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OpenOffice UI Design Proposals Published
An anonymous reader writes "Various members of the OpenOffice.org community have been submitting their first revisions of proposals to the OpenOffice.org Call for Design Proposals to redesign the user interface of Open Office. As part of Project Renaissance, attention is being drawn to the OpenOffice user interface, and it's 'user-friendliness.' Among the designs, is FLUX UI, which won an award at the Sun Microsystems Community Innovation Awards Program. Anyone can, and is encouraged, to check out the proposals (scroll to bottom of page) and leave your comments so that the designers can improve their designs for the final deadline for proposal submissions to the community."
First, do away with the standard File menu bar. Put the most common actions (Create new file, Save file, Print file, etc) in a big button in the corner. Then create a tabbed menu "strip" separated logically by function. Have something like a Format strip and an Insert strip with all the actions you'd expect included there.
As computers become more touch-panel oriented, bigger buttons will be mandatory. The old File Edit Options Help bar is going to be a millstone.
Hey, that's a great idea! But I think we should call the strips "ribbons"...sounds way more sophisticated that way.
Maybe, instead of a strip, it could be more like a "string" or a "thread"?
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
... make everything available via hotkeys (emacs and vi mappings should be provided) and change the arrow keys to print the particular arrow typed. This would be a significant improvement over the current design and would encourage users to work instead of playing with their mice.
;)
So everyone wants OO to like like MS Office07
Don't forget to make sure it's difficult for the visually impaired to use, and impossible for those relying on screen readers to explore the interface as a sighted person could do! You're 99% of the way there already, I'm sure you can come up with the remaining 1%
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Shouldn't these common actions (Save, Print, New) be presented in a standard way across all applications? I don't think it would help ease-of-use if OpenOffice implemented its own cutesy button bar that's different to all other apps. But if most programs on the system could change at the same time, it might be worth a try.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Isn't this kind of ironic, Oracle?
I'm surprised far too often by great and useful features I didn't know OO.o had.
Does anyone else think the UI doesn't have to be messed with.
Why do people do this?
Vista, windows 7, office 2009, etc. etc.
These things are all failures for more-or-less one reason: the UI has advanced as far as it needs to. Interface revisions are okay, overhauls are NOT.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I know its off topic, but I don't know the correct locations to post this...
A few days ago I stopped seeing the story comment counts on the main page. Is this a bug in Firefox or were they removed? If removed, why? They provided me valued information about the story.
Think of the children!
It would be better to leave the menu bar, but allow users to hide it by key combination (or autohide) to fit with how the OS behaves, so in kde ctl+m hides it, in vista/7 it has the ribon style button autohide stuff, on mac/xp it leaves it as it is.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Whoosh? The GP was making a joke in relation to the new ribbon UI in Office 2007. One would think it was pretty obvious...
It has never been hard to learn and is pretty ubiquitous. I think it all works pretty well.
While I am sure that all this additional exploration of new ideas and concepts is a good exercise in generating new ideas and all, I think gone are the days when "new" means "better."
It turns out that "circle" is the best shape for most applications of the wheel. (Some exceptions exist, you don't need to point them out.) For 2D information formatting and arrangement, the menu bar and tool bars do a pretty good job of making it as easy as possible even though other paradigms exist and the menu/tool bar doesn't cut it well enough for other things.
curiously enough, this has been done in the proposal shown...
(grammar corrected)
I wouldn't consider this post Flamebait. The parent pretty much described Office 2007's interface, which everyone was complaining about when it first came out.
On the subject of ribbons and tabs, I would favor the ribbon interface similar to Photoshop. For example, when you choose the cropping tool, there is a ribbon with all the options for cropping. However, I'm not too much of a fan of the Office 2007 interface. I think they did a poor job in the organization of the functions, and didn't even offer an option to switch interfaces.
OpenOffice.org Wiki has a problem Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading. (Can't contact the database server: Too many connections (localhost))
It's sleek, informative and minimalist. 2-thumbs up, would buy again!
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Please, please, please.
You can have it both ways. Do your Flux/Ribbon thing, but leave a standard mapping shortcut for those of us who don't like to spend 10 seconds mousing around when we can perform the same command in three keystrokes. Allow us to turn off the ribbon doodads, show both at once, or just the legacy menu.
You don't want to turn us into this, now do you?
Where do you live so that most of us can come over and stab you to death.
the OO.o interface DOES NOT NEED TO BE REDESIGNED!.
Jeebus, the biggest problem with Office 2007 is having to retrain the users on how to use it.
Why is it that developers think they need to move crap around or redesign so that they frustrate users? Is it some kind of sick game?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
* Remove save and open. They belong to the past. Manage memory-disk transfers as needed, not manually ! (as a first step auto save +save on close)
* file menu and file dialog belong to the file manager. Just provide a shortcut to it if needed. (like open this document folder in explorer)
* Get rid of "applications" and implement functionalities as file / folder views of the file manager (view as ..) use file metadata. (or make apps act like simple apps & use embedding of - any - apps) : integrate.
