User Experience Planet

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

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

Please read Christoph Noack's second blog posting on his visit in Hamburg, which he begins with:

"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."

 BTW
It seems from the comments I got and notes I read on the list, that we humans are indeed more pleased to be F2F than only bits and bytes. ;-)

Kind regards,

Liz 

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

Last week Christoph Noack from the User Experience (UX) community took time out of his busy schedule to visit Hamburg and the Sun office for face to face (f2f) discussions on UX topics.  Be sure to see his blog post on "day one" to hear what went on. Be watching for "day two" as well.

For my part, I can say it was a very productive visit with many meetings and long talks. It is good to be there in real-life sometimes instead of just virtual. Although I have to say the sleep mode is easier to achieve on my computer than in real life. ;-)

Speaking of virtual vs real-life, what are your thoughts about non-f2f situations like webinars or conferences solely online? Is that a good or bad thing? Perhaps you could leave a comment here to tell me if you have had good or bad experiences with one or the other. What do you prefer? A mix? Which one would would you be more likely to attend and why?

Have a great day, both virtual and real.

Liz :-)

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

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

Everyone loves receiving presents, especially presents which are useful. Likewise, giving presents to others feels wonderful. An important part of the holidays is the spirit of giving. This is where OOo fits in: Not only is the OpenOffice.org office suite a great present to the world, but giving and receiving is also experienced in many more ways within the OpenOffice.org community. There are volunteers working in numerous project groups, from localizations to marketing, documentation to website maintenance, plus mailing lists.

Not too long ago, I was reading the Users mailing list and saw two nice examples of giving and receiving that I want to point out to you. The first one was the quick and kind community response to a novice user's request for help. The other was the mention of how a school was outfitted with Linux and OOo. These two examples appeared in the same thread titled "I'm Petrified", in which Helene asked for information about switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, saying she was terrified to try OOo. Helene, who lives in Washington State, USA, was amazed by the large number of helpful responses she got, on and off list, from the OOo community. In her own words: "I have received many good comments and great advice from practically around the world.  I am awestruck! [...] Therefore, thank you and all the other Oo.o users around the world for your help and concern." One of the responses to her initial message was this (text shortened by me):

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [users] I'm petrified!
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:44:18 -1000

Here is a story that may help you not being "petrified" about OpenOffice.

I am retired but help a large local elementary school (800 students) with database applications. [...] Like many organizations the computers vary greatly in age. We have a mix of
Windows (Win98, Win2000, WinXP, Vista, and Mac computers.  That means it's always a problem with knowing what format to use if a file needs to move from one computer to another. But license fees to create a uniform environment are just out of reach.

My grandson, while still in school learning computer science, worked at the school as LAN manager. He proved that we could save a lot of money by converting many of our "old" computers to Linux (Ubuntu) rather than upgrade and to install open office on most of the computers regardless of the Operating system.

This has been a resounding success, the teachers had no problem with it and the students learn it easily.

[...]
Harold Hauge

The two photos here are from that school in Hawaii.

These are just two of the hundreds of similar experiences people have with OOo and the OOo community every month, in many countries all over the world. It is wonderful to be part of a huge global community where so many knowledgeable and helpful people are giving and receiving all year round.

Happy holidays everyone! Keep up the spirit ;-)

Best wishes from me and everyone at

OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun

I know the holidays are drawing near and you are twiddling your thumbs, bored, not knowing what to do now that you already bought and wrapped all the presents and sent all the cards. ;-) Well, never fear! I have just the thing to keep you from falling asleep at your keyboard while watching animated snowfall.

The team made up of developers, user experience, quality assurance, accessibility and documentation specialists is hard at work writing the specification for the work-flow improvements which they plan to implement in Impress, the OpenOffice.org presentation application.

To find out what the latest plans are, take a look at the spec as it unfolds. Please remember that this is a work in progress. I'd also like to point out that the mockups are only for content. The final "look" is in the process of being designed.

