Proposing a new User Experience project on OOo

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

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.

...to be completed

Questions

...to be completed

Votes

Positive	Negative	Neutral
Mathias Bauer, Jan 16
Ian Lynch, Jan 16
Bernd Eilers, Jan 16
Chad Smith, Jan 16
Christian Lippka, Jan 16
Cor Nouws, Jan 16
Peter Burow, Jan 16
		Dan Lewis, Jan 16
Summary as of Jan 16
7	0	1
Juergen Schmidt, Jan 17
Frank Schönheit, Jan 17
Thorsten Behrens, Jan 17
Ain Vagula, Jan 17
Bernhard Dippold, Jan 17
Christian Jansen, Jan 17
Sophie Gautier, Jan 17
Eike Rathke, Jan 17
Summary as of Jan 17
15	0	1