Project “Renaissance” - Create a New User Interface for OOo

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 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 OOo development team 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OpenOffice.org users complain about its cumbersome and outdated graphical user interface (GUI)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

Comments

Chris Rijk said:

Since it's early days, I'll specifically suggest looking at limits in things like GUI builders themselves (poor/useless at handling more dynamic layouts in my experience) and also what approaches are being taken in more recent major products (eg different layouts for different stages in workflow like in Adobe Lightroom and others).

I'd also look at intention based wizards/guidance - eg "I want to achieve X in the end". For example, "I want to print an image as big as possible on this piece of paper with zero cropping".

Posted by Chris Rijk on November 28, 2008 at 10:52 PM CET #

Jörg said:

Hi Frank,

for me the most important point is consistency of the UI. As well consistency between the OOo applications itself, as consistency between OOo and other applications.

What IMHO should not happen in future again, is that a user interface feature like the cool zoom control slider of OOo 3.0 is only available in SW and SC but not in the other applications.
An other bad example is the three pane UI which was introduced with OOo 2.0 for Impress, but until now none of the other OOo applications adopted it.

The other thing is that OOo should strictly follow the UI guidelines of the used operating system. Especially the dialog layout and behavior (Modeless, OK-Button, Apply-Button) should be the same user knows from his platform.

Even the look isn't fully native now, it shouldn't be visible, that OOo is a cross platform suite. One example are screenshots in the online help. They should be rendered for each platform (or better in real time with your personal desktop skin and your personal toolbar configuration).

Best Regards
Jörg

Posted by Jörg on November 28, 2008 at 11:36 PM CET #

Mike said:

Please get rid of VCL finally!! Mozilla can do too, they have native widgets under Windows, Linux, MacOS and Co. Please give a native Windows GUI.

I love OOo.

Posted by Mike on November 29, 2008 at 12:44 AM CET #

Bob Harvey said:

This is a splendid development.

Let me mention http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=18829 which still has 55 votes and dates back to 2003.

I genuinely believe that a skinnable interface, with the ability to create and manage toolbars, menus, sidebars, etc could result in an explosion of user-generated UI ideas, and a great deal of innovation.

Posted by Bob Harvey on November 30, 2008 at 12:58 PM CET #

Frank Loehmann said:

Hi,

We have a new mailing list for project Renaissance:

ui@ux.openoffice.org

Please subscribe to that list, if you want to be informed:

http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectMailingListList

Best regards,

Frank

Posted by Frank Loehmann on December 01, 2008 at 01:56 PM CET #

Vincent Dagousset said:

Why don't you use ribbon's Office 2007 ?

Posted by Vincent Dagousset on December 01, 2008 at 06:36 PM CET #

Harm Hilvers said:

Wow! This is really great news and it's good to hear it. OpenOffice.org is good software.

I'm on a Mac and in terms of functions it is better equipped than Pages (part of the iWork suite). However, OOo's performance is a bit weak, but – and that's the biggest problem for me – it does not feel like a native Mac application. Take a look at Mail, Safari, Pages or any other behaving Mac application and compare it to OOo, which definitely does not look like a Mac program.

I hope this problem will be solved by this bold initiative. I, for one, am looking forward to the results of the usability and other tests. Good luck and please do keep posting updates.

Posted by Harm Hilvers on December 01, 2008 at 10:21 PM CET #

Sven said:

Office 2007 team has posted nice videos about backgrounds of their decision-making.

For instance, they rejected the idea of big vertical toolbar, because that way it would have been far too easy to add "just one more" button and make whole scrollable etc. thing too big for one screen.

That is why ribbon was born, because it forces to think of the UI layout really seriously. And it is quite enjoyable, to be honest.

Posted by Sven on December 02, 2008 at 03:10 PM CET #

Thomas said:

I think this is the right approach to do this. There was an usability test in the German c't magazine of OpenOffice.org 3 and MS Office 2007. Neither OpenOffice nor MS Office did well in this usability test

http://www.heise.de/ct/08/22/136/ (German).

Posted by Thomas on December 02, 2008 at 03:58 PM CET #

Alexandro Colorado said:

Awesome, lets fix Media, embrace the web and look awesome.