* TABbed views belong to the window manager !
here, I'm calm now.
Difficult for the Visually impaired? How so?
I actually have an eyesight problem myself, it's nothing MAJOR in the sense that I can't do everyday tasks (I can't, I just can't see clearly very far). I blow up the font a little bit and I'm all right and for me, personally, the ribbon interface that people seem to hate so much is a godsend. I can easily tell what every button does without squinting, but then again, I never feel the need to use an on-screen reader or whatever. However my first inclination is that the ribbon interface isn't at fault for "breaking" them, but rather the on-screen reader programs just haven't been updated to handle the new interface.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
(I can't, I just can't see clearly very far) should have been (I can, I just can't see clearly very far)
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Quote from the article:
"""
* The document is the most important UI element.
* Don't show the user what he/she doesn't need at the moment (context sensitivity).
* Don't focus on a single UI element (i.e. Ribbon, Menus, Tabs) - use a hybrid of elements so that the information is displayed in the most appropriate way.
"""
I like their idea of having more vertical bar, as the wide screen form is being widely adopted, it will be a better way to use our screen real estate.
"not invented here" is our motto, so in that sense, I agree. "Ribbon" is a fabulous new way of describing that strip!
Okay, that link to a clip from the movie Idiocracy is apparently to a white power / neo nazi site. Don't go there.
(Did I just goatse... myself?)
What,
It needs is a significant amount of effort bringing the graphs in Calc up to a level that even approachs what was available way back in 1986 in Lotus 123.
Calc's graphs are a MAJOR stumbling block to my being able to push OO to clients as an alternative to XL.
Redesign graphs, enhance them, whatever you want to call it, fix them please....
Promote this competition on Graphic Design boards/communities/portals, offer up a few cool and trendy prizes (branded FOSS snowboards/skateboards/bikes/x-sports etc) and there will be hundreds of entries.
programmer nerds and geeks are the wrong people to ask anything about UI design, if they where this publicity drive wouldnt be needed in the first place (note: pc geeks/nerds/programmers are part of the FOSS UI disaster problems, lets stick to what we are good at and let "design experts" design the UI)
yes. and just to show that we are in charge we should make that strip huge and not allow the user to control the size or move it to the side/bottom of the screen. zero flexibility is key.
I hated Office 2007's "ribbon" interface when I first saw it. However, after the first few days of using it, I found myself at least twice as productive when using it. Yeah, I know... it's a Microsoft idea, and therefore it's automatically bad. Except, it isn't. Everything I need is easier to get at with fewer clicks, and working properly with styles is finally a snap.
It's hard for me to take seriously people's snobbery toward the latest Microsoft UI designs, when so much of the open-source world is simply a direct rip-off of OLD Microsoft UI designs. OpenOffice is largely an MS Office 2000 clone, KDE started out as a beefier Windows 95 clone, and the new desktop menu in Gnome is a bastard stepchild of Vista and OSX. Up until very recently, innovation in UI design hasn't been an open-source strong point... and it would be nice to see more innovation rather than derivative work in this area. I look forward to seeing what the OOo community(*) comes up with.
(*) Just as I look forward to seeing what the "OOo community" IS under Oracle. Up until now, the community was basically "Sun".
First: not everyone, just the guy who posted the message! ;-)
Second: not, he does not. He was just being funny and sarcastic at the same time! At least I got it this way...
-- dnl
You think that's bad? Try using MS Office 2007 on a eee. The bloody ribbon takes up a quarter of the freaking screen!
The latest version of OpenOffice is the first one on OS X where the spell checker actually uses the default, built in spell checker on OS X which is used by all the other programs and already programmed with all the preferences and words from my other work. I applaud the addition of this functionality.
Sadly, the UI by which it is accessed is clunky and nonstandard. In every other program, highlighting a word and right clicking on it brings up the context menu that lets me directly select the corrected version of the word. In OpenOffice I have to run the spellchecker which opens a separate window to provide suggestions which I then have to close once I'm done and go back to working. The only usable way to do spellchecking becomes to ignore all spelling errors until I'm done then go through and correct spelling mistakes at the end, a slow and tedious workflow.
Further, In every other program, the context menu that comes up when right clicking on a word allows me to use the dictionary/thesaurus service and to correct grammar mistakes using the universal grammar checker. OpenOffice still ignores the standard APIs and thus still does not have these freebie functions even basic text editors on OS X have. When I have to copy and paste my text out of my full fledged word processor and into a basic text editor in order to check grammar or apply any other text services, well something is wrong. Some of the features OpenOffice does present in their context menus are useful, but really I want to select the correct spelling for a word flagged as misspelled a lot more often than I want to change the font size of a word. The options presented to not reflect my needs and I doubt they reflect the needs of the average user.
