User Experience/Improved Styles
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Contents
Presentation
Improving the use of styles in Writer is a recurrent subject on the User Experience discussion list. We can identify three main questions:
- How to improve the user experience of the style-related dialogs and User Interface elements, in terms of usability, productivity and enjoyment?
- How can we incite the user to use styles rather than hard formating (for his own good)?
- How can we enhance the default styles to make Writer looks more appealing and provide a better User Experience?
Status of this activity
This activity is independent of other User Experience projects, such as the recent Renaissance. It could be broken in sub-activities or milestones if required.
Currently, the brainstorming season is on. Please add your ideas, your design proposals and future user interface mockups. In the next step, we will have to rate the requirements and the ideas and select an adequate design solution. Until we get close to development, a roadmap is not necessarily needed.
The problem
Styles usage is often misunderstood or found «too much complicated» by end users, who often prefer using the formatting toolbar instead of styles.
The fact is styles are one of the most powerful features a user could use to increase its productivity, but they don't think so, beeing afraid of the feature. One of the most common reply over style is «I know I should use them, I have to think about it, I don't know how its works and I don't have time to look further».
Some suggestions
Sebastien Just has made a list of suggestion in this mail. Feel free to add your own ;).
The Styles panel
- The style panel should be always visible (in my opinion, hard formatting should not exist at all, but that's another discussion…)
- Instead of just showing the name of the style, should display a example of text formatting with the style (like the font selector.)
- Avoid using contextual menus for «Modify» and «New» (contextual menus are always a bad thing when it's the only way to do something), because people are not aware of the way to change the styles. Maybe a «Modify» icon next to the style example should be a good thing.
- The «New style» button should not be only an icon, but icon + text.
- People don't understand the difference between paragraph, character, pages, frame and numbering styles. The buttons are not self-explanatory. We should have buttons with icon+text in the toolbar to explain it. The style list presentation using examples should show help explain the difference too.
- The combobox Style filter is quite difficult to understand while it's an handy tool. Placing it on top of the Frame panel should show people it's importance. At the bottom of the panel, they don't see it at all and don't even try to click on it. Maybe a folder like presentation (like layouts in Photoshop) may be a good replacement for it.
Default Styles
- Maybe the number of default styles provided should both be reduced and provide much more visual differences between them.
- I also think that the default styles should be reworked to provide a more eye-candy look to new documents. It may help in OpenOffice end user adoption to write documents that look really nice even if they don't play with styles or hard formatting. We can see how Apple's iWork productivity suite is fun to use as documents are rendering so «cool» even in the earliest stage of document creation.
The way we approach formatting
Page Style Confusion
Jaron Kuppers has said that “OpenOffice.org poorly distinguishes between page styles and selected individual pages. The Format-Page menu option is improperly named, as the user is in fact changing the page style. There really is no way to effectively format the current page without explicitly creating a new page style and then applying that style to the selected page which is extremely confusing to most users.„ The subject has also been longly discussed in the thread about page numbering.
See Also
Some proposal by Leonard Mada to enhance the selection of styles: User_Experience/UI_ideas#Styles_button. See also the palette idea in this post by Clément Pillias (in section ‘the complex solution’.)
