Revision as of 21:17, 12 June 2008

User Intro

I am currently a new member of the User Experience Community, and will add more to my user page in the future.

Reach me at JaronBaron @ gmail (dot) com

I am primarily interested in the following topics:

- New UI design

- New user experience

- Graphic design of UIs, such as icons, logos, etc...

- Organizing the current rules for designing OO.o 2's UI and creating rules for the future UIs

I would like to see user experience compatibility between the different OO.o suite products which I believe will be beneficial both in programming and maintaining OO.o but also gives the user a continuously intuitive experience. That is to say interacting with a table in Writer should be the same as in Calc.

My Thoughts & Ideas, My Grand Scheme for the UI

Intro and my existential view of office suites

I want to start off by talking about office suites in general.

What is the difference between the different programs in office suites?

Answer: Nothing (or rather it should be). The objects contained within the different suites are exactly the same, and in theory should behave the same for a user consistent experience. However, most fail to operate this way. If I want to create a spreadsheet with some paragraphs to explain contents, should I use a spreadsheet program or should I use a document program? The answer should be that it doesn't matter but the default tool set available in the spreadsheet program should make it easier to use for a document that contains primarily spreadsheets.

An Object Based Design

Object oriented programming comes from the natural urge to classify and order things. In office programs the UI approach should be as intuitive to program (I mean in terms of objects) as it is for the user to navigate. Below I have written a list of the objects that I identify as the core objects contained within documents. The list was made with a focus on document programs (aka Writer) so please keep that in mind. Especially the page object, which contains objects relevant only to

• Pages
  • Page Style
  • Pre-defined text spaces (this could be something other than text, such as tables for OO.o Calc)
    • Body text (free form document writing has no need for body text, ex: newspaper-articles don't wrap from page to page, and might even skip pages)
    • Style or Section dependent content objects
      • Headers
      • Footers
      • Siders (a new concept, its applicable to documents with things like numbered lines)
  • Breaks (normally things like line breaks are under the page category, but that is not appropriate since breaks belong to the body text box)
    • Style
  • Layers (All documents benefit from layers, ex: watermarks on simple text document)

• Text Boxes
  • Text Box Style
  • Text
  • Box Links
  • Columns
  • Breaks
  • Footnote space
    • Line
    • Column/Layout
    • "Page" (since this basically restricts the use of the remaining text box space and is only relevant for linked text boxes, page is a misnomer)

• Text
  • Characters
    • Special Characters (besides the normal special characters also implies images as characters which is relevant mostly for lists)
  • Lists
    • Bullets
    • Numbering
    • Sections
  • Paragraphs

• Figures
  • Canvas (I use canvases since the following objects can be intermixed within any given figure, ex: a picture with an arrow)
    • Pictures
    • Charts
    • Drawings
    • Placeholders
  • Captions

• Tables
  • Spreadsheets (tables that contain primarily text and have a local referencing system for functions etc...)
  • Organizational tables (tables that contain and organize any/all objects, ex: a table that has multiple subfigures but is a single figure and has a single caption)
  • Captions

• Shapes/text boxes/vector-based graphic objects

• Rastered images/pictures

• Media (These categories are completely different but current office suites have failed to incorporate them effectively and I doubt their user functionality is well defined)
  • Movies
  • Sounds
  • Animation/Flash/interactive web content

• Smart text/References/hyperlinks/scripts
  • Literary references
  • Object references (ex: A figure hyperlink such as Fig. 1, where the number changes based on figure number order and clicking the words take you to figure 1)
  • Text references (such as hyperlinks which reference the current section title)
  • Web Hyperlinks
  • Footnotes (the textual refrence, the footnote space falls under the page category)
  • Bibliography/Scientific References
  • Content Tables (Index, Table of figures, etc...)
  • Bookmarks? (Reluctant to include this since they are better defined as a form of object metadata and not text related metadata)
  • Notes? (Reluctant to include this since they are better defined as a form of object metadata and not text related metadata)
  • Auto text (external metadata references)
    • Static (creates static text, such as inputting the date)
    • Dynamic (changes based on current metadata values, such as a "current date" script)

• Fields (end user interactive objects)
  • Form fields
    • Text/number
    • Template text (such as mm/dd/yyyy, date entry)
    • Dropdown menus
    • etc... (there is a long list of potential form fields)

There may be more kinds of objects or a better way to categorize these objects and I am constantly refining the list, especially when it comes to the last two categories.

I think the major difference between the different office suites would be in the definition of a page.

Object Properties

After trying to identify the objects within office suites I startes to create a list of the objects properties. This list is quite extensive but I have included a preliminary example with the text object. Note that text is pretty much the traditional character and paragraph format options.

• Text
  • Style
  • Text
    • Font
    • Bold
    • Italic
    • Strikethrough
    • Color
    • Background Color
    • Size
    • Direction/rotation
    • Subscript
    • Superscript
    • Line spacing
    • Alignment
    • Indents
    • Paragraph spacing
    • Tabs
    • Drop caps
    • Font effects
    • Character spacing
    • Hyphenation
    • Text flow
  • Lists
    • Level
    • Bullet/Number (Character or image as character that is the number/bullet)
    • Content of auto space preceding text (ex: “#.#.→“ as opposed to “#-#→“ where → is a tab)