So basically my complaint with OpenOffice's user interface is that it does not conform to the standards of the OS on which it is running and instead dumbs down functionality to the level of the lowest common denominator OS.
Yeah I guessed so, because, well, I assumed you couldn't proofread your comment very well.
(ouch ouch! karma burns!)
But... the future refused to change.
Please?
C_Kode: Computer, close file.
Computer: File closed.
If it works for Captain Kirk and Captain Picard, it should work for Captain C_Kode too.
I've got Karma TOO burn!
Plus, I know how slashdot works. Wait for an article to pop up from kdawson, then post "This article is nonsense!" or even "Kdawson sucks!". You'll have plenty of +1 informatives.
Sound like cheating? Not really, usually the article IS nonsense.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Why is it that developers think they need to move crap around or redesign so that they frustrate users? Is it some kind of sick game?
Because that's what Microsoft does. See, if you're going to release a new application or operating system and ask customers to pay for the upgrade, it helps if you offer new functionality that the customers can use. However, developing new functionality that's actually useful is difficult, and if you aren't able or aren't willing to do that, then the next best thing is to make it look very different. Ideally it will look much better, but as Windows XP's Luna theme has proven, "different" is enough.
Because if something looks different enough, human psychology makes people think that it is actually different. Also, culturally, we're disposed to think that newer+different=better. Therefore, people will pay to upgrade even if they don't stand to benefit.
So with each new version of Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, they always change the UI even if the functionality is the same. At the very least, they apply a new skin and shuffle around which controls go where.
I'm not sure, though, what the benefit is for FOSS. It's not like people are going to pay to upgrade to the new version of OpenOffice.
Try either double-clicking on one of the ribbon tab titles, or right-click on the ribbon and check "Minimize the ribbon" or using the keyboard: , , n
Don't forget to make sure it's difficult for the visually impaired to use, and impossible for those relying on screen readers to explore the interface as a sighted person could do! You're 99% of the way there already, I'm sure you can come up with the remaining 1%
Oh, theres a lot more than 1% of the way to go to make a totally useless GUI.
How about using unintelligible icons? That way you can make it impossible to teach anyone how to use it verbally, makes it only possible to describe operations visually. "now right click on the second icon from the left that looks like a squashed centipede, obviously everyone who centers text thinks of squishing a centipede". Bonus points if the icon is could be interpreted obscenely in a Freudian manner or is a swear word in some obscure ideographic script. After all, all of your users are experts at learning ideographic scripts like Egyptian hieroglyphics, so instead of typing "load" or "open" on a command line, make them memorize that a clovis arrowhead means open in this program, but a little star trek shuttle means open in this program.
Then too, make it graphically as utterly modal as possible. Pop up screens that come from pop up screens that come from menu bars on pop up screens. Make it as challenging as memorizing the knot and overlap structure of a bowl of spaghetti. Organize the pop ups and menus solely by programing team or by how the marketing gang declared how the tool would be used. Bonus points if its possible to open multiple different config windows simultanously, but only change things in one window at a time. And try to lock the screen so the user can't look at other windows (like a cheatsheet or notes or whatever) while a config window is open.
Don't ever use threads and don't worry about responsiveness. If clicking on the "wrong" thing appears to lock the machine up for seconds, even minutes, with no way to quickly stop it or go back, thats OK. You know you've succeeded if the user forums describe the best roll back technique as "quit and reload" or "easiest just to reboot and try again". If they complain that is slow, tell them to get a faster PC.
Can't get here from there... Lets say there is 20 step procedure to get from here to there. Make sure that the rollback procedure is a totally and utterly different 40 step procedure. Whatever you do, don't make a global "undo" button that works, or at least works reliably (its OK if it only works on 75% of the operations, then no one will expect it to ever work and thus will never use it). Forward should never equal or be equivalent to backward.
Everyone whom uses the program only wants to see your glorious program, right? Not their little data or whatever it is they are working on. So FLOOD the workspace with an infinite array of tool bars and buttons covering almost the entire workspace. After all, if they paid $500 for a bigger monitor, your program should get that screen area, not their data.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Modal dialog boxes interrupt workflow. We need to make most dialog boxes modeless and dockable.
The interfaces should not steal user space. If necessary, it would be better to add auto hide or ability make them disappear at the click of a button. In other words, the interfaces should be transparent to the user.
Context sensitivity should not limit the user experience - everchanging option lists (much like under SAP) are a bane of learning. When stuff appears and disappears whenever you change context, you are forced to learn each context separately. Additionally, developers may find it hard to maintain consistency across changing contexts.
Scalability. It's a an Opera thing to me - I am free to choose the size of interfaces. Adjust them to preferences, make them fit the screen space. Therefore, allow users to scale interfaces just like one can scale documents.
