Hi Enrique,
Enrique wrote:
Dear Mathias, the point is not how much work have been involved in getting this again, but the effort wasted in a silly usability test,
Not sure how that came up. What 'silly usability test' are you referring to?
time wasted in making up the decision and writing a specs document to remove that functionality from the quickstarter.
If you look at the spec, noone wrote a spec 'to remove that functionality'. The spec was about defining facilities to lauch OOo from the various desktop environments in a consistent fashion and consistent with the rules and style guides for these environments. I don't think doing that is a waste of time.
If NO designer were had thinked about touching a single line of code here, what a saving of developer time!
Looking at the issues and the spec that are concerned with this, it may still be a good idea to change this in the next release. Instead of duplicating what already is in the start menu (launchers to launch all our applications with an empty document) it would be better to have a small targeted selection here. One proposal I've seen is to lauch a file-open dialog from there. Apparently the necessary interface in the application core couldn't be completed for OOo 2.0, so that idea couldn't be realized either.
Casually, I was readig issue 39486 before reading this.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=39486
There you have another example of existing functionality that is wasted due to deeply wrong and biased usability scenario.
The strange usability scenarios may have played a minor role in the things that happened with that specification. But in the first place this is something where there was a real usability problem. If I get a document from someone else (e.g. by mail) it should not open at a seemingly random place in the middle. This may utterly confuse less experienced users. So changing something here was indeed necessary. But the initial ideas to solve this with 'smart' automatisms were (luckily) recognized as flawed in time, so a simpler solution was sought. This is all well so far. But then under time pressure the remaining feature was further 'reduced' in a way that some functionality was lost entirely. This was the place where noone noticed that doing only the final remaining step alone made no sense. But again starting that work was necessary. Only the execution was lacking.
And there are some more expamples. I agree that many real improvements too of course!!. But why to drop out good and working functions? This is what I do not understand. I hope that the designers could realize that there's something that has gone very wrong in the process of designing specs for 2.0.
Noone started with the intention to 'drop out good and working functions'. And considering the amount of work that has gone into OOo 2.0 and the scarcity of resources that necessitated a constant replanning of what would be doable for this release it is not surprising that some details in few of the specifications went awry.
OTOH we recognize that the spec design process and quality control needs to be improved and I believe there is ongoing work to put this into place for the specs for the next release.
When I read the Q document I do not see it implies all that silly changes. If we would want to work with a clone of MS-Office, we were working with the real MS-office. Many of us like OOo *because* it is different from MS-Office: more profesional, cleaner interface, easier to do the normal things (not the absolute beginner things).
Noone says we want to clone MSO. But we do want to be more usable and we do want to lower the learning curve for new OOo users - both completely new users and former users of competing programs. Of course we should try not to sacrifice our unique advantages for this.
I remember a citation (don't know fron whom): do not argue with an idiot, perhaps sideviewer do not realize which is the idiot. If OOo ends up being designed to the root for the absolute beginner users, we may upset and lost the regular people. Again, not a rant against some user people, simply that the usability scenarios I have read supporting these decisions are completely absurd, imaginary and non-existent in real world.
I don't think that this is the case in general. But it is true that there are specs of varying quality. In some cases there were mistakes, because the author's English is not good enough.
BTW: Last I looked the user scenarios in the OpenDocument specification looked reasonable, while I seem to recall that they were messed up misleadingly and simply poor English in a former revision.
Ciao, Joerg
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