While there may be a valid reason for an UX project, what is contained in this message I got makes absolutely no sense. I still have no idea what UX is about nor why it should be a project. It would be nice if it were written in a way that I as a user of OOo would understand its importance.
Dan On Tuesday 16 January 2007 6:04 am, Lutz Hoeger wrote: > Hi, > > This message is cross-posted to discuss@, users@ and [EMAIL PROTECTED], in > order to reach a broad audience. However, I would be happy if most > of the comments / discussion / etc. could be sent to discuss@ only > (not sure if the reply-to header works here). > > WHAT > > I would like to propose an OpenOffice.org User Experience (UX) > project. > > WHY > > It is time to raise the curtain and to make OOo user experience > engineering more transparent to everybody who is affected or who is > interested. There has been a lot of discussion about UX work > recently, and to put it straight: being an integral part of OOo's > product development process, it simply is inappropriate for UX to > act like a "black box" component, especially since the entire > development process becomes more and more open. > > In fact, UX work already happens in many places on OOo, e.g. as > part of feature specifications or spread across various issues. But > there is no central home base for our activity on OOo, which makes > it hard to see and understand what we do. > > By increasing the visibility of our work, we make it easier to > find, understand, and comment on UX work. Even more important, we > would like to motivate others to participate and to contribute to > the user experience design of OpenOffice.org. > > The new project shall serve as a single point of contact for all > user experience related inquiries, and vice versa, it should be the > single point to learn about possible areas of involvement in the UX > space. > > Last but not least, the UX project should serve as a link to other > open user experience projects, e.g. educational projects or other > open source projects. > > HOW > > Starting as an incubator, we would like to launch UX as a new > project. Some years ago, we took first steps towards "hijacking" > the UI (user interface) project and to transform it into a dual > project, but we were never serious enough about it, and so this > failed. One reason might have been, that the UI project was > intended to be something very different: in the beginning, it was > targeted to developers, and it's main content was the UI source > code. Typically, UX people are not developers, and don't deal with > source code too much. But more importantly, the scope of UX > embraces more than UI only. Here is a first draft of our charter to > explain what makes up UX: > > "We are the OpenOffice.org User Experience Community. Our intention > is to improve the usefulness and usability of OpenOffice.org for > our users. We work in close cooperation with development, quality > assurance, Sun's User Experience Design Organizations, marketing, > documentation, and - last not least - the OpenOffice.org community. > We use methods and strategies in the areas of user-centered > software design, user research, expert evaluation and UI-design to > achieve our main goal, to make our products more successful in the > market." > > So I propose to start with a new UX project. Where necessary, we > can move UX related content off the UI project and into the new > one. > > Regarding roles, I would like to start this project as the project > lead. Leading Sun's StarOffice UX team, I work on StarOffice and > OpenOffice.org for about ten years. Together with my team, I feel > thrilled to seed a hopefully growing UX community on OOo. As for > the Co-Lead of the new project, I would like to propose Matthias > Mueller-Prove, who is probably well known by many of you already. > Since 2002, Matthias works as a user experience engineer and > interaction designer at Sun. > > AND NOW... > > Please feel free to share your thoughts on this proposal. Again, I > would like to have the discussion taking place at the mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED], but I will summarize and cross-post to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > and > users@ as appropriate. > > Thank You. > > Lutz Hoeger --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