If you have specific ideas to share or suggestions to make which could help the team make even more improvements in the areas being addressed, please post them to the mailing list: ui (at) ux (dot) openoffice.org.

For the Renaissance in Impress project overview, see the wiki page.

BTW, where I live, there is lovely white snow on the ground. Just a dusting mind you, but enough to bring thoughts of hot cocoa and cuddling up in front of warm fireplaces. No video-animated snowfall for me! ;-)

Best regards from me and the others on the Renaissance team.

Liz

Re: Project Renaissance Impress Improvements - Found the required slide layout yet?

Hi Andreas,

FYI_ I've developed the habit to use the context menu to create new slides. And I do it in the context (read the location of the click) of a slide that already uses the desired layout. Then the only operation I have to do is to drag the slide to the final position (if it is not already there.) So please consider the following:

1. do not open the task pane if a new slide is created. I do not need it. It is just annoying.
2. select the new slide if a new slide is inserted in Slide Sorter mode. Currently --in Mac OOo 3.1.1-- the first slide gets selected and the slide sorter scrolls to the top. Grrrr. Did I mention that the task pane opens as well. Grrr²
3. I appreciate that you want to reduce the number of different layouts. Do you? I hope so. I typically just use #1, #3, maybe #4 or #5. Do you have statistical data which layouts are actually used? The empty slide is the best in stock to place a full screen image --BTW_ this is the only layout that is currently missing, a full screen image.

cheers
Matthias

 

As indicated in the previous posts, we have started to redesign a few really basic interactions in OpenOffice.org Impress in order to reduce the overall complexity of the UI. Currently, we focus on navigation through slides in various contexts, the visual appearance of different slide selection states and the handling of slide layouts. Today, I want to share some thoughts about a different way how to assign slide layouts.

The Challenge.

At present, OpenOffice.org Impress offers five ways how to change the layout of an existing slide. However, four of those merely trigger or point to the task pane. Consequently, there is only one “real” way how a user can pick and apply a slide layout, and there is no way doing that without the task pane. Thinking about a common scenario of creating a presentation, adding new slides, modifying existing ones, adjusting their layouts, one can imagine that switching the task pane on and off over and over again is an unwanted interruption. Keeping the task pane permanently alive is of course an option. Yet, if you want to concentrate more on the content of your work instead on the tools at hand, you’d rather prefer to disable the task pane since it consumes quite a lot of screen real estate.

Von OOo UI - Ideas and Mock-Ups

In addition, there is no way to insert a slide with a favored layout in only one step. Currently, the default work flow requires a user to insert a slide first, decide if the layout meets the expectations and then assign the preferred layout if expectations are not met. From our point of view, there should be a more elegant solution to that, too.

Another drawback of the current implementation of slide layouts is that their sheer number exceeds a practical amount that covers most use cases without getting too difficult to work with. Including the vertical layouts OpenOffice.org Impress 3.2 Beta offers 27 slide layouts. That is challenging for two particular reasons. The 27 slide layouts have to go somewhere in the UI, namely into the task pane, where they consume a lot of space. Since they are so many, it is often necessary to scroll through the task pane in order to get an overview what is available and during search. Picking one is also not always easy because in a worst case a user has to look through 27 options and then decide which one to pick. That takes time.

Possible Solutions.

Since OpenOffice.org Impress already has a dedicated “Presentation” toolbar that contains an “Insert Slide” and a “Slide Layout” button, the Renaissance i-Team started working on a solution that offers a technique to change slide layouts without the necessity to constantly use the task pane. Motivated by the visual concepts in our prototypes, we will try to add a preview pane into the toolbar such that users can directly pick a layout from a drop down toolbox, in the context of the task (insert slide, change slide layout). In parallel, we have decided to add more value to that particular “Presentation” toolbar by reducing its functionality to support the most important tasks only (insert slide, change slide layout, change slide design, set slide transition, start presentation).

