. And - really great - he referred to Project Renaissance!

What a luck - Andreas and Frank gave a nice talk about the project right after. Unfortunately, the presentations files are not yet available, so you may prefer the video streams of the morning talks.

From my point of view, Andreas prepared a great presentation "to inform, to clarify, to motivate". Some people might have missed some examples, but from my point-of-view, the focus on the topic was quite right. Although the Q&A session afterwards showed, that we have to invest even more effort into communication.

For example, on person asked why we didn't work on "Macro Recorder" improvements so that everyone would be able to automate his tasks. To explain it a little bit further, Andreas talked about identifying and re-designing tasks which are important for the majority of users. For example (my example), inserting one or more pictures is a task which today requires many steps... Using the macro recorder would just mean to automate inefficient tasks which are still inefficient when used manually. And since selecting and positioning pictures still have to be done manually, that wouldn't change (or improve) that much. However, you might have a look at the videos for the Q&A.

Looking ... that reminds me that Bernhard from the Art team took the opportunity to present some of the logo ideas in one of the halls - the picture on the left. This hall did also accommodate the company booths.

After that day, we moved on to enjoy the dinner which - as usual - gave the opportunity to have nice chats with the others. For example, I would like to thank Frank Mau for his patience to explain of the OpenOffice.org tooling to me.

Besides the talks, I noticed some great wall decoration featuring some nice pieces of wisdom. You may notice that the following one seems closely related to usability and user experience in general.

That's it for today. Still, we didn't get any proposals for our workshop, so it seems quite necessary to finalize our own ones to be fully "backuped". We are really much looking for our workshop...

As usual, for the planet readers, you may better enjoy the "well formatted" posting on the OpenOffice.org User Experience blog.

Update update update: Andrea Pescetti of the Italian N-L provided a link to downloadable OGG video files of the talks. You find it here.

Time Machine Reloaded - November 3rd

2009-11-10T22:12:00.009+01:00

As I said yesterday, let's push some buttons on the Time Machine to - again - go back 7 days. Let's re-experience some of the precious moments during the OOoCon...

November 3rd

I try to shorten this posting a bit - the day itself was quite nice, although you may miss some thrilling stuff. In the morning, we sat together in the lobby of our hotel to work on some mails and our presentations. You may notice that the time buffer for the presentations has been already close to zero...

After that, we continued our sightseeing tour - having excellent weather conditions. Thus, we had been able to enjoy the "Duomo di Orvieto" and the city's surrounding; but see for yourself.

To warm up for the conference, I did a short stop-over at the "NLC meeting". There, procedures and issues with regard to the translation had been discussed. Very interesting, especially since the look at the wider picture helps a lot ... important for UX topics which also heavily deal with texts and terms.

By the way, since many people believe that UX work is just the work on the (graphical user) interface, we went on to have a look beneath the surface :-) "Orvieto Underground" - a labyrinth of caves and tunnels...

Although some people might have wished that we would have stayed there forever, we were guided back to the surface. So we could join the first party were officials of the city welcomed us. Thus, thanks for the warm welcome, the cold beverages and the delicious goodies!

We finished our day in a bar... I'll skip the pictures - you know - low light conditions make it really difficult to work with the camera :-)

Tomorrow, I'll shed some light on the start of the conference and the status presentation covering Project Renaissance. Keep on reading!

Bye,
Christoph

PS: As usual, if you miss some formatting, please have a look at the original post on the OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog.

Seven Days Time Machine

2009-11-09T23:41:00.011+01:00

Hi everybody,

some of you might have been at the OpenOffice.org Conference 2009 or already read some of the (few) blog comments. I'd hoped to provide similar insights like I did in my blog comments covering the OOoCon last year (first posting). Time for changing that!

But is a wrap-up sufficient? Surely not, since many little things happened which are worth mentioning... So what about a "Time Machine" to travel back 7 days? This would be a great chance to re-experience the great time we've had at the conference...

November 2nd

One of the best things being at the OOoCon is to meet other people who share the same ideas. Thus, I have been more than happy to meet André Schnabel right after my breakfast. Even better, he joined me to do some sightseing in Orvieto. There, Andreas Mantke was already awaiting us.

Our hotel was located outside the city, so we moved on until we - astonished - noticed that the center of the city was really sitting on a huge rock. See for yourself...

Once in the city, Andreas joined us and we started exploring. Of course, we wanted to see the famous "Duomo di Orvieto". It is somehow funny to go through tiny alleys and then - suddenly - a very huge building appears.

Don't worry, I'll post some more pictures when the weather improves. It was even a bit foggy that day...

Inside the building everyone will notice how well it is built and how good it was preserved over the centuries. Mmh, that seems similar to what we aim for with regard to ODF - being understandable even after a looong time. Moreover, being independent from the software which was used to create the documents.

Why this sudden change of subject? Because we noticed something noisy going on. So we went inside a building and found the people of the ODF|Plugfest celebrate their lunch break. Did you ever wondered how this looks like? Here are the action-packed photo ;-)

The good thing is, that we've also met Oliver-Rainer Wittmann (on the right) who kindly supported us with a map and some leaflets covering touristic highlights. Thanks a lot!

I'll spare you the rest of the day ... except for the arrival of Jacqueline Rahemipour. After meeting her at the train station, we did one of the best things you can do in Orvieto - getting an excellent meal. You may have noticed the praises by Louis :-)

The choice was easy, since we had already promised to visit a pizzeria proposed by Stefan Weigel. Why? He had to cancel his trip right before the conference, which is still such a pity... we've missed him. However, a picture to prove that we've been there. You will easily recognize this to be a real "Italian" pizza...

Since we prove to be a real community, Jacqueline was so kind to share some pieces - hunger, anybody? The blurry picture is definitely caused by my shaking hands awaiting to eat ;-)

Okay, this was my first full day in Orvieto. Stay tuned for the next day - working, more sightseeing and - of course - the first party. What else should we do?

Time Machine "off" and back to now: I would like to take the opportunity to express my deepest thanks to anybody who was involved in making the OOoCon 2009 such a great success.

Read you tomorrow,
Christoph

PS: I know that the OpenOffice.org Planet sometimes has its own ideas how my blog postings should look like. It might be better to have a look at the original post on the OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog.

cappuccinOOo and more

2009-10-25T21:59:00.005+01:00

The OpenOffice.org conference will start in a few days. It's high time to prepare for the stay - e.g. by consuming Italian style food and delicious coffee specialties. Today, I've added the second entry in my little series of "OOo logo interpretations": Two cappuccino and one espresso, per favore! :-)

Do you think I'm idling at the moment? If yes, then please consider to keep us running by submitting ideas to our workshop...

User Experience Done "Live" Based on Expertise and Usage Data

Up till now, nobody officially responded to our annoucement earlier this week. Maybe the reason is that we are question and issue free with regard to usability - which would be really great. But I really see the necessity for support when working with our software, trying extensions, reading websites, noticing user requests etc. Please, take that opportunity by either contacting us directly, or adding your ideas and questions to the wiki page.

I'm waiting for your input. Most presumably, I'll be awake for some more hours - I really had to consume the drinks mentioned above ;-)

We'll see us at the OpenOffice.org conference. I'm really much looking forward...

Christoph

Commercial Break - Workshop "User Experience Done Live!"

2009-10-21T22:12:00.003+02:00

Hi everyone,

the User Experience Team currently prepares a workshop - which requires your participation to make it a "real" workshop :-)

Are you a developer in the context of OpenOffice.org? Great! Will you be attending the OpenOffice.org Conference 2009 in Orvieto, Italy? Even better!

You and everyone interested in User Experience (UX) design are invited to participate in this UX workshop.

Bring your questions which have impact on usability to be worked on "live" - supported by the members of the User Experience team. Together we will identify potential issues and develop promising interaction designs to even better satisfy your users' needs.

Something for you? Please read on in the OpenOffice.org Wiki.

We'll be glad if you join!

Christoph

Questions, Answers and an Interview

2009-09-26T14:19:00.006+02:00

Question: What's happening in Project Renaissance at the moment?
Answer: The team answers frequently asked questions!

After our first prototyping phase, a lot of questions have been raised concerning the goals of Project Renaissance and its current state. After spending an incredible amount of time to address these comments individually, we now know about the commonly asked questions on mailing lists, in personal mails or in blog comments.

These questions have been collected and discussed with all the people involved in Project Renaissance, so you may consider these answers to be somehow official. You can find them on our fully revised FAQ page (link below).

But, plain text is missing a personal touch... So I'm very happy to announce that the FAQ page also features a video with Florian Effenberger (OpenOffice.org Marketing Co-Lead) who interviews Andreas Bartel (Project Renaissance). Enjoy it!

So check out the Project Renaissance Frequently Asked Questions in the OpenOffice.org Wiki!

And please: If somebody has answers with regard to Project Renaissance, please guide him to our FAQ page or just drop a message at the ux-ui mailing list (ui@ux.openoffice.org)! Thanks!

And now? The next few days we will publish more information about the current state of User Feedback data. Stay tuned ... and have a nice day!

Christoph

LinuxTag WrapUp

2009-06-29T00:21:00.010+02:00

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

2009-06-22T23:46:00.004+02:00

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

2009-06-13T01:58:00.008+02:00

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

2009-05-11T21:43:00.005+02:00

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

2009-04-28T22:07:00.005+02:00

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

2009-04-12T12:20:00.004+02:00

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

2009-04-03T16:26:00.000+02:00

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:

Program start-up
Base
Math & Chart
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.

