OOo User Experience Project Lead Meeting in Hamburg

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.

Quarterly Review is done – what is next?

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

Quarterly review process for Calc has been started

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