Hi all, thanks for your feedback. And no excuses needed for anything that is beeing said. I assume everyone (including me) has only the best in mind, so do not take anything personal...
I will try to address the major points. 1. Made bad experiences with User Research Anyone who is working in UX and does not believe in the power of working with users should actually question him / herself wether (s)he is doing the right job. Funnily enough, there was a great dilbert about this issue just a few days ago: http://dilbert.com/strips/2012-05-07/ If we do not go out of the house and work with real users (think of cultuural, social and many other factors influencing UX) we automatically do imply we are the users. But we are not. We are users, but not the users. Any UX process that does not take this into account will only accidently produce good results. If anyone has made bad experiences with that, then do should not resign. Instead work harder on making this work. It is a difficult topic. At least I never said anything different. I am not saying anything about the arguement, that we cannot do it any worse than it is, even without asking the users. If I have to say anything about this it would propbaly turm out to be personnal... So we agree on this never beeing said, ok? 2. If you want to help use our structures. I will not use the structures you set up, because I think they are fundamentally wrong (disclaimer: as far as I could follow them, seeing there have been tons of mails about this topic that I did not read all - correct me if anything I say is wrong). You propose a waterfallish modell with a closed design phase at the beginning. All I have learned in software development is: This does not work out. Not all designers should work on every topic. We have to build small teams and apply best principles of agile software development. You are isolating topics. The personas for Impress remote are different from those I saw at some other place. This will never lead to a consistent user experience across LibreOffice. This might lead to some isolated really cool solutions, but the user will never feel this is one applications suite. So, sorry, but I am not willing to invest my valuable time into these structures. 3. Vague offers of help You said my proposals are very vague. I partially agree with this. I did make a very concrete suggestion to help you solve the "bold, italic,..." icon discussion, by showing you a way how to solve this problem with users, taking different languages and cultural backgrounds into account. But there was no reaction to this. This offer still stands and could be a extremely concrete starting point. My following suggestions were indeed vague, because I felt it would be a waste of time to offer something concrete again, if there is no interest. As I said - my time is strongly limited. So, still staying vague, I can help to build up the artifacts (vision, personas, scenarios,...) that can help us to create a consistent UX within the LibreOffice suite, help to validate these artifacts with real users, create solutions together with developers and again validating them with users - just to name some things we need to work on. But be aware, this will shift the focus in this list from designing (which I still see as a craftmenship) to research and understanding. I strongly believe: if we understand, finding the solutions is easy. This is why the work we need to do is research. So if there is anyone interested in this resaerch based approach on LibreOffice design, give me a sign and we will find a way to start working. Cheers, 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