Regards,
Ruemere
please get a copy of ClarisWorks from the '90s and CLONE IT. ClarisWorks on System7 in the BasiliskII emulator puts your product to shame in every respect.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
I suggested something similar on ubuntuforums a couple of years back and got shot down instantly. But the idea behind flux/ribbon is actually really good. Hide buttons that you arn't using at the moment and give the document more space.
Menubar:Replace the main menubar with a menubutton, use this to show all menu bar buttons that aren't shown by menu buttons that are spread out at the appropriate ends of the main toolbar (help)
Buttons: you are likely only interacting with one thing at a time, if define usage cases narrowly enough to put all the relevant tools on a toolbar but widely enough that there are only a few settings, then you can save space (or give more space to just the relevant tools). /print/save/open/new) and read (auto-hide the entire toolbar, giving 100% of screen estate to the document)
*Some Actions can be done from any of the states Copy/undo stick this outside of a "container"
*Bind keys&buttons (automatically based on selection?) to toggle whats in the "container"
*Imo the container should be editing text/ editing pictures/layout(including columns & tables)/document(changing setting
|Menubutton(s)|permanent buttons|toggles:relevant buttons|help|
Customizations:Make the whole thing customizable (if the relevant buttons are to big to fit in the provided space that section should be the first to loose space (be it only showing the 1st few and adding an arrow or allowing scrolling though the relevant buttons)) and allow users to define thier own usage cases, with repeated buttons (looking at you kde3) and thier own triggers (some people want to go straight to the text editing menu as soon as they select text others dont).
Make the whole look changeable (companies may want to replace the default menu button with a company logo? or make the whole thing bright pink?)
Allow the different sections to be separated (so you could give the relevant buttons an entire tool bar underneath)
Allow different toolbars to use different sized icons
Providing too much customization is not a bad thing as long as most people can use the defaults.
|Menubuttons|_____toggles_____|help|
|permanent buttons|relevant buttons|
Themes:Provide an easy&safe way to save/share a theme.
Provide sane defaults and get it out there, during the next release cycle look at which themes popular (you'll probably find there to be a few popular themes, classic, ribbon, office, geek, flashy) and ship them with the next release. There is no point in doing research designing what you thing is a good compromise for the work load that office/home users put their suite through, when you can just put a version out there and see what people do with it.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Double click the ribbon tab to hide the ribbon. You can then single click a tab to temporarily show it at any time.
Well on the other hand if new users are trained to use ribbons coping that interface might be beneficial.
Now some aspects in OO.o are just horrible, the color picker looks *and works* like something straight from 1994.
I think they should ask for help or at least inspiration from AbiWord.
Abiword has a wonderful UI, minimalistic yet does 99% of what you want. It's colorful and even cute yet still looks professional. The icons represent exactly what they mean, the menu structure is very intuitive etc.
The problem of Abiworld is that it can't do *every fukken thing imaginable*, you can --for instance-- underline and/or overline and/or strike anytext, but always using the same color of the font. AFAIK in OO.o 3 you will be able to use 3 different colors for that. I'd personally stab anyone who sends me a document with multiple colors per font.
In principle you could apply Abiword's elegant GUI design to all the features in OO.o, it just will be a lot of work. But it would still be intuitive and standard.
This FLUX is both nonstandard and a cheap rip off.
But... the future refused to change.
I'm really starting to think that all these people that need extensive training to use office software should be out back shoveling sand over a wall. I mean, if they can't get the basics in 10 minutes of clickly-clicky, I shudder to think the pearls of wisdom that will emerge once they get down to 'work'.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Although it's interface isn't quite as friendly as I want it to be, at least it is a tad more powerful than Calc, and the results tend to be better than Excel.
THANK YOU
There are already more important problems with OO.o anyways.
In Writer, the image scaling looks like crap (they print out OK, but on screen they look horribly pixelated).
Various functions in Calc are cumbersome to use compared to Excel. They need to take some time with an accountant, hear all their complaints and streamline the UI - they're things that most users won't be bothered by, but when you're working with spreadsheets literally all day long it throws a big wrench in the works (accountants using spreadsheets where they should be using databases - NOT Access BTW - is another topic).
I don't have any serious problems with OO.o but lots of people who use office apps more often have complaints, they should fix those instead of trying to make it look nice. I think offering an "MS Office compatibility mode" in the installer to change the default file formats would go a long way to reducing complaints - that's the most common one, they hit save, don't look at what they're saving it as and then other people can't open the OpenDocument file and the whining starts.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
....hide ....the ...ribbon.
(Or...better yet, don't run an Office suite on a PC that doesn't meet the minimum requirements)
*1024x768 or higher resolution monitor.
Hey, that's a great idea! But I think we should call the strips "ribbons"...sounds way more sophisticated that way.
Oh come on, no one would be stupid enough to fall for that!
and also add nice looking table design templates
The parent comment is not flamebait. Mods? Plz fix. k thx bye.
Sounds like CS4.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Yes! And put it vertically on the FSCKING LEFT!.