The CeBIT is over. The UX point-of-view.

2009-03-11T00:02:00.004+01:00

As I posted some days before, I went to the CeBIT in Hannover to join the German community and to present the current activities in the Project Renaissance. Due to my vacation planning, I was only able to attend the trade fair from Friday to Sunday ... the last three days. That means, that the visitors were rather private persons in contrast to the business people who usually attend during the working days.

However, as you can see on the picture, it started cold and rainy - outside. Inside, it was rather hot, loud and hectic. The latter results in having only very few photos available, but maybe other community members will provide some more visual input. On these pictures you would be able to see that most of the time there was no chance to rest. We answered questions the whole the time, explained our product and many community members did presentations. My sister was right when she proposed me to buy some cough drops. I've never needed so many... ;-)

At the evenings, we tried to calm down - we drank some beer and (of course non-alcoholic drinks) and went to dinner. Like before at e.g. the OOoCon 2008, these are the real-world events I like most, because you get the chance for more private contacts with other contributors of the OpenOffice.org community.

Summarizing the few days, there were some minor bad experiences and many very good ones. The less good ones for example were people who rather aggressively asked for gifts like USB flash drives - things we cannot offer. But there were also other people who just stopped by to say: "Thank you for the great product!". And people who gave us some feedback how to improve this or that. For me, the most noteworthy discussion have been...

Two elderly people asked for a small feature comparison of Microsoft Office applications and our OpenOffice.org modules. They explained that they are trainers for computer courses targeted at seniors and wanted to know how to integrate OpenOffice.org in their learning matter. Those two people were about 70, I think, but seemed very active and proved a great sense of humor.

With regard to Project Renaissance, a teacher of learning-disabled children asked me to limit the changes in the user interface. Currently, his scholars are able to explore and to understand the interface - slowly but steadily. He told me that a small test revealed that OpenOffice.org is superior (in this case) in comparison with a current product of an competitor. I invited him to join the UX team to support us with his pedagogical knowledge, let's see.

From the UX point-of-view, the highlight was the presentation of Project Renaissance. Unfortunately, only very few people attended because it was pretty late and many people had already left the trade fair. And, Andreas from the German team held a presentation in the open source forum at the same time - pretty hard competition ;-)

Thus, you may enjoy the presentation for yourself and have a look at the slides (German). The presentation is located in the Project Renaissance Wiki , direct links to different formats: PDF, OpenOffice.org Impress ODP. And, there has also been some video recording which will be published if the quality is sufficient (at the moment I don't know whether I would like this high quality *g*).

What is my final thought? Personally, I will try to use more of those great opportunities to meet other community members. See you :-)

Have a nice day,

Christoph

OOo Wiki Usage Survey is Underway

2009-03-02T14:59:00.003+01:00

If you read GullFOSS recently, then you'll have already seen that the Wiki Usage Survey is now active and awaiting input.

Now that the OOo Website has been Refreshed, the wiki seems the logical next thing to work on.

If you haven't already done so, speak up by responding to the survey. It is really short and will only take about 5 minutes or more depending on how detailed you decide to make your answers.

Its anonymous and it is here:
http://surveys.services.openoffice.org/surveys/index.php?sid=91154&lang=en%20

So far there have been over 50 responses. The survey will run till March 15th. After that the UX project will be able to analyze the data and then anyone who wants to can help make improvements!

It is so exciting to have so many things going on all the time (development, testing, releases, surveys, conferences, discussions, etc). Nobody should ever say that OOo is a dead horse. ;-)

Giddy up!

Liz

Project Renaissance at the CeBIT in Germany

2009-03-01T01:37:00.005+01:00

Hi everyone,

as some of you might already know, I will be part of the OpenOffice.org staff at the CeBIT 2009. There, I will do my best to promote Project Renaissance and give a presentation ...

Topic (German): "Projekt Renaissance - Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Benutzungskonzept für OpenOffice.org"
Time: Sunday, March 8th 2009; 1:00pm-1:45pm
Location: Hall 6, Booth G41

The CeBIT is the world's largest trade fair for IT and telecommunications and therefore very important for the German community. Some more information on what is being planned is available on the wiki pages of the German project and the web site of the OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. I hope that some of you will be able to come...

By the way, if I ever finish the presentation slides, they will be made available at the usual place.

See you,
Christoph

OpenOffice.org User Survey 2009 Now Online

2009-02-27T10:16:00.007+01:00

The OpenOffice.org User Survey (OOoUS) 2009 is online since February 20, 2009. The survey is available in English, German, Spanish, French and Chinese. It replaces the OOoUS 2008.

The new survey focuses on what our users do with the product and how satisfied they are using it. We need this data to improve the user interface of OpenOffice.org within project Renaissance.

Please take the survey, it will cost you only 10-15 Minutes.

Best Regards,

Frank

Website Refresh and UX

2009-02-21T23:13:00.008+01:00

Have you noticed? A few weeks ago, we finished a large round of improvements to the OpenOffice.org website and the Wiki design. And all of it involved UX in the re-design phase. If you are thinking something like "UX? I thought they want to improve the software?", then this post might enlighten you...

The Starting Point

So why is our web presence important? Our main website could be one of the first things new users see if they want to download OpenOffice.org. Plus, each OpenOffice.org contributor who simply logs on - even in native language sub-domains - uses the same web interface. Hence, there are about 300,000 visits to the OpenOffice.org pages every day! One little tweak, and so many people can benefit...

The UX work started when Ivan Miskovic, who was the driving force behind the recent website refresh, presented some first changes at ux-discuss and website-dev. The proposal was an improvement, but several main issues remained – and he listened to our concerns. Soon it became clear that we would focus on three aspects of the website: the header, the expandable download area, and the news items.

The Main Criticism

The little box sitting in the header had been designed not to draw attention to itself, combining Search, a link to the NLC language selection page, and the Log In form, but it had been criticized for a long time. To sum it up (more info at ux-discuss):

Tabbing by mouse-over only: The tab panes are changed by hovering with the mouse pointer – the change can not be made persistent. Moving the mouse when entering the user data for a log-in results in losing the input fields. Weird.

Changing tab descriptions: On tab changed it's description, in dependence on whether the user was logged in or not. And, the tab “Log Out” did also serve as an action button. In reality, tabs only group information staying passive.
Low contrast: The visual design was very subtle and caused problems for people with visual disabilities.
Text only: People who are unable to speak English most presumably had difficulties to switch the language via “Change Language” – “National Language Projects.” No icons - text only.

The expandable download area was also somehow tricky. In contrast to the other so-called “action statements”, it was the only one which exposed the download-button directly beneath instead of loading a new page. Unfortunately, there was no visual cue for the user clicking the action statements. Once opened, the download button could not be made to go away – a behavior many people might expect.

The Re-Design Phase

As some people might remember, there was a lot of talk from August to September last year on ux-discuss. Together with Ivan, the UX team discussed ideas, created mockups, criticized and so on. Fortunately we had a dedicated test environment at http://test.openoffice.org which made it possible to check the design against the technical constraints of the OpenOffice.org website platform. Ivan organized the communication with the website team, e.g. checking whether the web browsers are compatible with the new approach.

But how did we do the new header design? The biggest challenge in the header was the limited space; especially since the website is designed to work well on lower resolutions like 800 x 600 pixels (e.g., for netbook users). The design should be highly visible and accessible, and at the same time not be a distraction when working with the website. So we tried to get a compromise between “show everything” and “hide elements” (like the tab style in the old approach). Language projects and the search box are shown all the time, while the input controls for the log-in user data is only shown on request. The behavior itself is consistent between the new action item “Download”, e.g. clicking keeps the container open. Have a look...

Want some background information on the header design? Here's the scoop:

Fast Access: Although far more often used, the “Log In” action link is located right to “Register”. For western countries, the more often used elements are usually located on the left. We changed that to enable the user to just go to the upper right corner and click – the webbrowser window helps to guide the user. Finally, if the web browser automatically fills in the user data, the user just places the mouse in the upper right corner of the website, clicks, moves a bit down and clicks again. That's it.
Accessibility: Try to log in by pressing Shift+Alt+4 and then hitting Enter (when the password is automatically filled in by the browser). There are even more key bindings which can be found at OpenOffice.org Wiki.
Visual Clues: We added icons for each of the elements to ease navigation and to enable users to understand it's meaning – even if they don't understand English.
Hyperlink mouseover effect: To improve the contrast, there is no mouseover effect for the hyperlinks, because the text is already white. Thus, we rely on the functionality of the web browser to show the “hand” cursor. Initial ideas to change the background color of the header to further improve the contrast were not effective, since it wouldn't have worked for low screen resolutions.
Better browser compatibility: The new design works now well with the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 which is still used by a lot of people. The former approach required a fall-back solution for those users.
General ease of use: We discussed many different use cases, e.g. forgotten passwords, how to register, how to present the “My Pages” if logged in, … I can only say, the devil is in the details ;-)

Besides the header design, we also improved the download action item and the news snippets. Some comparison of the whole start page? Here we go...

I said 'we', but who is meant there? Fortunately, we had plenty of support from other OpenOffice.org community members. Apart from the Website team and the User Experience team, Stella designed excellent new icons, Éric supported us for questions of accessibility, and Liz was a great help when discussing the needs of the local language projects.

Going Live

The day after going live, I met a well known German team member who indirectly gave me some feedback. Not knowing about the new design, she had asked her husband to log in – as usual. She told me that she couldn't believe that he completed the login so much faster than usual!

