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 

tags: renaissance user-experience

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 :-)

tags: renaissance user-experience

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

tags: impress renaissance user-experience

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

tags: renaissance user-experience

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,

tags: renaissance user-experience

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

tags: impress renaissance user-experience

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

tags: ooocon oooocon2009 renaissance user-experience

Thinning out process for the existing OOo user interface has started. Focus for OOo 3.3 will be on Impress. Please find the October status update presentation for Project Renaissance at the OOo Wiki (1 MB).

Feedback welcome.

Best regards,

tags: renaissance user-experience

The OpenOffice.org conference will start in a few days. Two cappuccino and one espresso, per favore :-)

The OOo User Experience Team will give two presentations and two workshops:

Wednesday: (11-04)

• 12:15 PM: Project Renaissance - Designing a new user interface for OpenOffice.org; Building; Palazzo dei Sette; Room: Sette 3; (Andreas Bartel, Frank Loehmann)

Thursday:  (11-05)

• 11:15 AM: Getting usagetracking data, technical and security aspects and a look in the future how to provide the data; Building: Palazzo dei Sette; Room: Sette 1; (Frank Mau, Frank Loehmann)
• 04:15 PM: UX Workshop I - The role and the methods of user experience in product design
  Building: Palazzo dei Sette, Room: Sette 1 (Andreas Bartel)
  
• 05:15 PM: Workshop II - User Experience Done "Live" Based on Expertise and Usage Data
  Building: Palazzo dei Sette, Room: Sette 1 (Christoph Noack, Frank Loehmann)
  

We are calling for topics for the second UX workshop. So everybody who wants to attend please give us input what you want us to discuss at the workshop. Up till now, nobody officially responded to our annoucement earlier this week.

We'll see us at the OpenOffice.org conference.

Best regards,

OpenOffice.org User Experience Team

tags: ooocon2009 renaissance user-experience

Project Renaissance has created a special spreadsheet with the Impress User Feedback Data.

This spreadsheet is easier to use than the full version (no filtering needed) and will be used for the thinning out process of the Impress user interface.

The spreadsheet provides data for:

• Shortcuts
• Menu Entries
• Toolbars
  
• and new: A list of not called events

• Undo
• Text
• Position and Size dialog
  

Best regards,

The Renaissance Team

tags: renaissance user-experience