Ooooh... the MS design horrors... the pain! (widescreen for those morons...)
Here be signatures
Double-click the tabs at the top of the ribbon, and the ribbon itself vanishes. Single click a tab to show it temporarily, like a menu. Double-click to get it to show permanently again.
This has existed since it was beta software called "Office 12." It's surprisingly poorly advertised; the behavior is logical but a little un-intuitive since most UIs don't do things like that, so a little user education would be smart.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Difficult for the Visually impaired?
This has the unfortunate implication of those who are not so great to look at. Perhaps the parent means vision-impaired.
I happen to Like Microsoft's 2008 ribbon. It got rid of the redundancy of having a toolbar and menus. It was a good idea on their part to simplify the interface in such a way. I'd hate to say it Microsoft devs once and a while do some things right.
RES PUBLICA NON DOMINETUR
So long as there is the option to use the standard interface/menu bar that I can turn on so that I can do my work without trying to figure out how YOU think I should work, you can do whatever you want.
I happen to LIKE the menu bar, I know where everything is, and can find anything quickly and easily.
Hiding all of the programs functionality makes it LESS usable, not more.
A large number of my clients have refused to move off of ms office 2003 because they aren't interested in everyone having to waste however many man-hours learning a new interface. And that is to say nothing of the forced change to .*X format which has pissed off even my stalwart MS loving customers.
I'll switch to a touch interface when I get a touch interface.
Till then it's a waste of screen real estate that will probably get revised upon being actually used with a touch interface anyway.
I am a management student, so have to deal with office products a lot. Where MSOffice win hands down and OO.o loses out is that OO.o is plain ugly. If I have to show my boss a sales plan, I need to highlight a few rows. The colours that are by default provided on it are simply plain ugly. Anybody using those colours to distinguish estimated vs actual sales is going to get a dirty look from the boss.
The defaults in Writer (size, margins,headings, fonts, colours), the ease of accessing formulas in calc, the ease of making a ppt which will win us a contract, these are the things missing from OO.o. I don't care if it is open-source or costs $0, if I can't make a good presentation out of it, bye bye.
Why don't OO.o do a market survey on what are the default colours and themes and fonts people like? What are the functions, menu items that their target segment use? I think with this sort of data, UI changes make more sense, not on simple random ideas by nerds. True, this is a great forum for generating a few ideas, and thats where this post comes in too, but I would be more than happy to see some USEFUL features incorporated as UI changes.
http://monkeynesianeconomics.blogspot.com/
Tabs are just another form of MDI, which everyone in their right mind has been running from lately. Why? Because as the OS window management tools get better (Expose, Aero Peek), it makes less sense to reimplement the features. Moreover, UI's designed for "all maximized, all the time" don't play nice with multiple monitors, which are becoming fairly common. At the very minimum, tabs should be "tear off", and should reveal themselves when using Expose / Aero Peek.
Keyboard shortcuts are a must. Preferably for every single function in the program [1]. This gets more important if you decide to forego the OS standard widgets for menus etc.
I've been working with a few programs that copy the MS Office Ribbon, and they're a nightmare to control from anything but the mouse. This is not just a problem for mouse-phobes, but macro/scripting applications like QuicKeys (which I use extensively) suffer as well: QuicKeys offers no mechanism for selecting items in a ribbon; you could set up mouse clicks, but since ribbons tend to grow and shrink, I find that doesn't work too well.
Also, if you optimize the UI for a single use case, make sure it's the correct one. One program I use always selects the wrong ribbon when I click inside a table.
1: even better: allow the user to configure all shortcuts to their liking. VLC gets this right. Most programs don't, and offer needlessly complicated shortcuts to boot.
Or for that matter, go to Customize, pull up "Commands Not in the Ribbon," and assign "ToggleFull" to the F11 key (the same key that is used in Firefox). Voila! No wasted screen real estate.
Breakfast served all day!
KILL THE FUCKING LIGHTBULB
'Deep tree' GUI menus are getting annoying as vendors rack up the feature quantities to compete with each other. Searching in menus for some long-lost feature is becoming ever more time-consuming as the trees grow. Perhaps it's time to rethink hierarchical menus and borrow some ideas from search engines, such as Google.
Consider listing (and perhaps linking) all the options or features in a database-like contraption, and key-word searching on these behind the scenes to produce a Google-like list of feature/option matches. A simple SQL "LIKE" statement(s) can be used for a simple implementation (under the hood, not user-side), with dedicated text indexers for fancier ones.
The database could also contain synonyms to assist finds. Some options will have prerequisites, which need to be dealt with. These can be tracked via a dependency tree or graph.
Has anybody tried something similar to this in a desktop app with success? If so, what technologies and techniques did you use, and what lessons did you learn?
Table-ized A.I.
Two: With more and more widescreens, put stuff on the side, and let people choose which side (although for right-handed users, I would suggest left - I've been working with a touch-screen/tablet PC for some time now and it helps to keep my palm off menus when writing).