Besides such very positive responses, some problems occurred which still seem unforeseeable. For example, there were problems with the download page with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 when the new header and some download code clashed. And, due to caching which is supposed to improve the behavior of the site under high load, sometimes the log-in status is just wrong (Issue 94328).

Besides that, we still haven't received any negative feedback concerning the new interaction design. And I hope this blog post won't change that... ;-) By the way, “changes” is a good keyword as there are things we might do different the next time.

Lessons Learned

A lessons learned section for what might appear to be such a small effort? You might skip reading it, but I thought it would be helpful to share our experience.

The test domain was extremely convenient when moving from the picture only mockups towards the final design. But not every problem could be solved in advance, so the community feedback was a great help! Just be prepared for getting less sleep than expected...
It makes sense to only implement changes which have been discussed in advance. There was a time when several changes did go live which solved particular problems, but didn't fit to the whole concept. Just make sure that you talk with each other constantly.

The effort to improve the website was much higher than you might expect. Why? This was mainly due to Ivan's praiseworthy desire to understand all the reasoning behind the changes. It turned out to be absolutely positive, as he was able to provide excellent counter-proposals if our proposals missed the requirements of the website infrastructure. Did I mention to the importance of talking with each other?

Next Steps

Ivan has already done some work to improve the consistency between the OpenOffice.org website and the Wiki, but there are still some things to be worked on. The Website Refresh 2008 Wiki page, which also summarizes all the changes presented here from a technical point of view, proposes work be done on the language selection page, the navigation structure and visualization, the “My Pages” tab, etc.

But now let's take a deep breath and simply enjoy the new header design.

Finally, a big thank you to all the people who supported us and provided valuable feedback!

Liz, Ivan & Christoph

Final Results of the OOo User Survey 2008

2009-02-21T22:27:00.006+01:00

I have uploaded the final data from the OpenOffice.org User Survey 2008. It includes 248289 full responses from November, 1 2008 to February 19, 2009. Survey language was English only.

As assumed the final results do not show any big changes from the sample taken in December 2008.

Best regards,

Frank

State of the Renaissance Project

2009-02-12T08:51:00.002+01:00

Two weeks ago we gave at Sun, in Hamburg, a presentation about the state of the Renaissance project. The main goal of the presentation was initiate a "transfer of information" channel to development, quality assurance, marketing, and documentation, and everybody who is interested in that project. It is planned run these TOI sessions once a month.

The focus of the first presentation was on:

State of the Project
Results and Outcomes of the IsoMetrics Survey
Results and Outcomes the OpenOffice User Survey
OpenOffice.org User Feedback Program
What's Next?
Q&A

Everybody is invited to take a look at the presentation, it is available on the OpenOffice.org Wiki.

Best,
Christian

What document templates do our users really need?

2009-02-02T17:04:00.009+01:00

Stella, a colleague of mine, pointed me to statistical data about the usage of our OOo template repository. I had a look on those numbers and made a word clound using Wordle. The cloud shows for what document templates do our users search for in the search field of the OOo template repository:

I found the result quite interesting and we will consider this when creating new document templates for OOo.

Best regards,

Frank

Thank you, Doris!

2009-01-29T19:09:00.005+01:00

I know that many people are involved in a project like OpenOffice.org, but my today's personal favorite is Doris... :-)

On the German users mailing list, Doris asked why the new Notes functionality in the OpenOffice.org Writer behaves in this or that way. It soon became clear, that she is a kind of hardcore notes user - at least I don't know many people having more than two dozen Notes on one page, some of them originally created in WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS), imported via Microsoft Office 97 and edited in OpenOffice.org 3.0. Phew, this is real-world testing for scalability and stability!

We ended up in a nice discussion, uncovering some bad issues like 98002 and improving other behavior, e.g. the person editing the document (you) will always get yellow notes.

Not everything could be resolved so far - some things are still on our roadmap (even for volunteers, resources are somehow limited *g*), but it was a very pleasant experience, especially since this was very constructive criticism. I hope she will further contribute to OpenOffice.org - as she already does for Wikipedia.

A big thank you!

Max & Christoph

Using Linkedin's Poll application for research

2009-01-21T11:51:00.005+01:00

Hi folks,

I just discovered a cool way to collect information on Linkedin.com. They have an web app that allows you to pose questions either inside your own network (free) or worldwide in Linkedin.com (not free). So I took a first shot to check who uses which office tool in my network. The cool things is that I am able to post the link to the app anywhere on the web and as I just found out, the not-so-cool thing is that you have to have a Linkedin.com account to fill out the poll. Hmmm :-(

However, anyone who has an account, here is the link:

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/17849/mknhe

Linkedin.com does the analysis automatically and displays them in your profile.

Best,
Andreas

OpenOffice.org User Feedback Extension Beta is Available

2009-01-13T16:19:00.002+01:00

Hello,
as you might know, a data driven approach [1] is an essential part of the Renaissance Project [2]. On element is the User Feedback Program [3]. It collects anonymously data about how OpenOffice.org is used. This information is used to better understand how people use OpenOffice.org.
Especially with regards to the user interface.

The extension is now available for public beta testing
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/OOo_User_Feedback

How can you support the Renaissance Project?

This is simple.

Download the extension, give it a try. Provide Feedback.

Please be aware, that the use of these Beta builds has risks associated with it. Don't use them with production data, as data loss and other scary things can occur. The OpenOffice.org User Feedback Extension Beta runs as an extension for OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 or 3.1

Please note that the OpenOffice.org User Feedback Extension requires a Developer Snapshot of OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 [4] or 3.1 [5].

A list of known Bugs can be found here [6]

Thanks for your support,
Christian

[1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Renaissance:Phase_1
[2] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Renaissance
[3] http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/OOo_User_Feedback
[4] http://download.openoffice.org/3.0.1rc1/index.html
[5] http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html
[6] Known Bugs

OpenOffice.org User Survey Part II

2009-01-12T17:54:00.005+01:00

I took some time and analyzed the data [1] posted recently by Frank. Based on the data it was possible to create a pretty good person profile. The map below sketches out some characteristics of the person based on collected data.

I've also created a bunch of diagrams. These provide a more in depth view on the users who participated in the survey.

Some of the results are really surprising....

Happy reading,
Christian

[1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Image:OOoUserSurvey2008.ods

A great story about the Renaissance Project from a personal perspective

2009-01-10T00:15:00.004+01:00

... me again!

Look what I found on the net, Bruce Byfield, is talking about the current and the future UI of OOo. A story that is well ellaborated and nice to read. Actually, it's a must-read for everyone who is interested or involved in the Renaissance Project in any way. I'd really like to discuss the content with you guys.

Best,
Andreas

Yet another task we can put on the OOo list

2009-01-09T23:51:00.005+01:00

Good evening people,

here is a statement I recently stumbled upon in a book about user research:

"This book was written entirely using OpenOffice, from the first keystroke to - well, just about to - the last. It only crashed a couple of times. Really."

Impressive! Who says we are not feature complete? The book has more than 500 pages! "Observing the user experience. A practisioners's guide to user research" was written by Mike Kuniavsky and was published in 2003.

So, here we go, people write books with OOo, not only letters and resumes.

Best,
Andreas

Merry Open Source!

2009-01-08T12:53:00.003+01:00

Now that the busy holiday season is over, I thought I might share what I just discovered: Open Source is like Christmas to me.

In my family, we always get presents from many friends and relatives and some from Santa Claus, too. We write thank you notes to all the people who send us presents, except Santa. In my husband's family, the children think that all the presents they get come from Santa, so there is a lot of exchanging of packages secretly as the relatives and friends give each other the presents that will be discovered under the tree. Nobody in his family writes thank you notes, because every present comes from Santa, who you of course do not know personally. He is a just a magical mystery who only comes by once a year, otherwise living incongnito. This difference in tradition was especially important this year because we had to figure out how Christmas presents would be “defined” for our son.

I like knowing who gave me what and being able to say thanks directly to the person responsible. If I don't like a present, I can ask the person to exchange it or return it. I also want to give presents to people and see their happiness and feel their appreciation.

For me, Christmas is about the joy of giving and receiving! That sounds a lot like working on an open source project, doesn't it? We know who contributed what and can say thanks for that contribution or ask them to change it. In addition, we have fun contributing and are pleased when our "presents" are appreciated.

How did we end up doing Christmas presents for our son? Open source style, of course!

Some ideas and questions on how to look at the User Survey data

2009-01-06T00:06:00.005+01:00

Hi folks,

first things first!

Happy New Year!

Now, since the Renaissance wiki is down, I thought sharing some of our data analysis ideas over the blog might be an alternative. As you might know, we have collected a huge pile of data with the user survey. Now is the time to take a closer look at the numbers and the survey content as such. Some of you already did that as revealed by the discussion that is going on on the mailing lists. Thanks for that! However, here are some questions/hints/aspects you could pose/keep in mind when looking, analyzing and drawing conclusions from the collected data.

1 Who are our users as revealed by the survey?
1.1 Do the users represent people we have/had in mind?
1.2 Are these the users we actually design and develop for?

2 What value these users most in OOo?
2.1 Is that something we have expected?
2.2 Is that something we were hoping for?
2.3 Is that something we actively worked for?

3 For what purposes is OOo used?
3.1 Is that something that we anticipated?
3.2 Is that something we have worked for?
3.3 Is that something OOo is really made for?
3.4 To what extent does that usage cover the functionality of OOo?

4 What makes OOo so popular among these users?
4.1 Is that a quality we have expected?
4.2 Is that a quality we worked/work for?
4.3 Is that a measurable quality?

