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."

Comments

Re:I had some ideas, but they are pretty "out ther

[vlm]

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.

Re:I had some ideas, but they are pretty "out ther

[cbhacking]

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.