Three: display all the shortcuts when user presses ALT or CTRL.
I imagine a screen reader, which probably informs a totally blind person of menubar items by just going from menu to menu, top to bottom (it's very simple to explain the concept of the menubar even without visuals) would have a problem with all these new "ribbon" style controls, with controls down the sides and bottoms and all over the place.
It's not so much that it's unusable, it's that forming a "concept" of these new types of controls is very hard without the corresponding visuals.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
I see what you did there! :)
More than likely, but surely reading out the ENTIRE menu bar would be counter-productive after the first or second time? Would it not make sense to only read out what's being highlighted? If you do that, then it doesn't matter if it's a ribbon or a menu, you just hover over what you think might be relevant and see what it says. Sure, the Ribbon relies a bit more on recognising icons and such, but is it really harder to pick apart different icons than to pick apart rows of text?
I genuinely don't know how it affects those who have a severe visual impairment, I'm just speculating I guess.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Modal dialog boxes interrupt workflow. We need to make most dialog boxes modeless and dockable.
The Mac version of Office has one (the Toolbox, they call it) and the vast majority of document formatting tasks that were formerly modal can be done with it. It uses accordion-style organization, but with as many panels open as you have room for. And it's a draggable palette, but it'll snap to a screen edge or corner.
Oh, and in Office 08, the traditional menu structure and modal dialog boxes are there, too, so old-timers aren't forced to relearn everything, as with Office 07.
If they hadn't sabotaged it by removing VBA, Office 08 would be a pretty awesome suite.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Renaissance/Design_Proposals_for_%E2%80%9CAccessing_Functionality%E2%80%9D
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Jaron_Baron
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Constantin_B%C3%BCrgi
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Johannes_Eva
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Miroslav_Mazel
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_J%C3%B6rg_Sievers
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Knoxy
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Michel_Renon
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_J%C3%B6rg_Wartenberg
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Rodrigo_Carvalho
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Frank_Loehmann
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Loehmann_Jansen
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org.nyud.net/wiki/Proposal_by_Cinly_Ooi
coding is life
Simpsons did it
I would propose not redesigning anything, that would be most user friendly, you know, have everything where you'd expect it...
Wow - nice tip! Excel 2007 just became a little less painful. Thanks!
Call me when I don't have to use my hands.
Otherwise, just don't mess with the shortcuts/hotkeys and I'm happy. I don't really care what kind of interface is used once I have hotkeys mentalized.
Perhaps the developers should focus more on getting people to use hotkeys rather then focus on keeping "clickers" comfortable, especially in an OFFICE environment.
Haha... mercifully I haven't been exposed to Office 2007 so I didn't spot the joke.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
You think that's bad? Try using MS Office 2007 on a eee. The bloody ribbon takes up a quarter of the freaking screen!
If you actually measure the height of menubar + default set of toolbars in Office 2003, and the height of ribbon in Office 2007, you'll see that ribbon is, in fact, slightly smaller.
You forget to mention that you need to choose randomly a size of actions and does they have text or not. This way you get very easy to read menu when you cant just read one line of actions, but you even need to read 3 lines. One part might have 2 rows of icons, other 3 rows and few with just one row with biggest icons.
And make it even better by hiding those actions when the window is scaled so you actually need to think where they have hided... because we all now "If it ain't there, you do not need it!"
The idea is NOT to give people choices.
Consistency is key to a UI. By giving a choice to switch you muddy that up. I'm STILL having to check when doing phone support if the control panel is in classic or catagory view. If MS had gone with just ONE then I would know exactly what they should be seeing. By not giving a choice they made it standard and now when I work with somebody on an office problem I know what interface to expect.
Oh, for friggin sake. Just when Linux and Ubuntu were poised to take over the desktop, the Gnome developers throw a wobbly and the Open Office people loose their way. Next year looks set to be the year the Linux desktop is abandoned.
We just wanted a stable, integrated desktop that did what it was supposed to do, and an Office suite that let us do office stuff. It was pretty much there.
Take your fancy makeover and award winning designs and you know where you can put them.
I'll give up computing if Linux takes one more communal step in the direction of Microsoftification.
What's that you say? As computers become more speech-oriented, buttons will be obsolete?
Meh, toss the file handling bit fully, and have the user use the file manager to create new files, make copies (save as) or open up existing ones...
For saving, it should do so in a incremental fashion that's fully reversible...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
As long as the Gimp guys aren't going to change can we make OO look like Gimp?
I agree, the Ribbon interface does actually make it easier to find the functions that you need at any given time. However, the problem in doing such a large scale revamping of the UI lies in the fact that most office workers are conditioned to blindly click their way around the menus like Pavlovian dogs, so while the new UI is undeniably easier, retraining your drones is going to take some time and you're going to hear a lot of sore complaints for maybe around six months it takes to recondition them.
