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

tags: community 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

The Renaissance Project has started the announced thinning out process of the Impress user interface.

The goal of this process is to improve the most common interactions for Impress 3.3. This process is based on data from the User Feedback Program, customer interviews, surveys and usability issues.

The following visualization of the most clicked icons on toolbars of Impress 3.1 is a good point to start this process. A larger version of this click map can be found on the User Feedback Program home page.

More details, visualizations and reports will follow soon. 

Best regards,

The Project Renaissance Team

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 is used within Project Renaissance.

The updated version from October now consists of five times more samples than the last version.  The spreadsheet provides separated data for Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and a summary for all applications.

A visualization of this data for the Impress user interface and additional reports will follow later this week.

Best regards

tags: renaissance user-experience

Those of you who tested the Renaissance prototypes may have also responded to the survey that popped up afterwards. All in all, there were 1596 complete responses. (There were approx 1800, but the others were not complete) Thanks to Frank's hard work, the results have been compiled, evaluated and presented in a Calc file, however, omitting the comments from the text boxes which sometimes contained personal information that cannot legally be made public. (This has proven to be a continual problem with text boxes, so we are hoping to avoid this dilemma in future surveys by coming up with a solution that will comply with European data privacy laws and let us present all the data). The results in the Calc file be viewed on the Renaissance wiki.

Here are the results from three of the statements in the survey. Just to make you curious to see more ;-)

53% answered that they agree or agree totally that the current version of OpenOffice.org need a UI redesign. 32% answered that they disagree or disagree totally. This tendency supports the idea of project Renaissance.

66% responded that they agree or agree totally with this statement about the prototypes, whereas only 14% said they disagree or disagree totally. That means, that in these early stages of the project, conformity with user expectations is pretty good. From the comments (see Calc file), the live previews for formatting changes seem to have been especially well received.

Aside from the "Neutral" responses, the "Agrees" vs "Disagrees" are about equal. That shows that the prototypes don't yet have a polished UI (which was never in scope for the prototypes up till now) and that there are still too many clicks necessary to complete tasks.

The fact that there are still too many clicks is okay, because this was to be expected. We had planned to address exactly that by way of the OOo Improvement program data. Frank Loehmann has begun to analyze this user feedback data under the aspect of performing the most common tasks and will report on his findings when they are ready. The idea is to figure out how to reduce the number of mouse clicks or keyboard actions on the way to completing a task in the OpenOffice.org office suite. Stay tuned!

Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey. We really appreciate the feedback. Please continue to support our step by step effort to reach an improved UI.

The Renaissance Team

tags: renaissance survey user-experience

Since we have been rather silent lately, some might think that not much is happening in the project anymore. Therefore I would like to give all those who are interested a short update about what else, besides prototyping, keeps us busy.

In addition to going through gazillions of feedback regarding the prototypes on different channels, thinking and discussing further UX engineering initiatives, analyzing the data collected using a new, office productivity specific version of the IsoMetrics usability questionnaire, there are two university projects that we give advice to in parallel.

A study project team at the University of Osnabrueck, Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, has been working in the context of Project Renaissance since April 2009. This spring semester, the students were busy with getting into the basics of UX engineering from a theoretical and a practical perspective. Their goal for the first half of the project was to design alternative solutions of how to handle charts in OpenOffice.org Impress.

In July, the team under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kai-Uwe Hamborg visited us in Hamburg and the students were given the opportunity to present their redesign ideas to the UX team and the whole Imress team. We had a great discussion about current usability problems and how the designs proposed by the students might resolve the issues. For further details, please visit the project’s Wiki page. In the coming winter term, the students will be busy conducting a usability study in order to validate the designs. We will keep you updated about their progress.

The second project was also initiated this spring with the support of Prof. Hamborg who is by the way one of the creators of the IsoMetrcs usability questionnaire. Our goal was to collect detailed information about the usage of office productivity applications in a university context. An intern of the Department of Work and Organizational Psychology conducted interviews to collect information regarding the tasks the students use office tools for. The task inventory was then used as input for a survey. This survey was conducted in several universities using the freely available LimeSurvey software which is also used by several OpenOffice.org teams. Data collection was just finished, so for now no detailed information is available. They only data that is available at the moment is that over a thousand students participated in the study, OpenOffice.org seems to not to be the leading (by numbers) office productivity tool in university context and Linux, as an operating systems, seems to be ahead of Apple Mac. A detailed analysis is what follows and as soon as the data has been processed, results will be posted here or in the Wiki of Project Renaissance.

