Hey all, One thing that I've noticed is that we have a lot of great redesign proposals floating around, but we have yet to establish a true direction for the Libre Office platform. Someone recently posted this video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4 ) which really made me realize the importance of having specific long-term goals for software design. Therefore, I wanted to propose a few simple goals that I think LibreOffice ought to have for its design as we move forward (maybe even for the 4.0 release) as well as the basic tenets that I think we can use to help achieve these goals. So, here we go:
*The Goals:* - *Make LibreOffice easy to use while retaining its power.* This is by far one of the biggest complaints I have when I suggest that my clients use LibreOffice - they don't understand where things are in the menu/toolbar hierarchy. The best example of this is page margins. The easiest way for a lot of my customers to find this is through the right-click menu. - *Lead current trends in technology, don't just follow.* LibreOffice retains a layout that was first commercially phased out about four years ago. While the Menu/Toolbar paradigm is an excellent way of displaying program features for less fully-featured software and smaller screens, but let's face it - most desktop screens are no longer small and LibreOffice is extremely full-featured. Instead of copying another office suite, let's pave the way for others to build on. - *Help people to be more efficient.* This is really important if we want to get LibreOffice used in more businesses and schools, and is ultimately the best way to get any piece of software adopted. *The Tenets:* - *Allow users to focus on the content, not the UI.* The document viewport should never change size or lose/gain visibility due to pop-up dialogs or toolbars. The only exception to this is menus, as users expect these to overlap their document. One major subset of this should be live previews. For instance, you have to click through Headings 1-10 individually to see what the differences are. - *Everything should be accessible within 3 clicks, not just the 'most common' features.* This will help reduce the clutter while increasing users' mastery of the software. - *Consistent UI areas (not features) across all individual 'apps'.* Keep the UI as consistent as possible without sacrificing the features/functionality of any individual app (Calc, Writer, etc.). - *Value context over comprehensiveness.* Users don't need to have table tools up and at the ready when they only have text in the body of a document selected. Let me know what you think of these and, in particular, how you would change/expand on these. This is just a very very rough draft (and very well could be repeating itself or incomplete) of things that I see , but ultimately LibreOffice isn't any one man's software, but rather everyone's, so I invite everyone to put some thought into this and please reply to this so we can come up with a general UX direction for this incredible project! Scott P.S. Sorry for the re-post - I sent this just before the list changed addresses, so I'm re-posting it with the new one! -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+h...@global.libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted