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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.
... 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.
;)
Isn't this kind of ironic, Oracle?
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.
(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.
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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?
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".
Bullshit. Human interaction with computers is embarrassingly inadequate. I still have a calculator, despite having a computer capable of billions of FLOPS, why? I still sometimes write things on paper, even with my computer right in front of me, and being able to type faster than I write by hand--why do I do that?
I'll tell you why: because computer interfaces still pretty much suck. Getting what I want in front of me RIGHT NOW is an elusive thing in computerland.
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.
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 only thing worse than computers is phones with computers in them.
My IP phone here at work helpfully keeps a log of missed calls, and their numbers. It helpfully displays these as a list on the screen, and helpfully lets you highlight one and press the "dial" button to instantly re-dial the call. But, uh... it's too fucking stupid dial the "9" for an outside line, meaning the call either fails or goes to some random extension in the company.
As an added bonus, there's no way to have the missed call list and dialing interface both on-screen at the same time. So my phone is surrounded by a pile of Post-It notes containing numbers I had to write down, only to dial mere seconds later.
In short: computer interfaces suck, ignore anybody who says "leave it the way it is" because the way it is sucks.
Comment of the year
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.
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
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!
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...
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.