5 How does the distribution of the users look like?
5.1 Do we have some peaks e.g. in age, usage, language etc.?

6 To which questions did we hope to collect answers by this survey?
6.1 Did we get the data we were looking for?
6.2 Can we get the answers to all our questions from the data?
6.3 Did this survey meet our own quality criteria in terms of objectivity, reliability and validity?

I hope that this will help us a bit to direct our discussions from a descriptive to a more inferential analysis of the data. Finally, we would like to draw conclusions from these results that are valid and valuable for generating design ideas in a later phase.

Best,
Andreas

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-24T11:19:00.006+01:00

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

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

2008-12-20T18:54:00.004+01:00

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

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

2008-12-10T18:20:00.003+01:00

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

OOo Con 2008 Picture Gallery

2008-12-07T00:35:00.001+01:00

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

Enjoy!

Best,
Andreas

Project Renaissance: JavaFX for prototyping

2008-12-05T19:47:00.006+01:00

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

Presentations of the World Usability Day 2008

2008-12-03T11:44:00.004+01:00

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

Havy Traffic on the Wiki since project announcement

2008-12-02T20:51:00.002+01:00

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

Project “Renaissance” Kick-Off

2008-11-28T15:44:00.009+01:00

Project Renaissance, to rethink the graphical user interface (GUI) and interaction of OpenOffice.org, was announced on OOoCon 2008 and has been officially launched this week. Renaissance is a long running project and will start from scratch, so please do not expect to see something in OOo 3.1.

Some details about the project
The project is divided in three phases:

Research
Design
Evaluation

Currently we are in phase 1 where we want to understand our users before we start designing anything. We will do usage tracking to get real data what our users do. We do surveys to understand who our users are and what they think about the product and we will do a lot more of things to understand our users (i.e. focus groups, Isometrics survey ). In phase 2 we will not limit ourselves to the possibilities of our current OOo GUI toolkit. We will create a list of requirements and the development will work to create a framework that could fulfill these requirements.

The Problem
Why do we run this project?

OpenOffice.org users complain about its cumbersome and outdated graphical user interface (GUI)
A great deal of functionality is hidden in many overstuffed toolbars, poorly structured menus and complex dialogs
Functions are thus difficult to access for novice users or too inefficient to use for expert users
In addition, the GUI offers an antiquated look & feel which is hardly capable to communicate innovation and to create joy of use

Our Mission

“Create a User interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users' choice not only out of need but also out of desire.”

Our Goal
... to know and to understand our users as they are, and to help them accomplish what they want to, by providing efficient access to valuable functionality through a desirable user interface.

Scope of the Project
We want to rethink the interaction and visual design of OOo. We do not want to build new features.

Project Home
Project Renaissance uses the Wiki for project coordination. As we start from scratch, you will currently find only basic information around the project. Details about communication channels (Wiki, Blogs, mailing lists) will follow as soon as possible.

This is a very important project for OOo and we are really looking forward working with the OOo community! So please stay tuned and participate!

Best regards,

Frank Loehmann
OOo User Experience Project Lead

I'm Back After 3 Years

2008-11-24T14:00:00.004+01:00

Amazing, but true! In Germany it is possible to take three years of parental leave.
When I returned to the office a few weeks ago, some guys couldn't believe it had been so long already. I told them they were coding when I left and they are still typing code now, so that's why they didn't even notice the passing of time. :-)

My parental leave ended when my little boy turned 3. It wasn't three years of only fun and games, though. When he was only two months old I realized that he had stopped breathing, so after intensive care and diagnosis, the doctors sent us home with a monitor. You know, electrodes on his chest, oxygen sensor on his foot, alarms sounding whenever he stopped breathing or the sensor was faulty, etc. "Fun" for the whole family, but at least it was only a matter of time till his body repaired the bugs in the software. Now he goes to preschool and is full of mischief. He is bright, busy and bilingual---speaking German (like Papa) and English (like Mama).

I'm so glad to still be an employee at Sun, but, aside from now being only part-time, my job has changed. I used to be active in the community mostly in marketing and German native lang, but may be remembered most as the enthusiastic linguist in charge of UI text in the German and English versions of the OpenOffice.org/StarOffice office suite.
If you are also passionate about User Interface text, you might be interested in the style guide I wrote before I left on leave.

Now, I am no longer in charge of text on the software design team. So please don't send me those issues/bugs! ;-) My current focus is user experience in general and to this aim I have joined the OpenOffice.org website mailing list because I thought I'd help improve the usability of the wiki. This and other similar work is something I can do easily from home and at odd hours, as is often necessary when small children are involved. Sun is a great employer, especially since I get a SunRay with peaceful and productive network access from home or office. I'm a big fan of computer people (I married a Java developer, of course!), but I am really quite pleased when I can do my work and let them do theirs. ;-)

I plan to write more about work and life on this blog. This is my first blogging experience and yet I already feel like a happy little pixel in the global picture.

ODF documents statistics

2008-11-21T12:00:00.007+01:00

As Christian mentioned in his post here, the IBM Symphony UX team did some statistical analysis of text documents on the web and they presented the results at the conference in Beijing. Since then, I could not sleep and was wondering how they did it and how we could possibly do similar things since their code is not available yet.

So, I just started sniffing around in the XML files of one of my own ODTs and look what I found:

This is a line from the meta.xml file that describes some basic document statistics. It includes the number of tables, images, other objects, pages, paragraphs, words, and even characters.

As a consequence, it is amazingly easy to get these statistics from ODF documents, assuming that every ODF file has this information included. I will bug Svante a bit about that to figure out some more details.

Then, I checked out the odftoolkit.org page and the opportunities the framework offers. So here is shot, how about a small and nice piece of Java code to parse the exact meta.xml files within ODF documents and to output a Calc spreadsheet with the statistics? I’d love that and the information would actually help us to make particular decisions within the Renaissance project.

So, what do you think of that, any volunteers?

Best,
Andreas

Wordle, I love this tool!

2008-11-18T18:26:00.007+01:00

Recently, I posted a survey on my Linkedin account (Q&A section) to collect some feedback to the following question "If you were offered Microsoft Office 2007 or OpenOffice.org 3.0, BOTH for free, which would you chose and for what reasons?". I was pretty much interested for what reasons people would or would not prefer OOo 3.0 over MSO 2007. The survey is closed now and I received 64 answers. The feedback is very interesting and valueable, as soon as I am through with the analysis, I will post the important things here.

However, so far I just tried to make some sense out of it and put it into Wordle. A very cool tool, I just love it. You can insert plain text, from a survey for instance, and this tool creates a nice word cloud of the input. Very useful if you want to see which words occur in the feedback and how often. So, without any further comments, here is the result!

Enjoy!

Best,
Andreas

OOoCon 2008. What's next?

2008-11-17T20:14:00.007+01:00

Writing this blog post feels a bit like sharing my final thoughts about this year's OpenOffice.org conference. I still cannot believe that only one week ago, I sat in a plane on my way home - the last week passed by without noticing it.

Okay, even my connecting fly just passed by ... because our plane from Beijing was pretty late. So I "enjoyed" one additional night in a hotel nearby. At least, it was payed by the airline, but that did not make it more comfortable :-)

After my job took total control over me, I finally managed to upload my photos to share it with ... the world ... and you. I added some comments, so today I will just skip the explanation about what happened on our last day in Beijing (from the tourist point-of-view).

But, the days in China were not only interesting in terms of OpenOffice.org or visiting Beijing's sights. It was also very helpful for me to get some personal feedback by other community members. One example: People got the impression that the structure and argumentation in my emails made many discussion somewhat "final". From their point-of-view, this is a big problem for new UX members who want to contribute ... those members may be somewhat "frightened". I think that such kind of feedback is very valuable, and I will try to consider that in the future. And if you will ever notice that I "lost my mind" - remind me, please :-)

There are also other things I don't want to get lost. On my way back, I thought about how we can make our contributions more efficient and better in quality to get them better adopted by the developers. Another thought was how we can fulfill the mission statement of the new project "Renaissance" - creating innovation. The funny thing is, that most of the ideas to achieve that have already been mentioned in the last months. Either there was no time on my side or the discussion just got lost... So after this year's conference, my personal goals are:

Create a place to collect new ideas. You may remember the discussion about UX brainstorming, I mentioned something like the "UX brainwaves" blog. However it will be finally called, it would be great to collect and discuss ideas in one place.

Get a better understanding for data driven UX approaches. Some months ago, I asked what the UX community thinks about approaches like Personas. Personally, I'm convinced that this is the way to go for complex activities like "Project Renaissance".

Working on the Writer's notes, again. After presenting the Notes development to the public, I would like to re-intensify my work on them. Yesterday I worked on the "Notes Ruler Control" which hopefully will make it into Writer 3.1. That would be great!

These are my personal favorites, so please feel free to propose topics which you think are important for UX. In the best of all cases, our goals match - especially for the ideas blog the UX project needs help: technical realization, design, ... and ideas. So is there anybody who wants to mastermind that?

