Symphony Contribution UX Analysis
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AOO UX Symphony Contribution
The recent donation of IBM Symphony source code to the Apache OpenOffice community presents both challenges and opportunities to the user experience of OpenOffice products moving forward.
On one hand, the OpenOffice user experience is really good, and many people have worked really hard to deliver a great user experience. On the other hand, the IBM Symphony user experience is also really good. Neither product is better than the other, rather, they are just different.
Diversity presents opportunity. If design is choice, then we have two great products as sources of great user experience design.
While both OpenOffice and Symphony are based on similar core technology, there are many differences between the suites. OpenOffice is a collection of six products, while Symphony is a subset, containing three products. Beyond features and capabilities, the user experience for each offering has strength and weaknesses. The best possible user experience will ultimately be an outcome of migrating and merging the best user experience elements from each of the offerings into a new code base. Features found in one offering, but not the other, present clear and present migration opportunities. Features found in both offerings, present an opportunity to merge the user experience.
The challenge before us is how we choose the best user experience, and how do we allocate scare resources to deliver the best user experience possible for our users.
UX Migration/Merge Considerations
Be mindful of the following considerations when exploring UX migration/merge candidates.
- when considering migration candidates ensure the proposed user experience elements support our core use cases and tasks
- when considering merge candidates, be respectful of the effort of your peers who implemented the current implementation
- where possible, build on our user's existing knowledge
- seek a consistent, unified experience, but not at the expense of individual contextual needs of individual editors
- it's OK to take features out if they do not support the our core use cases and tasks
