Hi Everybody,

I've just had this wonderful experience at an Open Solaris User's Group that I have to share with you.

You may not know it, but I am in Connecticut, USA, right now, although I'm usually in Hamburg. Since this is a rare opportunity, Ken Baer from Sun asked me to speak on "OOo in the Enterprise" on July 1 at the meeting of the OSUG he organized here in Hartford. I said "sure I will!" without hesitation because, as anyone who has ever been in the same room or on the phone with me will agree, I love to talk ;-) and I love OpenOffice.org!

Well I am glad I went, because not only were most of the people there really interesting and interested, but the venue was one of a kind: The Hartford Club. (Since it is so spiffy, I even wore high-heels! Now I shocked you, huh. :-) ) Unfortunately my photos all came out poorly because it was rather dark, but suffice it to say that I felt perfect in high-heels and "kleine Schwarze" (little black dress) as they say in German. Some guys commented that my dress added class to the event, seeing as they were in "business casual". But honestly, I had so many important things to communicate about OOo, who was looking at my dress?

There were 25 people attending. Only 5 of them had ever used OOo. (Can you believe it!?) I told them all about OpenOffice.org and StarOffice as compared to MSO (as much as can be done in 15 minutes) and talked about the open source community, open source in general, open standards. I had very few slides, really. I just had a conversation with the guys. They asked me questions and I asked them questions. It was fun and after my short, candid, informative, mildly humorous and enthusiastic talk (if I might say so myself :-) ) people came up to me to ask for additional handouts to take to their bosses, ask for more info on what other products can be used to create an open source stack to replace MS products (Of course I said Thunderbird, Firefox and co.), my experience with different platforms and version, etc.

Speaking of different platforms, a big WOW errupted in the room when, at the very end of my presentation, I pointed out that I had started preparing my presentation on StarOffice 9 on my Solaris Sun Ray, then finished it on a Windows Vista using OpenOffice.org 3.1, then took it on a USB stick to the venue and asked the friendly Sun guy, Dave Donmoyer, who was presenting ahead of me to let me present on his Mac using NeoOffice (sorry I forgot which version). I used the odp file with absolutely no glitches. Not once did I convert it to a different file format. I'm telling you, the whole audience was VERY impressed. My last comment was "Try doing that with MSOffice" in a tongue in cheek sort of way.Oh that felt good.

Then we adjourned to the lounge and billiard room. (!) Since my pics didn't come out very well, please see the Observatory blog where Brian Leonard, who I met at the OSUG, posted about a previous event.

tags: enterprise user-experience

It's been two weeks of prototyping now and we have already achieved great progress regarding the fidelity level of the prototypes and have gained many insights that we would have missed otherwise if we would solely rely on static low-fidelity prototypes.

Currently we are trying to figure out what might be a promising metaphor for organizing functionality and making it available to the users. There are a couple of basic constraints that limit our possibilities at hand. We still move around on a 2D surface, for instance. So, we only have two dimensions to organize tons of icons and buttons that give access to the features we have in Impress. In addition, the 2D screen real estate is also limited. The consequences of these constraints can be nicely demonstrated if you switch on all available toolbars and panes in any of the applications we have in OpenOffice.org.

What to do? We need to pretend that we have either more dimensions or more space. One way to simulate a multidimensional environment is to use tabbed navigation. Tabs give us the ability to implicitly squeeze a few dimensions onto a 2D surface by revealing one 2D tab at a time. This concept or metaphor was and still is frequently used in the web. Another way would be to implicitly increase the screen real estate, along the horizontal dimension for instance, and visually focus on those regions that offer functionality that is currently required.

However, since we decided to keep some sort of a menu in the new UI, it is quite a challenge to integrate both into one coherent concept. There is actually an inherent problem that comes along. Having a menu and having additional hierarchical global navigation elements increases the number of choice and adds to visual clutter (See my previous blog about MSO 2008 for Mac). Any user would have to decide where to look for functionality, is it is the menu or is it somewhere else. To solve that issue we need a design strategy that combines the best things of both worlds e.g. if a user wants to explore the abilities of OOo or needs to use advanced features, she will find any of these in the menu. However, the menu should never be the default way of using basic functionality. Therefore, we need to design an efficient way for accomplishing all basic, less advanced tasks without the menu. In addition, this should be as obvious as possible to the users in order to foster learning and to quickly increase familiarity.