That's it for today. Cheers,
Christoph

OOo Con 2008 --- Wrap Up

2008-11-17T09:35:00.006+01:00

I was really impressed about the fact that this years OpenOffice.org Conference had 9(!) UX-related talks. This is really a success and emphases the importance of user experience in the whole OpenOffice.org Project. IBM and RedFlag presented [1,2] some pretty cool UI improvements realized on top of OpenOffice.org:

Image courtesy of RedFlag2000 Software CO.,LTD [3]

We've received pretty positive feedback on the User Feedback program and the Isometrics questionnaire [4]. Another talk I'd would like to mention is the "Learn more about office users - Feature usage study by document element statistic" presentation [5] (sadly not publish now). The IBM Lotus Symphony UX Team analyzed 1600 ODF, DOC public available documents for feature usage analysis based on document element statistics. They've figured out that:

* 41% of all documents contain tables
* 95% of all documents contain less than 10000 word (approx. 30 Pages)

As mentioned earlier, it is good to see that interest in UX-related stuff exist and rises. I hope that the next OOo Con brings up even more talks on User Experience related topics.

Best,
Christian

[1] href="http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programme/friday_1464.odp
[2] href="http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programme/friday_1484.pdf
[3] href="http://en.redoffice.com.cn
[4] href="http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programme/friday_1447.pdf
[5] href="http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programm/friday_abstracts.html#a1467

The UX Team at the World Usability Day in Hamburg

2008-11-14T12:45:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, members of the UX project actively and passively attended the World Usability Day in Hamburg. Christian and myself gave a presentation about the Usage Tracking Extensions and the IsoMetrics-S questionnaire. Basically we talked about same things as during our presentation in Beijing, but this time in German. The feedback was quite nice, people were really interested and impressed, to some extent, that we have chosen a data-driven methodology to improve OpenOffice.org.

However, other contributors had very good presentations, too. James Kalbach, for instance, gave a nice talk about Commercial Ethnography. That was my favorite. Since we plan to do similar research in form of ethnographic interviews in the context of the UI redesign, that talk offered some insights how others successfully use qualitative methods for UX design. People from Xing.com gave a nice introduction about their first experiences combining Agile software development and User Centered Design. Also an interesting and a hot topic in the UX community since Agile is the way to do development nowadays.

Overall, I was impressed by the amount of attendees and the amount of usability professionals present at this local event. By the way, we were able to distribute a lot of OpenOffice.org flyers and writing blocks. So, in terms of OpenOffice.org marketing, this event was also a success.

Best,
Andreas

OOo Con 2008 captured in 2D

2008-11-11T14:05:00.003+01:00

Hi folks!

just a short notice, I uploaded some of my OO.o Con pictures. Here comes the link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/send.to.andreas/OOoCon2008InBeijing

Two things I'd like to share. I really liked the talks, a lot of UX. Actually, more than I expected. Way to go! Being sick and not able to attend several important post mortem events, that is something I really did not like :-(

Best,
Andreas

Get Three for One

2008-11-08T19:29:00.007+01:00

Today, you will get some news from three days in one blog post. Unfortunately, the preparation of our presentation took more time than expected. But, let's just start with...

Thursday: Project Renaissance

Thursday was the second day of the conference - and it was still very inspiring. The most interesting part (at least for me *g*) was the announcement given by Frank Loehmann of the "Project Renaissance" (presentation "The State of the User Experience project"). This activity will lead to a new user interface and interaction concepts for OpenOffice.org. You are not dreaming, it seems to be true :-)

What should be achieved was formulated in the mission statement: "Create a User Interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users' choice not only out of need but also out of desire." Here is a snapshot of the presentation:

The announcement is just a start and can be interpreted like a commitment of Sun to support such an activity. So there are no concept or mockups available, but we all may contribute to improve OpenOffice.org concerning UX (usability, productivity, enjoyment). I asked Frank and he will provide more information to the community in the next few days.

Until then, we may have a look how Chinese travelers work as a community to support the bus driver (photo taken at the evening):

Friday: Our Presentation and The Closing Ceremony

Unfortunately, I do not have any photos of "Making the New Notes - Community, Collaboration, Concepts". Nevertheless, I think we did provide some useful insight in our Notes2 activity. But you may want to judge for yourself...

We had the last presentation slot and then moved on to a very fine hotel to attend the closing ceremony. Some speakers took us some days back in time and provided insight in their view of how the community evolved. Then, delicious meals were offered and we had the chance to see some Chinese acts (magicians, acrobats, fighters, ...):

Here, I would like to say thank you to our Chinese community and the sponsors which prepared and financed the OOoCon. My overall impression is that everything was really excellent! So again, a big thank you to all the supporters and volunteers!!!

Saturday: Tourist Trip Starts

When we registered, we have been offered to attend a two days tourist trip in the area of Beijing. So after getting up really early, we went to the "Great Wall" and back to Beijing to visit the "Bird's Nest". It is really impressive and it is hardly imaginable that, e.g. for the latter one, the Olympic Games have been there only few months ago. Between those sightseeing spots, there have be some arrangements to visit a Jade factory and a Silk factory - let's say that this caused discussion in our group :-)

At the evening, we went on to buy some small gifts and to get something to eat. And, like every day, the rest of the evening was spent in the hotel bar to meet the other community members and to strengthen our relationships. I'm pretty sure that I will miss some of the people when I leave...

Oh, due to the preparation of my departure, I'm not sure if it is possible for me to blog tomorrow.

Bye,
Christoph

2008-11-05T18:07:00.005+01:00

Nothing really thrilling today, but at least my first attendance on an OpenOffice.org conference...

The opening ceremony was held in a official building (Diaoyutai State Guesthouse) which was decorated in the colors of the OOoCon 2008. Although being a bit different in comparison with the 'blue' OpenOffice.org, all media (presentation screens, banners, cards, ...) seem to be carefully designed and are very consistent. It was a pleasure to look at:

After the ceremony, which seemed to be a bit long, we drove on to the Peking University. There, the Sun User Experience team members Bettina Haberer and Christian Jansen held the first presentation: "What's New in OpenOffice.org 3.0?". Although there were some issues with the data projector and the internet connection, they demonstrated how OpenOffice.org did improve over time. And now you can judge if the persons on the picture did improve, too :-)

The evening was spent together with e.g. the Sun UX team, some Sun Writer team members and the German community. Like the evenings before, there were discussions about the project, how to handle issues, how to manage new features in Writer and the quality of the Chinese beer. Not bad, by the way. So we "ended up" in the bar of the hotel. And, most probably, some people may still be there... As I said, no surprise today.

So enjoy the rest of your day,
Christoph

Oh, it's pretty late!

2008-11-04T19:37:00.007+01:00

Wow, it's about 2:30 am now... it has been a great day before the conference really starts (great except playing the tourist).

So, after an extensive breakfast, some attendees moved towards a coffee bar to get some "real coffee". And, some bits and bytes from the "free" (as in beer) WLAN internet connection. I think, it has been a very funny discussion and I enjoyed to get in touch with some German community members I didn't knew much about, e.g. Jacqueline Rahemipour, André Schnabel, Stefan Taxhet and Andreas Mantke (see the post yesterday):

At 2 pm we had finished to work on our mails. We went back to the hotel and picked up some members of the Sun User Experience team and Max who just arrived. They starved from hunger. So we continued our discussion during a great meal. We decided that the most delicious dish was the "exploded chicken" (own interpretation). Let's have a look at Christian Jansen (Sun UX), Frank Loehmann (Sun UX), Max Odendahl (OOo development) and Andreas Mantke starting the meal (from left to right):

After being filled with an enourmous amount and variety of food, we went on to see the "Lama Temple" which is located in the center of the city. Like yesterday, we missed the opening hours by a few minutes ... Ouch! Instead, we took the chance and walked around in the smaller (and maybe less beautiful, but also interesting) streets - like in the picture here:

Do you miss something? I think yes, because I didn't talk about the next meal.... A very large group of people joined a meeting in a restaurant nearby. Perfect dinner which brought up a very interesting UX discussion. One of the people involved was Cor Nouws (OOo contributor, e.g. NL marketing contact). From left to right, front to rear ... various people except me:

Finally, I don't want you to miss two very interesting UX bits I found today, both located in the Beijing metro. First, there is a very interesting button on the ticket vending machine:
The description is rather far away from the button, and the pictures itself help nothing at least. But what could it be on the first sight? It is round, red and protected by a transparent cover to avoid unintended activation. Best guesses: The self destruction mechnism? The ultra-secred rocket launcher? No, it seems to be the help button... but I still don't know if it is for emergency use. Anyway, we should re-think the OpenOffice.org menu item to make it look similar to prevent people from opening the help. This would greatly reduce the efforts for maintaining it :-)

A much better idea was to put braille texts on the handrails for the staircases. This idea rocks and shows how information can be integrated within physical objects: the staircase both leads into a certain direction and will be touched most propably (at least blind people will use it).

Now, I will get in touch with my bed. I'm looking forward for my first official conference day...

Bye, Christoph

Christoph, this is Beijing. Beijing, this is Christoph.

2008-11-03T12:00:00.007+01:00

Finally, I'm in Beijing. It's hard to believe...

The flight was good and I arrived at the Beijing Capital Airport at about 10 am. Before I left the airport building, I noticed a guy with an "OpenOffice.org" neck strap and made my very first contact with another attendee: Claudio Filho. So people, please don't forget those important indicators! I don't have one yet ... and my excuse: this is my first OOoCon.

Together, we took the bus to the hotel. The closer we came to our destination, the more attendees we met. In the hotel, we met Peter Junge, who is one of the main conference organizers. We took the chance and went to lunch with him - so he was in charge to select some very delicious dishes for us. Thanks Peter, it was ... yummi!

The picture shows our group before the meal. That's better, because afterwards the table looked less shiny. We will soon get used to chopsticks :-) Anyway, from left to right: Christoph (it's me), Claudio Filho (BrOffice.org Project), Florian Reuter (Novell), Andreas Mantke (German OpenOffice.org Portable Project) and Peter Junge (RedFlag 2000).

