Hi all, I like to step into the Impress Remote discussion - not presenting a mock-up, but trying to get you guys to reflect a little bit about they way you are working.
In the past I (and many other experienced design and usability people) more or less left this group / mailing list. This is definitely not due to a lack of interest - I still read a lot of the stuff written here. I think the thread about creating an impress remote UI at least for me is a prototype to illustrate what is going wrong here at the moment. Let me tell you a little bit about my background: Personally I have spent more than 10 years now working on the usability for free software projects (and almost 15 years of professional consulting in UX, including running small companies offering UX services). Next to LibreOffice I have worked for Wikipedia or KDE just to name some you might know. I have also co-initiated OpenUsability.org and was in the jury of free-software awards. I am not writing this to show off - I am writing this in the hope you might be interested in the experience I gained over the past years and you might accept my following criticism to be constructive - and not as trolling or ranting around. So what do I actually want to say? So far there have been 16 mails and a couple of possible solutions in this thread and - as far as I understood - - nobody from the design team even talked to the GSOC student or the mentor - there was no proper analysis of requirements - there was no agreement on the goals that need to be achieved (just to name some) Working this way will never work out. I predict a great amount of frustration for a lot of people and lasting harm to the standing of UX within the LibreOffice community. UX is a service discipline to the coders. If we do this service well enough, we might be able to set our own topics on the agenda - but to my experience this will take a (very) long time of providing excellent service first. There is a simple reason for this: Coders work either for topics that interest their employers or that tickle them personally. They simply won't work to make our visions come true (at least not until they gained trust in us as persons). So on every topic - the first thing we always have to do is to understand why the coders are working on a it - aka what tickles them. Next is a polite question if they are interested in any UX support at all - and what extend would suit them. If they want us to step in, we have to discuss criteria first that allow us to evaluate the solutions we create - and make sure the coders agree with these criteria (sometimes we even need to do user research for this). Only then we can create actual solutions and judge them by applying the criteria. In this judgment we have to take coding effort (and other relevant aspects) into account and together with the coders agree on the final solution. If we do not roughly follow this agenda, it is very likely the coders will simply ignore whatever we do - thus we do not need to do it at all, because everything is wasted anyhow. This will predictably lead to frustrations on both sides - coders and UX people. The impress remote thread shows that we do a lot of work without even reassuring that our work is welcome - or evaluating the criteria for a good solution. A bit unrelated, but also important: with the current way of doing things, we are creating such an amount of white noise on the mailing list that some people (like me) simply cannot follow the discussions anymore. Again, this will not lead to acceptance, but to frustration and to a loss of knowledge and experience. To sum it up, please: - think before you start working on a topic - think before you send a mail to a mailing list Hope this mail is fruitful - LibreOffice as a project is too important for the Free Software ecosystem, and we really need the energy you guys show. Simply do not waste it to create tons of frustration. Thanks for reading. Björn -- www.OpenUsability.org www.OpenSource-Usability-Labs.com -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