Von OOo UI - Ideas and Mock-Ups

We have also considered options to handle slide layouts from various mouse context menus. However, this seems to be very challenging from an implementation point of view. Although we already have some design mock-ups, we need to explore the feasibility of that solution first on all platforms. So for now, the development team is investigating our options.

Von OOo UI - Ideas and Mock-Ups

One way to reduce the amount of slide layouts is to offer object placeholders in each layout that can be used to insert images, charts, tables and the like where usually text content would appear. That would make the need to create slide layouts with tables, images or charts separately obsolete.

Overall, these changes may seem small or less significant compared to other troubles such as the inability to create own slide layouts. However, having the goal of thinning out the current UI in mind, these redesigns and the sum of all forthcoming incremental improvements of the work flow will eventually keep us on the right track. For details about the ongoing work check out the Renaissance i-Team Wiki.

Best,

Andreas

The thinning out process for Impress 3.3 is in full progress. Please find the Project Renaissance status presentation for November/December at the OOo Wiki. The presentation provides first mock-ups of  the planned changes.

Feedback welcome.

Best regards,

Project Renaissance Team

I know some of you read the title and thought “Oh cool! I'm dying for a new user interface (UI). When will it finally be ready?” At the same time, some of you thought “Nooooooo! I like the UI already, even if there are a few little things here and there that annoy me. I wish they would stop this talk of a new UI.”

Before you read the more important stuff below this, let's just take a quick look at three basic questions.

1) Is there going to be a new UI for OpenOffice.org?
Yes. Improvements in interaction design (usability) will result in changes for the user interface. Good interaction design considers how fast you can do tasks which occur quite frequently and how easy you can figure out things you've never done before. BTW, "New UI" isn't a very exact term. We could just as easily say "revised UI" or "updated UI".

2) When will it be done?
Slowly but surely; over a long time; bit by bit. We will only change things if there is a good reason. And gathering and analyzing data (the "reason") takes time, as does designing improvements.

3) What is the goal of Project Renaissance?
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.

That said, the following is an elaboration on those three points and an attempt to clarify any incorrect interpretations of Project Renaissance.

There is a great deal to do within the scope of Project Renaissance, and since the OOo community regularly comes out with a new version of the OpenOffice.org office suite, each version is an opportunity to improve the interaction design. Slowly but surely. This usually involves UI changes, but sometimes may only result in performance or other intangible changes not visible on the UI. A motto for Project Renaissance is "form follows function".

In keeping with the goal of providing efficient access to valuable functionality, experience thus far has lead us to focus first on solving some fundamental problems so we can build on those solutions in later stages of Project Renaissance. One of the fundamental problems now in focus is reducing the complexity of the very large number of graphic elements on the UI. This is a big problem and so it will take time and many steps to work on it. Improvements will be noticeable here and there as we go.

We've always said that Renaissance is a long-term project. Unfortunately, many people got the wrong impression from the really real-looking prototypes (probably because our developers are really good at coding). Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your preference, those prototypes were exploratory---just ideas we were trying out, not the real solutions. What they, and the design idea collection before them, did, was supply us with a lot of feedback that is invaluable in the continued unfolding of the Renaissance work. "Unfolding" describes not only the work but also what happens whenever we start to work on an improvement.

For an excellent explanation, I would like to quote UX Architect, Matthias Müller-Prove:

"Most, if not all UI problems get larger during the time you are working on them. To a certain extent this is natural because you get more deeply involved and gain a better understanding of the issue. You discuss the topic with colleagues and incorporate their point of view into the design. You discover new aspects that somehow match your topic. [...] The challenge is to keep the chunks of UI problems you address manageable. At the same time you have to keep an eye on the overall structure of the product."

If you have a minute, you really should read the entire text on The White Water Lily Effect.