These considerations lead us to the prototypes you can currently try out here. A few of those were already deprecated since they did lead to confusion at different screen resolutions. We are still working on basic navigation concepts, so most of the details are not fixed now. This is actually what comes next. The questions we will need to answer soon are 1. How do we label? And 2. How do we group?

So, stay tuned, check out the progress of the prototypes and give feedback.

Best,
Andreas

tags: renaissance user-experience

The user feedback program is still running and provides tons of data about what features are being used by our users in real live. This usage data will be used within Project Renaissance.

The spreadsheet with a summary of this data has been updated this week and now covers Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and a summary over all applications.

Best regards

tags: renaissance user-experience

Project Renaissance has entered the prototyping phase this week.

The phase will take six weeks. Andre Fischer and Bernd Eilers have joined the Renaissance team for this time to develop the prototypes. We have started to build a Java based prototyping framework this week.

The prototypes will be made available through the prototyping home page as soon as they become available. So stay tuned!

Best regards

Frank

tags: renaissance user-experience

I just need to share this one. Playing around with MS Word 2008 on my Macbook, I made a wonderful discovery. In case you’re familiar with the Ribbon UI of MS Office 2007 and in case you’ve always been wondering how the Mac version of Office 2007 turned out to be a bit, well weird, then here are some news for you. You can actually revive the toolbar concept in MS Word 2008 for Mac! Let’s have a look.

And this is how it looks if you switch the toolbars on, add some side-panes and open the “ribbon-like” catalog.

Great, isn’t it! From a UX perspective it’s just wonderful! It’s wonderful because its message clearly states “Hey, don’t do this at home!”.  Looking at this mess, everyone understands that mixing all interaction metaphors and paradigms in one single UI is certainly a very, very bad idea!

Cheers,

Andreas

tags: user-experience

tags: impress renaissance user-experience

The design phase for the new OOo UI has been started! Please find the May project status update for Project Renaissance at the OOo Wiki in PDF format (1.8MB).

Best regards,

Frank

tags: renaissance user-experience

So, the collection of design proposals and their refinement is over. Thanks to everyone who has participated and spent nights to finish either in time or a bit later. Liz will post a detailed summary about that part of the current phase later this week. With this post, I'd like to share my experience with using some ideation methods I learned in Berlin for UI brainstorming, and to give a short preview of what is about to happen in the Renaissance Project and for what reason.

But first, let’s check what we have planned and what was in the project road map. Here is how phase two of project Renaissance was initially set up:

1.    Incorporate research data
    a.    Analyze quantitative/qualitative data to understand usage/users
    b.    Create personas based on the analysis
2.    Focus on the personas' characteristics
    a.    Create scenarios for key functionalities
    b.    Define information architecture from the scenarios
    c.    Flow charts
3.    Generate design ideas using the scenarios
    a.    Paper prototypes
    b.    Clickable slides
    c.    Dynamic prototypes

I am still convinced that our initial plan was quite well elaborated and promising. However, looking at that now I must admit that we were not able to achieve many of the tasks that are listed here. In retrospective, we jumped right from 1a to 3b, which is of course possible but it makes many other design activities a lot harder at a later stage. Due to time and resources constraints, we spent only little time on understanding our quantitative data and almost no time on qualitative research. As a consequence, we were only partially able to generate findings that support design decisions. But still, please don’t get me wrong, what we got from our research is a lot more and better than relying on pure subjective assumptions. And that is a good thing and a good start.

However, usually you would want to start with a redesign strategy that defines your redesign scope and therefore guides any of your design research activities such as what research questions you’d like to have answers to. I would say that we were quite good at this part. But as stated above, we were not able to answer a few of our important research questions such as “What is important to our users and what are their goals?”, “How do they feel using our product?” or “How would they like to feel using it?”.  In practice, these are important insights that guide your design work and decisions. Insufficient answers to these questions make evaluation of designs a lot harder. That is actually related to our upcoming activities.