After the meal, some of us headed towards the "Big Bell Temple". Unfortunately, the area was closed in the moment when we just arrived, so we missed that opportunity. Instead, we took a photo from Mr. Small Bell.

Bang. That wasn't the bell... the jetlag came instantly and we hurried up to get "home" and some sleep.

Later in the evening (I went out to get some fresh air), I noticed that the entrance hall now looks like an real entrance hall (tomorrow, I expect more people to fill the space).

After all, it has been a very nice start for me! So I'm looking forward to see the other UX team members who will join tomorrow...

See (and meet?) you!
Christoph

See You in Beijing!

2008-10-30T20:44:00.004+01:00

Long time no blog post. Believe me that will change soon!

Christoph Noack, Bettina Haberer, Christian Jansen, Andreas Bartel, myself and many more UX team members will attend the OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing next week.

Stay tuned and follow our State of the UX project presentation. There are great news!

So see you in Beijing!

Frank

Interiour decoration - the colors of the new Notes

2008-09-04T00:12:00.008+02:00

Colors are bad. Are they?

Some months ago, after the release of the OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta, some Germans discussed the new Notes in a newsgroup (I don't remember the URL, sorry). There, one user referred to the notes being to colorful. He stated that it would have been better to use no color at all. Personally, I'm a little bit sad how this property of the Notes is perceived. So I would like to give some explanations a try.

Basically, color is an important information carrier and provides clues about the author of the notes. This is similar to the word processor of our biggest competitor. For me, it was no surprise that this request was estimated to be important to work on (different to other requirements which needed some more ... persuasiveness).

We only need colors. And...

The i-Team worked on it for several weeks: defining colors, gradient style, effect, visibility, ... Our requirements were (simplified):

provide a fresh and modern look, but avoid to distract the user from the actual text document
keep consistency with existing visual design work (e.g. with the Galaxy Icons Color Palette)
be based on the color palette of previous OpenOffice.org versions and the biggest competitors
consider the maximum number of different authors in the document
provide compatibility with the markups of the Change Tracking feature

Okay, so how do the colors actually look like? Let's have a look at the color table which has been developed...
But the competitor...

You may have noticed that there are some small differences between the application color palettes. I want to comment two of the decisions of the i-Team. First, the color of the first note is 'yellow' instead of 'red'. Although red is a nice markup color, we wanted most of the people to be able to recognize the little boxes as notes - similar to the sticky paper sheets in the real world. And, we are now somehow compatible with the visualization of notes in Calc. If you don't know what I'm talking about, try adding Notes for two different authors in the Microsoft Office applications Word, Excel and Impress. What a colorful world - they decided to use different visualizations (tested in Office 2003).

When we already have a look at Microsoft Office Word, you may have noticed that Word darkens the Note who currently has the focus. The result is a good recognizability of this note in comparison with the others, but the drawback is a clearly noticeable loss in text contrast. Remember, this is the Note the user views or edits at the moment. Personally, I don't understand that decision.

Let's have a look at a mockup which gives an overview over all the different colors and text elements. Although this is a rather old and chunky picture, you may get the point how it will finally look like... With the help of this picture, we checked the appearance on a variety of different monitors and displays.

Color is good. If you can perceive it!

At the beginning I said something about the importance of color in graphical representations. But there are people having problems to differentiate colors - maybe you know some of them personally (Wikipedia, Color Blindness). First, we checked our colors against color blindness with the help of the open source image application "The Gimp" which provides different filters to simulate color deficient vision. Look...
Yes, I'm not too glad that we can only guarantee to differentiate the first two or three authors. But you may agree that it is very hard to provide bright and decent pastel colors which differentiate well when considering such a high number of authors. This is already an issue with cheap monitors which have a limited viewing angle stability - same colors may appear different when displayed at opposite screen areas. And so we have to remember the most important principle when it comes to color: never code information exclusively with that. We respect that by showing the names of the authors in each Note.

People may not only have difficulties with colors, there are also other disabilities who have to be considered. Here is how it looks like, although it may hurt if you are not used to it...

That's it. So what is your opinion on how we worked and what was the outcome? We think color coded information is good, but we shouldn't rely on it. I experienced the selection of colors to be a balancing act of both providing a pleasing design and respecting all the users' needs. In any case, the i-Team hopes that you will be happy with the design we chose and that it'll bring freshness and improved usability for the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 release.

If you want to know more about it, then please have a look at the Notes2 color wiki page. And, as always, if you have any comments or opinions to share - simply share it!

Have a nice day,
Christoph

Let's do the Math

2008-08-14T15:48:00.003+02:00

This time I'd like to point to something which is in early stage of development. The "OpenOffice.org Usage Feedback Extension" [1]

The OpenOffice.org Usage Feedback Extension is an extension that collects anonymous data about how OpenOffice.org is used. This information is used to better understand how people use OpenOffice.org.

Our plan is to have this extension final on release date of OpenOffice.org 3.0.

As mentioned above, the data will be used to do some statics on the usage of OpenOffice.org. For example: We can better figure out how frequently specific menu- and tool bar items are used. The collected data will help us to create a decision base for user interface changes. It allows us to decide better on defaults, or items displayed by default.

The anonymously collected data will be published in form of diagrams/tables on a page on OpenOffice.org.

As always, feedback and comments are welcome.
Directly here, or on the discussion page of the Extension Specification.

There is momentary nothing to download, but this will change soon.

Stay tuned.

[1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/OpenOffice.org_User_Feedback_Extension

OOo User Experience Project Lead Meeting in Hamburg

2008-08-11T10:03:00.010+02:00

Sun Microsystems User Experience team had a meeting with Christoph, our OOo User Experience Co-Lead. Christoph stayed in Hamburg to meet his Notes2 iTeam, so we used this opportunity to prepare the upcoming quarterly review for Writer and to discuss general UX related things.

From top left to bottom right: Christoph Noack (OOo UX), Éric Savary (Sun QA), Max Odendahl (OOo Dev), Mathias Bauer (Sun Dev),
Christian Jansen (Sun UX), Andreas Martens (Sun Dev), Frank Loehmann (Sun UX)

I think the meeting was very productive and we also had much fun showing Christoph and Max a little bit of Hamburg at night. After dinner we went down to the harbour to have a look at the Hamburg Cruise Days. Nearly every ship/building was illuminated with blue light.

Blue illuminated Rickmer Rickmers and Disneys Lion King musical hall in the back.

I hope we can repeat those face to face meetings beside our weekly telephone calls.

Usability and handedness – is it considered at conceiving software?

2008-07-07T14:55:00.002+02:00

Within the software products / tools I have ever installed and worked with I have never discovered one, which pointed explicitely to the consideration of handedness.
So it seems, that one is working with software, which is mostly (always?) designed for right handers.

Is this assumption right?

How to satisfy handedness?

To meet the need of right and left handers at conceiving software one needs to know and be able to identify, which hand is supported in which way.

Does it really suffice to switch the mouse keys and mirror the menu and toolbars?

What needs to be considered at conceptual design of software therefore? In my opinion this is a topic really worth mentioning.

Your feedback is welcome.

Best regards,

Bettina

Improving the Usability: The new Extension Manager as an Example

2008-06-19T18:23:00.007+02:00

I would like to introduce the new GUI of the Extension Manager.
The aim of this refining was to ease the use of this tool and giving it an appealing look.

The problem:
This dialog has formerly been rather overcrowded with all functions available at the same time and thus difficult to understand how to use.
The user was forced to consider too many steps before getting results, while beeing in the context of extensions which at that days were not in common use for every user.

The solution:
Which buttons need to be available all the time and which are only relevant for a selected extension? According that assignment the buttons got arranged and their visibility reduced, so that the user has certain functions only available if needed. That should help to keep the user's focus on the work flow.
We also reduced the number of further dialogs coming up on top of the Extension Manager at certain actions by integrating it within the UI.
Well, not many ways exist to arrange an appropriate UI for the purpose of handling extensions, the result shows similarity in the style of the well known Firefox.

Here are some pictures showing the old and new Extension Manager:

The old UI

The new UI: Adding an extension

The new UI: After adding an extension

Congrats Firefox Team

2008-06-18T09:35:00.003+02:00

Well done. Especially I like the download site(s)....and of coarse the product.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/de/firefox/

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/de/firefox/organic/

--Christian

Quarterly Review is done – what is next?

2008-06-16T10:10:00.004+02:00

Some Quarterly Reviews for OOo are still running and some (i.e. the review for Calc) have already been finished.

The report of such a review consists of different sections. One section lists issues the teams are already working on and another the most important issues (i.e. a Top 20 of the highest voted issues). So now the question is how to start working on these most important issues to get things done?

I want to start the discussion on those issues as early as possible. If we have a good proposal in place, the chance to get those issues done is much higher. Furthermore we have the chance to do it on a high quality level if we do not start thinking about an issue when we have resources in development.

Discussions held in issues are often nonproductive, so I want to call for proposals, a kind of one pager, at the OOo Wiki. The issue itself just contains links to proposals but the discussion starts on the discuss@ux.openoffice.org mailing list. There could be more than one proposal for an issue, but in the end the UX team should recommend one proposal to development.

If the implementation of such an issue starts, the iTeam gets the supported proposal as a recommendation how to solve that issue. Maybe it is a good idea to have the original author(s) with that iTeam too.

Feedback welcome!

