Difference between revisions of "Proposing a new User Experience project on OOo"

Revision as of 11:00, 18 January 2007

This page gathers comments about the User Experience project proposal, sent out on Jan 16, 2007.

Votes

Original Proposal

Subject: [discuss] Proposing a new User Experience project on OOo
Date   : 16 Jan 2007 13:24:05 +0100
From   : Lutz Hoeger <Lutz.Hoeger@sun.com>
To     : discuss@openoffice.org
CC     : users@openoffice.org, dev@ui.openoffice.org

Hi,

This message is cross-posted to discuss@, users@ and dev@ui, 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 
discuss@ooo, but I will summarize and cross-post to dev@ui and users@ as 
appropriate.

Thank You.

Lutz Hoeger

-- 

Sun Microsystems GmbH           Lutz Hoeger
Nagelsweg 55                    Sr. Manager User Experience StarOffice
20097 Hamburg                   http://www.sun.de
Germany                         mailto:lutz.hoeger@sun.com

Comments

Mathias Bauer, 16 Jan 2007 15:58:56 +0100:

This will be a very important and useful addition to our existing
projects, especially as this is a project that does not appeal to
developers primarily and so will allow a lot more people to contribute
to the project.

Bernd Eilers, 16 Jan 2007 17:09:01 +0100:

It would be good to have an own homepage/project for this, I have 
already seen people searching for something like this.
(...)
The "incubator" project category is for something completly new that 
should grow up independently a little bit before becoming part of the 
product. But as you just pointed out UX work "already happens" and it is 
already part of the product. So IMHO we should just skip that step and 
create the ux project in the "accepted projects" category right away 
arguing that this is already "accepted" work which already is "part of 
the product" and that what´s being done by creating a project for it is 
just some kind of different modularization and that just some part of 
what´s already being done is going to become it´s own homepage.

Answer from Stefan Taxhet, 16 Jan 2007 21:21:41 +0100:

   I think Lutz went the proper way by following our guidelines and propose 
   an incubator project. While UX work is already part of OOo engineering 
   the UX project has yet to find its place in the broader OOo community.
   So I would be prefer if the UX project starts in the Incubator category, 
   establishes an active group of contributers, is accepted and used as a 
   valuable resource for OOo developers and users and finally be promoted 
   to the status of an accepted project ...

Answer from Lutz Hoeger, 16 Jan 2007 21:46:18 +0100:

      Though I feel honored by Bernd's suggestion, I absolutely don't want to 
      ignore any community governing policies. This would be a bad start for 
      a new project, aimed at building up a UX community.
      (...)
      So I agree with Stefan, in that ux.ooo should start as incubator and try 
      to build up a community first, before it grows up into a real project.

Chad Smith, 16 Jan 2007 11:12:02 -0500:

I would LOVE a place to talk about UX!

Cor Nouws, 16 Jan 2007 22:42:04 +0100

(...) it will have to cope with the situation that the work involved is 
ongoing business. So while new contributors find their place, and existing 
contributors sometimes find a new role, the work may not be affected.
That will make it special compared to other incubator projects, I guess.

...to be completed

Questions

...to be completed