Hi Lutz, all,
Lutz Hoeger wrote:
Hi,
This message is cross-posted to discuss@, users@ and [EMAIL PROTECTED], in order to
reach a broad audience. However, I would be happy if most of the
comments / discussion / etc. could be sent to discuss@ only (not sure if
the reply-to header works here).
WHAT
I would like to propose an OpenOffice.org User Experience (UX) project.
WHY
It is time to raise the curtain and to make OOo user experience
engineering more transparent to everybody who is affected or who is
interested. There has been a lot of discussion about UX work recently,
and to put it straight: being an integral part of OOo's product
development process, it simply is inappropriate for UX to act like a
"black box" component, especially since the entire development process
becomes more and more open.
It's great to see this new project being settled.
In fact, UX work already happens in many places on OOo, e.g. as part of
feature specifications or spread across various issues. But there is no
central home base for our activity on OOo, which makes it hard to see
and understand what we do.
The overall community has a lot to gain by having this central repository.
By increasing the visibility of our work, we make it easier to find,
understand, and comment on UX work. Even more important, we would like
to motivate others to participate and to contribute to the user
experience design of OpenOffice.org.
In fact, several members of the community have tried to contribute to
that kind of feedback and to the OOo design, but for my own case, I've
always felt that it was not appropriate or valuable or even desired. So
I'm really interested to see this project settled.
The new project shall serve as a single point of contact for all user
experience related inquiries, and vice versa, it should be the single
point to learn about possible areas of involvement in the UX space.
Last but not least, the UX project should serve as a link to other open
user experience projects, e.g. educational projects or other open source
projects.
HOW
Starting as an incubator, we would like to launch UX as a new project.
Some years ago, we took first steps towards "hijacking" the UI (user
interface) project and to transform it into a dual project, but we were
never serious enough about it, and so this failed. One reason might have
been, that the UI project was intended to be something very different:
in the beginning, it was targeted to developers, and it's main content
was the UI source code. Typically, UX people are not developers, and
don't deal with source code too much. But more importantly, the scope of
UX embraces more than UI only. Here is a first draft of our charter to
explain what makes up UX:
"We are the OpenOffice.org User Experience Community. Our intention is
to improve the usefulness and usability of OpenOffice.org for our users.
We work in close cooperation with development, quality assurance, Sun's
User Experience Design Organizations, marketing, documentation, and -
last not least - the OpenOffice.org community. We use methods and
strategies in the areas of user-centered software design, user research,
expert evaluation and UI-design to achieve our main goal, to make our
products more successful in the market."
OpenOffice.org community is represented by development, quality
assurance, marketing, documentation projects or I didn't understand what
you said ?. NLC should be mentionned in this charter too because the
user base of their projects will bring a great value to the work done by
UX project.
So I propose to start with a new UX project. Where necessary, we can
move UX related content off the UI project and into the new one.
Regarding roles, I would like to start this project as the project lead.
Leading Sun's StarOffice UX team, I work on StarOffice and
OpenOffice.org for about ten years. Together with my team, I feel
thrilled to seed a hopefully growing UX community on OOo. As for the
Co-Lead of the new project, I would like to propose Matthias
Mueller-Prove, who is probably well known by many of you already. Since
2002, Matthias works as a user experience engineer and interaction
designer at Sun.
+1 for Matthias and you :-)
AND NOW...
Please feel free to share your thoughts on this proposal. Again, I would
like to have the discussion taking place at the mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED], but I will summarize and cross-post to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and users@ as
appropriate.
I'll point NLC and the FR community to your mail. Thanks for this
proposal, again I'm verry happy to see this project happen.
Kind regards
Sophie
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