I found the Ribbon UI really easy to use though, thanks to not being such a big Word user before. You could say that I wasn't "contaminated" by the old interface yet :)
I agree. I like it the most in Windows Seven's MS Paint.
signature is pants
I'm on a 12.1 inch x61, so every inch is important. I removed all the toolbars to see more lines. Once you get used to open office without toolbars, it isn't that much different. You'll learn the shortcuts for common things such as superscript control-shift-p, bold control-b, new document control-n, save file control-s, etc., and I've found that I never really use the toolbar enough for it to constantly be there. If I ever need a small function that I never use, such that I don't know the shortcut, then I just unhide the toolbar and look for it. Also, I think the File-Edit-View toolbar has all the functions in them already.
Yes, but installing OpenOffice3 gives back about 50 vertical pixels and makes it MUCH more usable.
It would be nice if OO.org gave some thought to the needs of actual writers, in addition to clerks, programmers, secretaries, desktop publishers, bookeepers, project managers, and personnel officers. There are bells and whistles in that office suite designed to make life good for every line of work known to mankind, except fiction writing. As a word processor for fiction writing, AbiWord is far superior. And it isn't much. Some improvements like tabbed documents would be nice to start with.
Just copy the Pages UI. It is the best.
The Tango Project does just that. At the simplest level they have a standard set of icons which any application developer can use - the icons are public domain.
FLUX screenshots make it look much like Word 2007. I've seen it once, on a shop. Had nightmares for days.
Oh you can underline in a different color from the text? Awesome! That will go perfect for my next presentation when I choose six different typefaces in three different weights on each slide - with a sparkling effect! I was wondering how I can get my main points to stand out against the animated background! Thank you so much for the design tip! ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Why don't they choose all UI designs?
The users should be able do choose between different UI-s like they change themes.
At least 22 years ago a computer magazine columnist suggested make the entire UI a separate chunk of code. Have the same word processor "kernel" accept a variety of plug in interface designs. .pdf UI Design Lab Guide. Let groups or students use the packages and report back about the best UI's.
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Then have a package that contains alternate UI designs and a
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Open source software needs a UI development process. UI research is a discipline separate from programming.
Hiring a degreed UI research person and running a UI research workshop is at least a $100 per hour undertaking. I understand there is a university in Washington State that has a reputation as a strong center for UI research. Probably Microsoft benefits from such expertise being close at hand.
Use the UI design package to progressively refine one aspect of the interface, then another.
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I'd also like a "Crash Wrapper and bug documenter" that runs on top of the programs. The crash wrapper would save user data and keystroke sequences, and would accept problem descriptions.
I wish there was a Crash Wrapper last month while I was trying out Open Office 3.0. Somewhere between the UI and the program the app has a bug related to turning on page numbers. I turned 5 hours of work into a 0 byte file due to either a bad UI or a program bug.
I don't like big buttons. So may be, a good idea would be to have a UI template library so user could choose whatever he likes the most.
We're talking about Open Office, not about Microsoft Office.
I also agree, it's pretty nice. Occasionally I can't find things though, but usually they are things that I only used rarely before to begin with. It would have been nice if they redid the dialogs too, so that the options inside the dialogs were more logically laid out like the Ribbon, but overall it's a nice idea. I can see how Word power users would be annoyed though.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Uh, one of the nice things about the Ribbon for me is that it autohides, so I just have the document most of the time. I guess you have to double click it to make it do that, but afterward it usually autohides and then you have all the space for your document.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Why does nobody ever get this: It is a application where you mainly write, using the keyboard. So stop using those damned mouse-only-UIs. It's so incredibly stupid, that I do not even have words for it...
Additionally, that "award winning" FLUX UI is as always, with all open source GUI concepts just a bad clone of some Microsoft stuff... which itself is just a bad clone of the stuff of others (eg. Apple).
Why can't we for once use our strengths, and really be on the forefront of development?
I mean, the InfoBox (of Lotus WordPro) still beats every other mouse-only UI concept. But it still was crappy because it was too hard to control with the keyboard.
But at least they *finally* stopped relying on modal dialogs.
My brain hurts from all this stupidity. I'm out. Developing some real advanced UI.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The sidebar layout is an interesting idea in my opinion. With vertical screen space decreasing (read: more or less all displays are 16:9 these days), this kind of layout gives us back some space.
And my "but" is. they assume (wrongly) that one is always operating on an MS system with all windows maximized at 1600X1280. How many people are there on the ever more popular netbook (1024x600 or 800x480) or don't do the MS max to all dance and actually use multiple cascading windows as god and Xerox Park intended. ;) I HATE be forced to maximize an app just use it. (cough pdf readers cough) and like so many not all my screens are monster LCD desktop systems (in fact notebooks outsell desktops and netbooks lead the portable pack of late.)