The results of the cooperation directly support Project Renaissance. The data from the user feedback program gives us a clue about frequently used commands but with little task context, whereas detailed information from the task inventory survey will help us to map usage frequency on tasks. In addition, the study project might give us the opportunity to validate a few specific design solutions (e.g. sidepanes) with users. However, this is up to the study project team.

Best,

Andreas

tags: impress renaissance user-experience

The prototype phase didn't end on July 4 after as originally planned. It is still going strong and eliciting a great deal of enthusiasm and feedback. In this blog post we want to provide answers to some of the negative comments we've received. Of course we have been thrilled by all the positive comments, too, but the nay-sayers have been vocal, so we need to be vocal, too.

Some of the negative comments posted after in our July status update post were:

a) Oh no! Not like Microsoft!
b) My monitor gets wider not higher (horizontal vs. vertical UI)
c) Do not copy ribbons. Innovate do not imitate!
d) Why are you killing menus?
e) I/Everyone hate/s 'ribbons'!
f) Make it optional. Keep classic interface as an option.
g) 'Ribbons' are only for beginners/newbies.
h) Professionals (like me) are distracted by the new interface/'ribbons' because I/they already know were to find the desired functionality.
i) It is so ugly!

Before providing answers, we want to remind everyone of our goals and a tidbit about doing such development work in public.

Our mission:
“Create a User Interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users' choice not only out of need but also out of desire”

and our project 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."

Please trust us that we will not implement anything that has not been tested and validated in real-life situations.

Working in the "open" can be tough. It seems that everyone under the sun already knows what we should do. Regardless of what we present we will always get at least one comment saying our idea is wrong/stupid (See a, c, e). The team always has to keep in mind that many comments are not from average users of OOo. The UX team has to weigh all comments carefully. Presenting a mid-fidelity prototype means risking that people do not understand the purpose and think the next product will look like this (i).

We also created a survey, that shows up when the prototype gets closed. (This requires Java 6 installed, because the system's web browser is called). The survey has more questions now since last Friday. New Prototype, new survey. ;-) The results of the survey are different from the negative comments on GullFoss. We think because those users who fill out the survey give the prototype a test drive at least for a moment. But who reads our blogs and tries the prototype? The average OOo user? No! So only real live testing can show us if a new UI is suiteable.

Developing a user interface (UI) for office sorftware is not an easy job, because this software is used by unique users with all skill levels and a huge range of tasks. Nobody wants to be a beginner, at least not for long :-) , so we have to focus on intermediate users while not distracting expert users.

When you analyse office documents, you see that most users only use a very basic set of features out of what OOo offers. So it seems that we are already done, because OOo could do so much more. Really? But why do those office documents look so basic even if they are made by experienced users? We only know a few people who are good in techniques and design at the same level. So users should concentrate on what they are the experts in: the document content, and not have to design/define/layout each and everything inside their document on their own.

Most expert users stated that they already know where to find the fucntionality (h) and that no new UI is needed, so that only beginners (g) would take any advantage of a new UI. We want to provide rich formated document pieces like tables, header, footer, indexes, etc. in galleries, so that the user can easily choose from professionally designed ones. This allows all users to create powerful and beautiful documents.We need some kind of new UI to offer those galleries.

This new UI needs a home. So the question was where to place it. The reading direction in western countries is from top left to bottom right and users are used to finding the interface on top of the document area. Furthermore the height available for a bar on, e.g. the left side, is too low for the amount of functions, especially on small displays like netbooks. Also we did not want to spread the functionality all around the application. So the team decided to go with a horizontal on top even if monitors are getting wider (b) these days. Most users use the software as it is out of the box, so we have to focus on a good default. But  there is nothting to say that the user can't configure it to fit their specific screen or work needs. It is a clear requirement that the new UI must support a minimized visualisation (fold open or change to float) and it should support a vertical visualization in a second step. Configuration possibilities could be added in future versions.

Our prototype did not kill the menus (d). They are still there! Even the new prototype, which is in the making, will keep at least the same structure (File, Edit, View, Insert, Format...) users are used to these days, but it will provide new graphical possibilites where we need it to provide rich formatted document pieces. The next prototype will also implement a context-sensitive interface approach.

tags: impress renaissance user-experience