Best regards,

Frank

iPhone 2.0

2008-06-09T22:18:00.006+02:00

At today's keynote, Steve Jobs presented the all new iPhone to the masses. No worries, this ain't gonna be another blog post about the product as such. Instead, I want to point out how Apple managed to really listen to the their customers and improve the iPhone exactly there where it failed to meet their needs. This company's ability to gather, interpret and appropriately use feedback is state of the art.

Read the whole keynote here.

Best,
Andreas

PS: This is what Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Bertrand Serlet, said about Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X "In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system."

Introducing our new member: Jennifer Wright

2008-06-07T00:25:00.004+02:00

Who is Jennifer? Have you ever heard of her? I think not, but I hope we will make her or one of her friends come to life, soon. What we're talking about is using Personas in our development process.

Say Hello to Personas!

”Personas are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are most often used as part of a user-centered design process [...]” (Source: Wikipedia)

Why should we use Personas? To get: “Focus! Focus! Focus!”. And finally, the best OpenOffice.org we all can create.

Personas can help to remain the focus in our developments. Starting with requirements engineering, Personas can help to identify the functionality with most room for improvement or weighting requests for completely new features. You may just “ask” Jennifer what supports her most. For the interaction design, Personas may have special preferences, knowledge or even disabilities which affect the possible solutions. Using Personas means going straightforward.

How to Create Personas?

When creating Personas, you basically start by gathering real data from your users and identify similarities. You select the most important user types, for which fictitious characters are made up. These character traits make the information more vivid, manageable and understandable for all the people involved in the development process. And the data which the Personas are based on will make them believable.

Understandability and authenticity make them so valuable: Personas can greatly improve the communication inside the development team. And – also very important – that should work across all our activities and help us to achieve consistent solutions.

If you get the impression that this may also be useful for the other OpenOffice.org projects, you're right. Even Marketing, Documentation, ... may benefit from this approach.

What's Good Today? And What's Just Wrong?

So everything is bad? No, since we have payed attention to our users for a long time... Some data gathered in usability tests helped to identify and prioritize issues. All larger development activities are backed up by members of the User Experience team. The developers bring in years of experience with the product. And, there is a well-defined specification and design process for OpenOffice.org.

But looking more closely, you may discover small inconsistencies. Working in teams means that everybody wants to achieve the best for their users, but many have their own kind of “user prototype” in mind. Or, decisions are made up on very few requests and do not represent the needs of a larger user group. Or ... I think you got the point.

What we think can help is an improved common understanding. Guess what? Personas may help us to get there.

The Next Steps

So how to proceed? First we should avoid any rush, because this might be the only chance to introduce Personas. So what we might do is ...

Answer the question, whether we think Personas are useful for OpenOffice.org.
Select one or two first user types and collect the available data.
Make up the Persona characters.
Start promoting the Personas in the community and select the first development activities to make use of it.
Further improve the Personas as we gain more insight in our user base.

The Big Challenge!

Although the Persona approach may sound simple, the devil is in the details. One of them is to convince all involved people like software developers, documentation or QA that this will work. “Work”, that means that it will improve our decision making, reduce development effort and improve the outcome of our activities. Now, they may just think that it is ridiculous to “talk” with those unreal persons or base decisions on such “paper” data. We have to make clear that this is their user base and that we talk about real people. Our customers, our relatives and our friends.

So what to do now? Start discussing this idea on ux-discuss, please. We would like to hear your opinion on that and if you think that it helps to achieve the UX goals: usability, productivity and enjoyment.

Have a nice day!

Frank & Christoph

Source of the picture: http://www.burningwell.org/

Even Japan is suffering "feature bloat"

2008-06-06T14:52:00.002+02:00

I just read a posting on Wired Online that describes the situation of mobile phones in Japan. Even the feature-hungry Japanese seem to get tiered of the mass of functionality that is nowadays built-in their mobile devices. They got location tracking, mobile credit card payment and even live TV – Madness? No, just feature creep gone mad.

Read on at:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/news/2008/06/japan_phones

Best,
Andreas

Side by Side

2008-05-29T22:40:00.010+02:00

This is the first time that I will blog about our Notes activity. In the last time, I heard questions about the design decisions and some comments that we do just imitate the behavior of a large competitor's word processor.

So why not talk about it and start by discussing the Note Side Pane? But first - for the people not familiar with that - a small introduction: The activity Notes2 addresses the revision of the current notes functionality in OpenOffice.org Writer. The most significant change is the visibility of the Notes at the side of the document text page, which will be delivered with OpenOffice.org 3.0.

And this "side" is what we will talk about now.

Position of the Note Side Pane

Some years ago, Microsoft decided to show their notes ("comments") on the document page and therefore resized the page to make room at one side. I consider this solution as sub-optimal, mainly because people struggle to recognize that enlargement - no real visual clue. Think of a person who opens a document and hits the print button. If only one comment is inside the document, then the whole document is printed with the resized pages. Really, I saw thousends of pages end up in the wastebin for that reason ...

But we do have that too, don't we? If you want to have comments next to the document, want them to be scrolled together with the text and want them to be recognized as a part of a document, then you end up in something like a Note Side Pane. But this time, it is only attached to the page and not part of it. Some light border line and a light shade of gray work wonders :-) And, we do not end up in changing the document's layout (!), something which sometimes happens to Word documents.

By the way, short time after we decided to display the Side Pane slightly darker than the text page, somebody told me how this works in Word 2007. And guess what? They switched to gray...

So finally, how does that look? The next picture shows the upper part of a document. Great, isn't it? :-)

Layout of the Notes on the Note Side Pane

Notes, good cue. Where should the Notes exactly be drawn? The iTeam had a real intensive discussion about that ... believe it! Have a look at the competing ideas (or mockups, since these are only early drawings and no real implementation):

Above, there is something we called separate layout. It does look more like the famous little notes sticking on "something", and they do have nice shadows. But, they need much valuable space and add visual complexity (look from the left to the right, you will see several borders and background color changes).

Here, there is the integrated layout. The Notes do not have own border lines: they are limited by the physical page border, the document and the Note shadow. Something you rarely see in reality, but we decided to go for that layout.

Why? People may be happy if they use the feature for the first time and the Note looks nice. But, people will be happier if they can work with half a dozen of them on the screen and still focusing on the document. Yes, this is a decision for "productivity" and against some small part of "enjoyment". To be really sure, we presented the final design to some users and they still recognized it to be a Note. Hurray.

Did you notice? Even small things do have impact.

What's next?

We have plenty ideas for a lot of next releases :-) For example, I'd like to see a more direct manipulation for toggling the visibility of the Note Side Pane.

If you like to know more about the activity, then please have a look on our "development wiki" at Notes2. And if there is anything Notes related I should blog about, then please let me know.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day!

Spread the Word ... aehm ... Signature

2008-05-22T20:08:00.003+02:00

A few days ago, Christian announced our shiny new User Experience logo. I think this is a huge step forward in terms our presence to others. But those 'others' still have to stop by at our project main page or the wiki pages, which is ... suboptimal. So is there a way to communicate what we stand for, if anybody of us contributes to UX related topics in 'foreign' places?

One idea is use email signatures or forum signatures. Every time we (represented by on of our team members) comments a UX related topic, this would promote our activities. For better impact and recognizability, those signatures should try to catch interest and follow a certain structure. Some proposals and explanations are given in the wiki filed under External Communication.

Personally, I picked the proposal "smile" which basically states: Make users smile! Better usability, productivity and enjoyment for OpenOffice.org.

And you? What to do if you are an UX team member? Simply chose one and start communicating with it! By the way, you may agree that this makes only sense for communication outside the UX mailing lists :-)

As always, comments are appreciated. So if you like or dislike this idea, please respond by commenting this posting or discuss it at the ux-discuss mailing list.

Bye bye,
Christoph

Microsoft UX Blog vs. Internet Explorer

2008-05-20T20:52:00.003+02:00

Going through my “crash reports” image collection I found this one. It's in German but anyway, I think it's a hilarious one :-) In summary, I was surfing Clemens Lutsch's Blog (a UX guy at Microsoft) when IE decided to terminate with the message: “THE UX Strategy User Experience Blog ... Thoughts, News, Ideas can not be created>> Unknown Error”

Enjoy!

A new User Experience Team Logo

2008-05-09T07:48:00.003+02:00







I'm happy to announce the new logo of the User Experience Team.
The main goal of the logo is to penetrate core values of the project:

Usability,
Productivity,
Enjoyment


The three terms summarize in a very short manner what the User
Experience Team's overall goals are. The list below describes the
meaning a little bit more in detail:

Usability:
This term explains the ease with which people can work with
OpenOffice.org to archive their goal in a particular context in an
effective and efficient manner. Sadly, this term is usually meant to
describe the “user friendliness” in the field of computer-human
interaction.

Productivity:
This term accompanies “usability” because of the general
misunderstanding of meaning “user friendliness” only. Again, it
emphasizes that working with OpenOffice.org should raise the
“productivity” significantly.

Enjoyment:
Working with OpenOffice.org should be pleasant. This is important, if
OpenOffice.org wants to attract new users and keep the experienced ones.
Currently, OpenOffice.org loses many potential users who dislike the
overall behavior/look of OpenOffice.org. But there is also a serious
fact: people which are happy with a product tend to be more creative in
their solution findings.

The logo is the first step to improve the external communication of the
User Experience project. If you want to know more, then please have a
look at:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/Project_Strategy/External_Communication

The logo is available in PNG, SVG, EPS, formats. CMYK versions will
follow soon.

