OpenOffice.org Help TNT: Tips'n'Tricks that somehow didn't make it to the help (yet).

As you might already know, OpenOffice.org runs a user feedback program, aka improvement program, to collect data about the normal user's use of the OOo software. This is an opt-in program, and the user is asked if he wants to take part in the program the second time he starts his new installed OOo.

On the User Experience web page for the User Feedback Program (1), we can now see some more results of how many users open the installed Help and how they do this (2).

This is quite exciting, as it is the first time Help authors get some feedback "with the users' feet". We see how many users open the Help menu, or in which dialog boxes they click the Help button most often.

However, it is not easy to interpret the big Calc document with all the results (3). Mouse click events are named by developers who never thought about using names that can make sense to the public. The menus and dialogs are named to conform to internal code dependencies, not to fit the visible user interface. I do not claim to understand most of the results, so take the following data just as my first approach to interpret what the data might possibly mean. All numbers are to be interpreted as relative to each other. The sheets are ordered by COUNT, so the events with the most counts of user interaction are at the top. Searching the sheets for "help" returns the following list of observations:

Observations in Writer

Total use of "Save" (by menu, toolbar, or keyboard) is about 2.5 million times in the data, so we possibly see data for about 2 million documents (given that some users only save once, and some save often).

The main Writer Help window gets quite many click events, about 1 million times. That can mean that users love to browse and read the installed Help pages, or it can mean they click often and still find nothing of use to them.

The Index tab page of Help Viewer gets clicked about 50,000 times.

The Find tab page counts about 16,500 clicks, and the Contents tab page gets 4,500 clicks.

So the average user clicks inside the Help pages about ten to twelve times before he leaves the Help Viewer. Too bad we don't have a feedback whether the average user is now happy or sad.

The Writer dialog boxes where the Help button was called most often:

1. Word Count
2. Print
3. FontWork
4. Options
5. Spellcheck
6. Find & Replace
7. ASCII Filter Options
8. Special Characters
9. Extension Update
10. Printer Setup

From a user experience point of view, it would be a good idea to minimize the use of Help.

So the Word Count dialog should get improved by some text that explains what counts as a word, for example. I guess that information is missing, and users therefore have to click the Help button. Unfortunately, that information is also missing in the Help page. So this is the first thing to improve!

Observations in Calc

For Calc, we see about 1.8 million "Save" operations, so let's say data is for about 1.5 million spreadsheets. The Calc Help was called about half as often as the Writer Help.

The Calc dialog boxes where the Help button was called most often:

1. Function Wizard
2. Delete Contents
3. Find & Replace
4. Print
5. Format>Cells>Numbers dialog
6. Options
7. Rename Sheet
8. Conditional Formatting

Observations in Impress/Draw

The Impress and Draw Help were each called about one tenth as often as the Calc Help. Either these applications are very intuitive to use, or users really do not expect to get some Help here.

The Impress dialog boxes where the Help button was called most often:

1. Presentation Wizard
2. FontWork
3. Slide Design
4. Slide Show

The Draw dialog boxes where the Help button was called most often:

1. FontWork
2. Format>Text (for text in a text box)
3. Format>Line
4. Options

With these data, Help authors now know where improvements of the Help system are most effective and might be most wanted.

(1): http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/OpenOffice.org_User_Feedback_Program

(2): http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Tracking_results

(3): http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Image:OOo31_Usage_Feedback_Data.ods

You certainly have a name. Tell your software about your name, and your software will know it's you who is sitting there, writing a letter.

The benefits of having a name

OpenOffice.org offers multiple benefits for those users who enter their name:

• your name will be known by the spell checker, even for Rumpelstiltskin

• your name will be inserted as sender in form letters and on envelopes

• your name will be inserted as “author” in your Writer documents

When your name is inserted as an author in your text documents, then your text documents will always be opened with the same view where you did save them.

When you saved the document with the cursor on top of page 23, the next time you open the document the cursor will at that position again. When another person with another name opens the same document, the document shows the top of the first page by default.

To enter your name and other personal data

• Choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - User data.

To remove your author name from the current document

If you don't want your name to be inserted as the author of the current document, remove the user information:

1. Choose File - Properties. Click the General tab.

2. Uncheck “Apply user data” and click Reset. Click OK.

3. Save the document.