OpenSource Usability Labs

In long discussions with Christoph (who was one of the most active UX people in OpenOffice) I always said that I think OpenOffice has no future. I came to this conclusion because I think Free Software will not work if the community is basically not allowed to submit code or to steer the direction of the project, but is degraded to do everything the owner of the project does not want to pay for.

So you can imagine how excited I was about the raise of the truly independent initiative “The Document Foundation”. I had to change my mind concerning the future of what once was StarOffice. We suddenly have a prosperous and truly Free project.

It is a pity that it needed a fork to achieve this. On the other hand forking seems to be some sort of fashionable in office software at the moment, as most of KOffice developers chose to fork the project to Calligra Suite. But mechanisms of Free Software development are hard to understand for some people.

So at the end of last year I had another very interesting and long talk to Christoph, who is now one of the most active UX people in LibreOffice. And I decided I want to join the project and participate in facilitating the User Experience for LibreOffice user. This has some selfish reasons, as I am one of the partially annoyed users myself. But it also has to do with my ambition to create a set of desperately needed Free Software, that is not only usable, but astonishingly good. An office suite definitely is part of this set, as it is one of the most basic tasks people want to do with their computer.

On the other hand: I am a bit scared seeing the size of the project. I joined the ux mailing list, where Christoph told me “you will get one or two mails per day” and I now get more mails per day than I can even count (making it worse: KMail currently has a bug resulting in not filtering incoming mails!). I still wonder how we can get work done with this amount of noise on the list.

To get going, I have decided to keep myself out of a lot of things I do not feel I can contribute to. I am not an artist, so I do not talk about icons and such.

But I was very happy when Cederic asked for some help in redesigning the “Fields Dialogue” in writer. I happily said I will jump in, even though I cannot say I have achieved much so far. But one thing I do understand: This dialogue really needs more than a face lift. It is hard to understand what this dialogue is actually used for.

My personal highlight of this dialogue so far: You can count the amount of words in your document in letters. If you have three words in your document, the field shows you a “C” (you can choose whether you want to have the “C” in lower or uppercase). See what else I will find in there. But things like this don’t make it easy to understand what is actually going on in there – or even how to sustainably improve the dialogue.

Summing it all up:
Hello LibreOffice, I glad you are there and I am happy to join. Let’s have some fun and rock the Office world.

After Conny asked me to, I moved the introduction of Tine 2.0 Concepts into the Tine 2.0 Wiki today. When I did this I was shocked to see how old most information in the Users-section was. So additionally to adding the introduction I ended up updating some more pages in the wiki. But as time is always a little short there is still some work to do. So if you feel competent, please add some features to the description of the Tine 2.0 applications.

Today I have started an introduction on the main concepts of Tine 2.0. I hope this will be helpful to new and experienced Tine-users.

I have chosen not to post this introduction as blog-post, since I will try to keep them up-to-date. So you will have to take a look at the static articles in our blog.

So far there is:

• Tine 2.0: concepts and ideas
  • Choosing an application
  • Filtering Lists
  • Places – or how to manage visibility
  • Working with records

I am very happy about comments since I will try to keep working and improving the articles.

I have decided to provide some hints how to efficiently work with Tine. And I will do this as a series of blog posts within the next time, accompanying the upcoming spring 2009 release of Tine. Let us start with

Question #1: If Tine 2.0 is so usable, why is there a need for a tutorial?

Tine has been developed with a strong focus on usability. Usability experts and interaction designer have been integrated into the development from day 1 on. We regularly conduct usability tests to improve the product even further. Nevertheless usable does not equal simple or easy to learn. Both attributes are important aspects of a usable product – and of course we try to make Tine as simple and easy to learn as possible. But these attributes are not the foremost criteria for optimizing the user-experience of Tine.

When setting the scope for Tine we have decided that interactions and dialogues of Tine should always be

1. enjoyable – Tine is designed to be fun to use. So everyone should like to use Tine.
2. efficient – Working with Tine must always be efficient. Tine should never come into your way.

In opposite you can say Tine does not maximize the power for a first-time-user. We do not try to oversimplify the rather complex process of a groupware: different, cross-depending applications, a very detailed rights-management,…

So there is a need for some tips how to work efficiently with Tine. These will follow in later posts and hopefully help you to enjoy business collaboration with Tine even more!