Mathias Bauer wrote: > I can even imagine a much simpler approach: just keep the old UI as an > option and use usage tracking to find out how many users switch to it.
Studies for the courts found in 1996 that even back then 60% kept the default settings. By now it's close to 100%. I've tried paying people to customize Xfce and KDE UIs. It's just not in popular culture anymore do to more than whine about defaults. 1) Rather than find out how many change it, find those who *do* change it and find out how *they* change it and then study why. 2) Find out the frequency of usage of various functions (menu items). Find out clusters of activity, that is functions that are used frequently together. 3 Find out the relative importance of various functions, some may be seldom used only once per document but be considered essential. Then combine 2 and 3 to make your matrix, if you want primitive and wrong answers. 4) Analyse 2 and 3 and do interviews to find out what is working smoothly and where the problems are. 5) Have a taser charged and ready for anyone proposing to copy the failure known as "the ribbon". Ditto for vague, nebulous, or diplomatic speech that could be interpreted as such. 6) Interview experienced trainers. I can propose at least two. 7) Bring in real HCI specialists to do a) time-motion studies, including eye-tracking. Use as subjects educated people *who've never used a computer before* to gather data. Growing markets have lots. Then bring in novices and power users. Compare and analyse. etc. >> I'm very open to improving the UI, but only in the context of greater >> efficiency. Change for the sake of change is not good either. > > Agreed. I hope you don't want to say that Renaissance is about the > latter. I don't want to but, of necessity, have to. Work out a scientific approach, and the assessment can change. In the mean time, #5 above is probably the most valuable in the near term. > IMHO it is pretty clear that our current UI needs a change, Of course. However, survival of the fittest random changes doesn't really work in a population of one program. Regards -Lars --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.org