Lets get artists on the iconset. Lets make themes for OOo.

Posted by Alexandro Colorado on December 03, 2008 at 10:18 AM CET #

Benjamin Schindler said:

This is great news. I just wanted to complete the survey, but I found it to be really badly designed (sorry for the punt). I.e. there is a question: How well does OO Writer fit your needs. But the answers available are the answer to the question: "Do you exclusively use OO Writer?". You don't give me the possibility to say: Well, I dislike X,Y,Z, but because there is nothing better, I use it exclusively...

Second... I would love the UI System to be overwhauled. I find it extremely slow. My machine has a athlon64 3000+ and it really doesn't feel snappy at all. And heck, I can run office 2007 smooth on that one, so OO should too. (And UI-Speed wasn't one of the things on the list of possible improvements in the questionnary...)
See what mozilla has done to firefox and thunderbird. It isn't top-speed, but it definatelly feels snappy and this is - I find - really important

Posted by Benjamin Schindler on December 03, 2008 at 02:34 PM CET #

Mazur said:

This looks great, but I think that OOo should move to qt, it will increase the speed.

Posted by Mazur on December 03, 2008 at 07:06 PM CET #

Johannes said:

Finally! The OOo UI overhaul should have happened years ago... I wonder if it's too late or not. Even with its actual prehistoric UI, OOo 3.0 is slow as hell, I wonder how slow they can make it by making a new UI.

By the way - Microsoft HAS usability studies, not officially but at least partly public. Why not use them instead of reinventing the wheel re-making usability studies?

Let's hope they won't be as incapable with the new UI as with the last splash screen:
http://www.johannes-eva.net/index.php?page=ooo_splash

And if you don't know Red Office, which has a great genuine UI design:
http://www.johannes-eva.net/index.php?page=redoffice

All the best to Sun and OOo!

Posted by Johannes on December 04, 2008 at 04:26 AM CET #

JM Maranan said:

Finally! UI overhaul must be! or on the dark side OOo will become!

Yeah OO needs a new GUI that should be something more elegant and usable..

How about performance and snappiness?

Consistent layout? or perspectives like that on Eclipse? (Boo to this one I guess)

Speed please?!

Posted by JM Maranan on December 04, 2008 at 02:45 PM CET #

abc said:

I think OOo should move to a normal toolkit for programming it's UI: Qt or Gtk are there and can do a good job.

This way the OOo programmers don't have to worry about the native "look" anymore. (OOo seems to be "out of place" in modern Windows versions, but also in Linux/KDE4. Qt apps integrate much better.)

Okay, OOo programmers would still have to worry about the native "feel", but that's yet a bit less work...

Posted by abc on December 07, 2008 at 03:05 PM CET #

vincent dagousset said:

The Qt license is the GNU GPL v3 and the OOo license is the GNU LGPL v3. They aren't compatible.

Posted by vincent dagousset on December 07, 2008 at 07:02 PM CET #

Someone said:

Personally, I love OOo's UI.

Posted by 69.209.56.33 on December 08, 2008 at 03:17 AM CET #

Mardus said:

The Ribbon interface of MSO2007 actually was disliked by the people who were used to the current 'standard' user interface, because they had to (and some still have to) retrain their habits to MSO2007 after migrating. That is why some people also like the current UI, since it's historically consistent, so I would like OOo not to repeat the mistakes of WordStar and WordPerfect back in their days when they decided to drastically change the UI (WordPerfect also had its own issues with Windows). Already some bits in Mozilla Firefox 3 are different to what I grew accustomed to when using Mozilla Firefox 1.x–2.0, especially when it comes to keyboard short-cuts.

OTOH, skinnability is not always a bad idea... StarOffice had it and I think OOo 1.x did, too, in order to look more native on various platforms. Maybe just re-adjusting the UI to adapt to window managers' colours at first?

I guess the new UI will be introduced probably around the time OOo 4.0 comes around... As far as I know, people are currently busy refactoring the components and other back-end stuff, the way I understand it, for better modularisation (so that it would be easier for other projects to adopt and come along) and then trying to get new versions of ODF standardised.

Posted by Mardus on December 24, 2008 at 05:09 PM CET #