The Project Renaissance goal is "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."

After gathering data from several user surveys to get to know our users, the next big step toward a new user interface was our call for UI Design proposals which has now been concluded. The topic was Accessing Functionality in Impress, where we focused on the improvement or even replacement of menus. We chose this OOo application as the starting place and "playground" for the proposal writers, but the UI design concepts should be able to be applied to all OOo applications.

The interest and enthusiasm in the call for proposals is record-breaking. The wiki page with the list of proposals has been accessed nearly 80,000 times!

After five weeks of design work and review, we can also provide other impressive numbers.
All in all, 17 proposals were submitted and reviewed by our brilliant and creative community members. Please note that "creative" refers to information architecture--- graphics design is outside our current focus.
They contain a total of 145 user interface design mockups. (Wow!)
There were 80 comments or questions added by OOo-community reviewers.

From the many designs that were submitted, I've copied just a few of the mockups here in hopes of putting wings on your imagination (English translation of a cute German idiom) and to make this blog more colorful. These are not implementations, they are design ideas so don't get all nervous or excited. Just feel the creative vibes!

Special Note: To quickly view more mockups, see slides 21-34 in the status presentation that was held in May.

.

And don't stop scrolling now, here come more!

...and one more just for the fun of it:

What's Next?

The Renaissance team is determining which ideas (note: mixing and matching will happen here!) appear to implement the design directives* most successfully. Those that do will be used to create a handful of (wire frame) prototypes. Some testing of initial wire frames on unsuspecting "guinea pigs" has already begun. ;-) Later, the concepts the Renaissance team is working on will be the basis for mid-fidelity prototypes that will be validated in tests: We need to confirm that the UI changes will be real improvements and will be well-accepted before we roll them out to our whole user base.

The team will publish further information as they go, so stay tuned! The excitement isn't over yet.

Thanks again to everyone who participated and made the proposal phase extraordinary in the true sense of the word.

* For design directives see slides 18 and 19 in status presentation