So, fully aware of the challenge to keep the UI problems we address manageable, our current focus is the task-oriented optimization of interaction in Impress, due to be out in version OOo 3.3. More unfolding of Project Renaissance will continue, bit by bit, step by step. This is one of the first bits to reach the implementation stage.

To get a better idea of what "task-oriented optimization of interaction in Impress" means, to see which issues are in this "manageable chunk" so far, and to follow how the work is progressing, see the new pages in the OOo Renaissance wiki.

Best regards,
The Renaissance Team

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.


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...
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

  Powerpoint. Macht und Einfluss eines Präsentationsprogramms. Herausgegeben von Claus Pias und Wolfgang Coy im Fischer Verlag, 2009

As Christoph Noack opened a time capsule, let me do the same. Mine goes back 2 months to Sept 17/18/19 when specially invited members of the German-language OpenOffice.org community came to Hamburg. The visitors pictured above, plus me and Marcus Lange from Sun who joined the photo, were (l to r): Marcus Lange, Florian Effenberger, Daniel Stoni, Christian Lohmaier, Elizabeth Matthis (aka Liz), Thomas Hackert Uwe Altmann (not pictured: Gerald Geib, Volker Merschmann)

It was so wonderful to meet face to face people otherwise only known from email and to be able to thank them for their dedication and support. They each traveled here at their own cost (from far corners of Germany and even from Switzerland), which further shows their enthusiasm and dedication to our thriving open source product. On Thursday evening, those who were already in Hamburg met at a pub (Max&Consorten) for a first get-together. Afterward, most of us concluded the evening with a round of beers and more talk at my home---which I jokingly called "Motel Matthis".

Friday started out with a heartfelt word of welcome and thanks from Michael Bemmer, Senior Director of StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Engineering, and unfolded with a series of talks and snacks, including lunch and several smaller group meetings about special topics, until concluding at approximately 5:30 PM.

There were entertaining and informative talks by Stefan Taxhet on OOo in general, Gerd Weiss on infrastructure---including a personal tour of the server rooms to underline some of his points about the hardware, Andreas Bartel on Renaissance and Uwe Fischer on documentation, as well as tours of the engineering facility and opportunities to say hello to many of the OOo developers in real life.

At the end of the very busy but fun day, those of us who still had time went out to eat together at an Italian restaurant (maybe this was to get in the mood for the OOoCon in Italy!) and, several courageous visitors even spent a second night at Motel Matthis! This time Uwe made sure we had enough beer to let us talk long into the night. Thanks, Uwe!

Some comments I received after the visit are:

thackert: "It was interesting to become acquainted with some people I'd only known the mail address or nick of, and to hear really interesting talks as well to "sightsee" SUN. All in all a nice trip and - the best of all - a really nice stay at "Motel Matthis" with a perfect hostess (Liz!)"

floeff: "Thank you very much to everyone who made this visit in Hamburg possible! I'd never been at Sun Hamburg before, and it was a really nice day meeting old and new friends, getting insight on how the OpenOffice.org development works, and after all, we also had a lot of fun and a real great time. Liz is a wonderful hostess and we all enjoyed some very special days in a community that more and more becomes a real family."

VolkerMe: "Thank you again for such a nice day, which was very much too short for me. The opportunity to have personal talks with the engineers at SUN was so interesting, I wasn't able to discuss everything, so I hope I can come back another time. And although it has been said so often: Thanks Liz for hosting the meeting, for the well-prepared accommodation and for being our always smiling guide!

Saturday came too quickly and I had to say goodbye to my delightful guests. I hope to organize another visit to thank additional and like-wise dedicated community members in 2010.

Kind regards,
Liz

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

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...


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.

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.

Do not miss your opportunity to enter Christoph's time machine, if you could not attend this years OOoCon in Orvieto. Even if you have attended, it gives you the possibility to see the conference from a non-developers point of view. Enjoy!

Best regards,

Frank

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.