As always feedback and comments are highly appreciated.

Christian

Featuritis – The source of all evil!?

2008-05-08T19:01:00.002+02:00

A couple of days ago, I stumbled over a title of an article that has already been discussed in many other blog postings. I found it so appealing that I purchased the publication from Harvard Business Review. „Defeating feature fatigue“ by Ronald T. Rust et al. (2006) is an excellent piece of work that should definitely be added to our recently originated literature list. Here are the three main findings:

1. “Consumers know that products with more features are harder to use, but before they purchase a product they value its capability more than its usability.”
2. “Even when consumers are allowed to customize a product, they load on the features, worrying little about the learning curve they are setting for themselves.”
3. “Once consumers have used a product, their preferences change. Suddenly, usability matters very much.”

What do the authors conclude from that and what can the OOo community, UX specifically, learn here? In short, two things are suggested. First, too few features is as bad as too many features. Second, any company that is interested in a growing number of customers or users should avoid putting features before usability. Why? Dissatisfied users will “return” their product, will look for other products and will, nowadays, blog about their dissatisfaction with the product. Developing open source software is not much of a difference. A development strategy that is almost exclusively driven by features, such as in Open Office for instance, will more sooner than later lead to a stagnating number of new users. It might even turn out worse, users will turn their backs on OO. Hence, we need to get rid of this focus and be more aware of the complexity that is constantly increased every time a new feature finds its way into a release.

Any opinions?

Best,
Andreas

Reference:
Ronald, T., Rust; Debora, V., Thompson, Rebecca, W., Hamolton; Defeating Feature Fatigue, Harvard Business Review, 2006.

Quarterly review process for Calc has been started

2008-04-28T16:25:00.007+02:00

Niklas announced the start of the quarterly review process (2008 Q2 ) for OOo Calc today. Please find a list of issues for discussion here.

Please participate and add issues you think that they are important for Calc. The wanted issues are not only usability related, so bugs and requests for enhancement are welcomed too.

The list will be discussed in an IRC meeting taking place on Monday, May 5th.

Best regards,

Frank

It's all about people

2008-04-15T15:22:00.005+02:00

Hi everybody,

a few weeks ago Frank announced my participation in the UX project in terms of the co-leadership. I think it is time to shed some light on my motivation, my personal wishes concerning the future of the project and – finally – me.

Explaining my motivation for usability is easy: „It's all about people“. Some examples? I'm tired of seeing students investing more time in formatting their thesis instead of working on the content. I want my girlfriend to be able to create stunning presentations to present her scientific research results. I'm happy when my mother can work flawlessly with spreadsheets at home, originally created with „the big competitor's“ office suite at work. And finally, I want people to enjoy working with OpenOffice.org instead of telling me that it feels like crap - without looking at the great capabilities it offers ... I presume you got the point.

At the moment, my motivation is even more boosted by the impressions I got at the CHI 2008 last week. There, I had the chance to get in touch with many people from industry, research and the open-source software world. It may sound a bit strange, but there I have seen, heard and felt the spirit of “User Experience” - and it still surrounds me.

Concerning our project, I wish that you can share my excitement for the ongoing efforts. But I also have to admit that some things have to be improved if we want to have substantial impact. Some weeks ago, people took part in some great discussions how to improve the visibility of our activities, the cooperation within the projects and other community efforts and to lower the hurdles for new contributors. I just want to point out that these arguments are not forgotten and we (Frank and I) are working on some first proposals to be presented soon.

Besides that, I would like to finalize my personal understanding of the co-lead role: I'm now enjoying to be the human spam filter for our mailing lists. Sounds challenging, hey? ;-)

Challenge is a good key point, because you might wonder what I do during the daylight hours. I earn a crust as an interaction designer in the advance development of a rather large company. Although we work on „real-world physical objects“ instead of software user interfaces, it's still people we want to be able to achieve great things.

You might also ask why I'm interested in OpenOffice.org. About 14 years ago I bought my first products from the company StarDivision. My favorite application in those days was StarDraw 2.0 for DOS. Some time later StarOffice 3.0 was the only viable business suite for my operating system of choice, IBM OS/2. Since then, StarOffice and later OpenOffice.org were my preferred software on Microsoft Windows or different flavors of Linux. Maybe this knowledge will be useful for our discussions.

Back to the now. I didn't have the chance to say thank you. First to Frank who offered me the role of the co-lead, and of course to the people who supported me with their compliments. And finally, to all the people who spend their time to improve OpenOffice.org and therefore believe in it's future.

Do you get tired? Maybe I should consider to come to an end, because I'd like to spare some text for later blog posts. So if there are any questions left or if you have personal comments, then please feel free to discuss this blog entry or just drop me an email! Anyway, I'm glad to be part of the UX community and to work with you!

Thanks for reading (or printing) :-)

Christoph

New Default Bullets for OOo 3.0 Writer - Update

2008-04-15T14:17:00.003+02:00

I have adjusted the previously proposed new bullets behavior based on feedback I got so far:

We will use the following bullets for our default bullet list in Writer:
Level 1: 2022 (small bullet)
Level 2: 25E6 (small outlined bullet)
Level 3: 25AA (small square)
Optional via dialog only: [Level 4: 25AB (small outlined square)]

These symbols are used from the font assigned to the paragraph. If this font does not contain a bullet, the font substitution uses OpenSymbol font as fallback. Therefore these bullets will be added to the OpenSymbol font.

The 'Bullets' character style is still assigned to the bullets, but the style is initally empty. This allows the bullet to grow with the font size of the paragraph.

Please track issue 63395 for details about the implementation for OOo 3.0.

Thanks for the feedback!

Frank

Hello OOO Community!

2008-04-14T17:27:00.001+02:00

As a new member of the OpenOffice/Star Office User Experience Team at Sun I want to introduce myself to the community. My name is Andreas Bartel, I am 29 years old and I joined the UX team two weeks ago. I studied Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück (Germany) and at the University of Linköping (Sweden) focusing on human perception, human-computer interaction and robotics. I am very excited about my new position and I very much look forward to contributing to the UX project and the OOO community.

Talk to you soon!

Andreas

New Default Bullets for OOo 3.0 Writer

2008-04-08T15:08:00.008+02:00

The currently used default bullets in OOo Writer are too large (Issue 63395). Furthermore the "Bullet" character style assigns a fixed size of 12pt to the bullets. This hinders the bullets to scale with the text size of the paragraph. The following screenshot shows a current default bullet list.

For OOo 3.0 new smaller symbols from the OpenSymbol font are used. The spacing to text is kept unchanged. The bullet size is taken from the paragraph text size so the bullets are growing with the text size.

Feedback welcome!

OpenOffice.org User Experience Blog

We Moved

Stuff on the Shelf

Budapest, Day 2 and 3

Budapest, Day 1

Informal Meeting "FOSS and Usability"

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words!

Departure ahead!

CHI 2010, Day Four

CHI 2010, Day Three

CHI 2010, Day Two

CHI 2010, Day One

Happy Easter!

CeBit2010: The Ribbonator

Back me up, Scotty! Aehm, BackupPC.

CC F2F Meeting in HH

Brainstorm New Ideas: Contextual Undo

UX meeting in Hamburg, Day Two

UX meeting in Hamburg, Day One

Happy New Year!

Brainstorm New Ideas: Document Check

Time Machine Reloaded - November 8th

Time Machine Reloaded - November 7th

Time Machine Reloaded - November 6th

Time Machine Reloaded - November 5th

Time Machine Reloaded - November 4th

Time Machine Reloaded - November 3rd

Seven Days Time Machine

cappuccinOOo and more

Commercial Break - Workshop "User Experience Done Live!"

Questions, Answers and an Interview

﻿LinuxTag WrapUp

Design Proposal Collection, Lessons Learned

Transparent Decision Making

Feedback on OpenOffice.org 3.1

Vacation the UX way

OpenOffice.org Easter Eggs

OpenOffice User Survey 2009: Performance Findings

The CeBIT is over. The UX point-of-view.

OOo Wiki Usage Survey is Underway

Project Renaissance at the CeBIT in Germany

OpenOffice.org User Survey 2009 Now Online

Website Refresh and UX

Final Results of the OOo User Survey 2008

State of the Renaissance Project

What document templates do our users really need?

Thank you, Doris!

Using Linkedin's Poll application for research

OpenOffice.org User Feedback Extension Beta is Available

OpenOffice.org User Survey Part II

A great story about the Renaissance Project from a personal perspective

Yet another task we can put on the OOo list

Merry Open Source!

Some ideas and questions on how to look at the User Survey data

Merry Christmas!

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

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

OOo Con 2008 Picture Gallery

Project Renaissance: JavaFX for prototyping

Presentations of the World Usability Day 2008

Havy Traffic on the Wiki since project announcement

Project “Renaissance” Kick-Off

I'm Back After 3 Years

ODF documents statistics

Wordle, I love this tool!

OOoCon 2008. What's next?

OOo Con 2008 --- Wrap Up

The UX Team at the World Usability Day in Hamburg

OOo Con 2008 captured in 2D

Get Three for One

Oh, it's pretty late!

Christoph, this is Beijing. Beijing, this is Christoph.

See You in Beijing!

Interiour decoration - the colors of the new Notes

Let's do the Math

OOo User Experience Project Lead Meeting in Hamburg

Usability and handedness – is it considered at conceiving software?

Improving the Usability: The new Extension Manager as an Example

Congrats Firefox Team

Quarterly Review is done – what is next?

LinuxTag WrapUp