So, what is the objective of ideation?  As described in one of my earlier blog posts, ideation helps to generate a lot of unconstrained design ideas. By a lot I mean masses, as many as possible. This process is all about the quantity of ideas, not the quality or richness in detail.  Quantity is important since you never know where a bright idea might show up.  So, learn to embrace the diversity. When you think that you have enough crazy ideas, start getting some order. Sort them, check for overlapping ideas, define groups and label them. In sum, put similar things together and give them a name. Then take your design principles that you’ve defined with the help of your research findings, and start refining all the crazy ideas accordingly. At the end, you should have a nice set of designs that you want to see in action in order to verify them with real users. That is basically where we’re heading next, refinement and prototyping.

To check how that approach works in our context and what we can actually get out of it, I did a small ideation “experiment” for the last two weeks. The first week I spent on drawing sketches like a maniac by myself. However, through our proposal collection phase, I was too restricted in my head. It is actually hard to let things go to which one is so used to. Last week, we repeated the ideation method with a couple of colleagues with various backgrounds. We had Dev, QA, Tooling, and UX onboard. In two groups, we started brainstorming about how we would want the ideal Impress to be. For three minutes, everyone wrote adjectives attributed to the “imaginary” Impress on sticky notes and then we put them on the wall, and started sorting and organizing them.

Amazingly a lot of the adjectives overlapped. At the end, we were able to define two main groups that had a lot more adjectives than others. The first group could be described as the one concerned with usability while the second group was all about positive experiences, emotions and aesthetics of the product. That happed in both groups by the way. In sum, everyone in Dev, QA, Tooling, and UX wanted the future Impress to be easy to use and “pretty”! These are quite basic needs, aren’t they? And all from people with totally different backgrounds.

As an exercise, we took these adjectives as design principles, without any other constraints, and spent another 5 to 10 minutes sketching UI ideas on paper. Wow, you would not believe what crazy things appeared! But it was great overall, we had generated quite a few designs and almost each of them had at least one tiny idea that was actually worth taking a closer look. Then we evaluated our performance according to our defined design principles. Well, we succeeded in some ways and concluded that it is quite hard to sketch design ideas under time pressure while trying to stick to only two design principles 1. Easy to use 2. Aesthetically attractive. In any way, it was great fun for all who participated and I personally conclude that such ideation methods are perfect to get people’s creativity out of their heads and on paper!

But back to the question what is next in the Renaissance Project. We will consider everything that we currently have in the Wiki, on paper and anywhere else. We will put out our design goals and principles, write them on walls in huge letters and get everyone to think about what we have and how it can be reshaped by the goals and principles. Everything that can be sorted out by sketching and pixel setting will probably not make it into the prototyping phase. However, all those things/ideas/concepts etc. that seem interesting, maybe unclear or even controversial will be prototyped and shared with the audience (common, unbiased users) to get verified. I guess that it is self evident that the whole process will be transparent and well documented, as everything else that we have been doing in the Renaissance project so far. The ultimate goal of all next activities is to finally come up with a design concept that is well tested with users and is modular enough to be realized iteratively since this is how OpenOffice.org is developed.

Well, that was a long speech. I might even have beaten Christoph Noack ;-) I hope you have a better picture now of what User Experience is about, which methods are important and how we work in the Renaissance Project.

Best,
Andreas

tags: user-experience

The data collected by the current OOo User Survey 2009 has been published at the OOo wiki. The data is based on more than 125K submissions by our users within the last three months.

Unfortunately the questions are in German due to a limitation of the survey tooling (we have started this new survey with the 'wrong' language this time;-). Please use the key of a question to grab for the English text shown on the right side inside the spreadsheet. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Helen Yue from IBM has replaced the German texts with the English ones! Thanks to Helen for contributing!

Best Regards,

Frank

tags: renaissance user-experience

Project Renaissance is in full swing. 

As of this very minute, the call for UI design proposals wiki page has been accessed 70,332  times. The count goes up every second! Until the morning of May 11th, the day of the proposal submission deadline, there were only a couple thousand hits on this page. What a difference!

If you haven't already, you might want to leave a comment or question for one or more of the proposal writers. There are 16 proposals to inspect and question.

All members of the OOo community can write in the respective wiki pages (see space for comments at the bottom). You have until May 25 to do so, preferably sooner so the authors answer your questions by May 25, too. That is the deadline for the revision phase.

BTW: A very big THANK YOU to all the proposal writers for your hard work. There are truly impressive designs there.

Liz

p.s. Now the page has been accessed 70,342 times. I'd better post this message quick or it'll be out of date ;-)

tags: impress renaissance user-experience