Hi all I had some free time today and thought I could contribute something to LO. The following is an analysis of LibreOffice Writer with the aim to point to UI and UX problems, and propose solutions.
Here is the blank screen shot I used for the analysis: http://ubuntuone.com/1T26evMLE0Q1Sfvbc6LcnO During the analysis, I tried to look at the UI from the point of view of an average user - I guess that they are by far the biggest LO user group. An average user is for me someone who uses a computer because he has to, but who is not computer savvy. Think of your mom or a student -> http://goo.gl/6Lqvh 1. Needed UI elements ================= At first, I took a look at all visible UI elements and categorized them. green = elementary orange = sometimes needed red = rarely needed Image: http://ubuntuone.com/7TZkH1e7vo88B637NEIjEc As you can see, there is a lot of orange and red. More than half of the icons are less relevant for simple day-to-day tasks. I'm sure that there is a large percentage of people out there who don't even know what some of the red-marked icons are for. ### Proposed Solution ### Till LO gets a new UI I think the most simple way to improve the Writer UI is to remove or hide less used icons. 1a - Remove the area to grab a toolbar. Instead, choose the same toolbar arrangement method as Firefox. The user has to right click on the toolbar and select 'Customize'. Most users don't change the arrangement of the toolbar, therefore there is no need to always display the grab area. My suggestion removes clutter and hides an advanced feature without making it too hard for a power user to guess where to find the functionality. 1b - Remove the 'Edit File' button -> useless. 1c - Remove the 'Page Preview', the user can still find it on a common place -> the file drop-down menu. 1d - Remove the 'Spelling and Grammar' button. Why should there be two such buttons? 1e - Remove 'Table', 'Show draw Functions', 'Navigator', 'Gallery' and the 'LibreOffice Help' buttons. They are all a bit special and not needed by average users for most daily tasks. If a user wants to create a table, he can do so using the table menu, no need to have it visible all the time. 1f - Remove the 'Styles and Formatting' button. Its an advanced feature - normal users just ignore it -> no need to have it there - it clutters the UI. 1g - Remove the button labeled 'Default' in the lower left corner. Its label is unclear and the button adds no value to the UI (remember average user point of view). 1h - Remove the 'Standard selection' and the save status button next to it. Both don't add anything useful to the UI. If the document has unsaved changes it can be viewed by looking at the much bigger save icon in the upper left corner. 1i - Remove the small paper icons left from the zoom panel. I don't get what it is useful for after trying them several times and guess that normal users would struggle here too. 1j - Remove the much >>too small<< 'Navigation' and 'Previous/Next page' buttons in the lower right corner. 1k - Move the 'Align Right' and 'Justified' text formatting button into a little drop-down menu like done for creating a new presentation file from inside Writer (upper left corner). This would clean up the UI a bit without making it too hard to access the less used formatting options. 1l - Move the bullet and numbered list icons in one icon with a drop-down like in 1k. 1m - Maybe remove the 'New', 'Open', 'Export directly as PDF' and 'Print File Directly' buttons in the upper left corner. Reason: they are less used compare to other buttons and can be very easily accessed by the file menu. Secondly, the tasks they perform don't belong to the main task of this application. Writer is about writing not about file handling. 1n - The other orange buttons are less used but should probably stay the way there are right now till a better solution is found. 2. UI skim through - Icon recognizably ============================ When searching for a button, users skim through the UI. The different UI elements are better recognizable if each icon has a simple, clear and unique shape. To simulate how the user perceives the UI when skimming through, I blurred the image. green = easy to recognize orange = possible, but takes a while to recognize red = hard to recognize Colorless image: http://ubuntuone.com/4pY6Sb1SOHFvXJKETjDfV7 Image with colors: http://ubuntuone.com/3YUqIEC6umBkeZutI80UWf A lot of icons have a similar shape or are too detailed and therefore hard to recognize. The elementary buttons are green - that’s good - but orange and red dominate. In the image without color you can notice that most thin lines and space holders are invisible (I've marked them in the colored image with a thin red line). ### Proposed Solution ### 2a - Keep the space holders but remove the visual thin line to separate buttons. The current thin line is not useful when searching an element - in contrary it clutters the UI. 2b - I think you already know it, but again: LibreOffice needs a new icon set because the current set is hard to differentiate and looks - my personal opinion - outdated. 3. Lines in the UI ============= I visualized the lines that structure the UI but are not part of any button. Image: http://ubuntuone.com/75eM3Kex30qhLqshd0oswK As you can see, there are a lot of lines. ### Proposed Solution ### 3a - Remove the line beneath each toolbar. This would remove clutter and give the UI a more settled character. 3b - Remove as many unnecessary lines as possible to further clean up the UI. 4. Summary ========= I've combined all images to give a better impression of the current UI state. Image without blur: http://ubuntuone.com/2GbweFTlHiYJQjpxa6atVf Image with blur: http://ubuntuone.com/3vsf5conkUeIebI59h6pVM The blur image is interesting because it visualizes nicely what a users sees if he looks at Writer. He sees a lot of UI elements and a lot of lines - everything seems pretty cluttered. The important parts are recognizable but there is huge space for improvement. To improve the UX I suggest to: * Remove or hide less used features * Drastically reduce the lines in the UI to make it clearer * New icons Most of the suggested changes could probably be made without changing much code, it's more about having other toolbar defaults in Writer before we see in future a UI redesign. I suggest to improve the UX by using existing widgets. A clean UI --> easier-to-find program functionality --> happier users --> good for LibreOffice Hope I could help a bit and that the provided information is useful to you. Regards Thibaut -- 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