Please if any would listen remember these 3 things. 1. Not all or your users are Windows encumbered. 2. Not all of your users are on Desktops with massive screens. 3 Not all of your users like wasting real estate. It won't be long until smartphones are able to do document.... er... wait I already am doing docs on my Android, never mind.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Well, if you need to run a computer at lower resolution to conveniently enlarge things, it takes up too much real-estate when it's open to see what your formatting is doing to the page. The little buttons at the bottom right corner of each ribbon section, are still tiny and hard to find - the ones that open the font or paragraph properties modification windows, for example. Not with the ribbon itself, but if you want to change some of the general settings, you click the office logo, and you get something akin to the file menu - with many task options on the left, and on the right a bunch of recent documents, below the documents (not the task options) is the office settings button. If you are severely nearsighted or have a lot of nerve damage in the eye, that damn thing is hard to find without good directions.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Aye, at least you're thinking about it.
But trust me, just from my personal experience I've seen directly in training just how hard it is to teach people _who can see_ to use Office 2007. It's a pain in the butt.
New UI's are easy for people like us to learn because we're computer aficionados -- to the average person, the new UI in Office 2007's ribbon was like an alien world.
To a blind person, I'd imagine it would take even longer to learn.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
But we did get the basics in 10 minutes. But Microsoft didn't like that (no need for Microsoft Certified Office Specialists, I guess), and redesigned the UI to make it completely useless.
Warning: I, and several thousand of my closest associates, will find you and slowly remove every inch of skin from your body with barbed wire and razor ribbon if this implemented.
Thanks.
It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to Save As in the latest MS Word that uses the 'big button in the corner' interface element. The main reason was that I didn't figure the big graphic was a button. Now that I KNOW where it is, I can live with it, but I didn't quite "get it" off the bat.
Also, on a Mac, I think the File menu bar has to be there. You may not have to populate it, but the redundancy wouldn't hurt anything. The 'big button' UI doesn't make quite as much sense on a Mac (compared to Linux and WIndows), but, again, I could live with it being there.
I have no idea what half of those mean or why they're applicable in a spreadsheet program. I don't remember ever needing to paste a bitmap image in a cell (and wouldn't that be pasted by default anyway if that's what was in the clipboard?). I believe they are just the same options as in Writer. For Calc, these options should read Values, Formats, Formulas..., etc.
I do appreciate, however, that Calc and Gnumeric have the good sense to assign a shortcut ctrl + shift + V to the Paste Special dialog.
Maybe I'm stupid and just used to MS Office, but even as an OO.o user for six years I still don't get their formatting system with "Header 1, Header 2, etc." I've looked into tutorials and help and when I learn to use something I quickly forget it the next time I need it. I love Abiword but it's not really capable of doing everything I need and nobody else can read that damn .abw format.
Shades of the "document portal" envisioned nearly two decades ago by Guy Kawasaki.
*shudder*
The whole notion of dumping programming resources into creating a sexy, "me-too" user interface is ludicrous so long as OOo is missing it's most sought-after feature: A well-integrated replacement of Outlook.
Don't get me wrong. I love Thunderbird now that it comes with an integrated calendar. I use it all the time. However, new users of OOo consistently and constantly ask why it doesn't come with an integrated replacement of Outlook. The e-Mail/PIM client is by far the most heavily used piece of software used in any office today. It's the bread and butter of any office! And any "Office Productivity Suite" that doesn't include one is missing the mark by light years.
Good Lord! Mozilla's already done the heavy lifting! Download the core code from Thunderbird and build on top of it, but build and Outlook replacement BEFORE fussing with a sexy new user interface.
For the most part, I like OO's interface. Especially now that the Mac port doesn't rely upon X. The biggest gripe I have is that there are no menu options to start the video games hidden in OO.
I don't see why this was modded as Troll. It makes sense to have the ribbon on the left on widescreen (and even regular) monitors. As it is now, most pages that people edit are oriented in portrait mode, so a ribbon at the top cuts down on usable vertical space, whereas a ribbon at the side would leave the page being edited closer to its portrait aspect ratio.
I dunno about you, but when I upgraded OpenOffice, it cost me more than the previous version did.
About 6 megabytes more.
Oh, yes you Americans may scoff, and think that's funny, or worse, irrelevant. But out in the real world, (well, my little part of it,) there is a cost associated with data transfers.
Just not a really big cost. But it's there.
> If you like vi then I'd have to ask for you to just sit quitely in the back. To each his own and this conversation is for the GUI lovers :)
I love vi. It starts quickly, quits quickly, and is responsive during use, even while editing a file several megabytes in size. I do diff and svn merges with Vim's diff mode. My shell at home is setup to use vi emulation mode. My Visual Studio setup at work has a keypress to open the current file in GVim.
I agree with you.
I would go further however. GUIs should, if at all possible, be designed by usability experts and be guided by both user trials and user feedback. Those of us who make the machines go have no business deciding how people should interact with them. Seriously.