iPhone 2.0

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

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 ...

1. Answer the question, whether we think Personas are useful for OpenOffice.org.

2. Select one or two first user types and collect the available data.

3. Make up the Persona characters.

4. Start promoting the Personas in the community and select the first development activities to make use of it.

5. 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"

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

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

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

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

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