Renaissance:Status Meetings:2009-11-09

ux.openoffice.org
Quick Navigation User Experience Wiki Home User Experience Project Home User Experience Wiki Category Project Renaissance Team User Experience Team How To Join?

<< Back to Renaissance Status Minutes Page
Meeting Details

• 2009-11-09, 4:00 PM CET
• IRC details: irc.freenode.net #ux.openoffice.org

In Attendance

• Christoph Noack (IRC: christoph_n)
• Frank Loehmann (IRC: frankl)
• Christoph Lukasiak (IRC: clu_sun)
• phaUNTOtom

Agenda

• OpenOffice.org Conference in Orvieto
• Round Table

Round Table

• see IRC log

IRC Log

* christoph_n (n=christop@HSI-KBW-095-208-215-154.hsi5.kabel-badenwuerttemberg.de) hat #ux.openoffice.org betreten
<FrankL> Hi Christoph!
<christoph_n> Hi! :-)
<FrankL> Any special agenda topics for today?
<phaoUNTOtom> Hello
<christoph_n> Not from my side. There are still some things to do with regard to the OOoCon last week... Nothing special for Renaissance.
<christoph_n> (Btw, hi phaoUNTOtom.)
<FrankL> So do we want to talk about OOoCon?
<lizm> Hi Oh yes please give a summary
<christoph_n> If all agree, then yes.
<christoph_n> Hi Liz!
<lizm> Hi Christoph!Good to hear that you have all survived!
<FrankL> The UX team gave two presentations and two workshops.
<FrankL> More than 60 people attended the 'Project Renaissance - Designing a new user interface for OpenOffice.org' presentation.
<christoph_n> Okay, we may shed some light on: How much UX was there in general, how were the presentations received, and how was the food...
<FrankL> expensive :-)
<FrankL> if you did not want to eat pizza all day long.
<christoph_n> With regard to the presentation mentioned by Frank: From my point of view, the presentation was very good with regard to the topic itself. I'm sure many of the attendees got some new ideas what Project Renaissance is about. But, we didn't get through in some rare cases...
<FrankL> As allways. Sometimes you get asked things shown right before @ the presentation.
<christoph_n> Some people do still have problems (or better, we do have problems) to better differntiate between functionality and efficiency of already available functionality.  And, some people still resist on "provide more choices instead of selecting a good default among those choices". Sigh.
<christoph_n> our problems --> to get it communicated, the sender - receiver - problem ;-)
<FrankL> Yes, but I think Andreas did a good job and had prepared a good presentation.
<christoph_n> One of the first keynotes listed about 105 important success factors for establishing "changes". The last 100 were: communicate, communicate, communicate, ...
<FrankL> :_)
<christoph_n> @FrankL: Rare cases. Unfortunately, these people didn't had the time to attend our workshops...
<FrankL> :-)
<christoph_n> @FrankL: How was the second presentation (I know, but the others don't) ;-)
<lizm> How many people attended the OOoCon in general. I'm impressed that 60 were at the presentation
<lizm> ?
<christoph_n> (I don't know. Hard to guess, and I didn't see any official numbers.)
<FrankL> I have no read any official statement. Kay told me that they have prepared 500 bags with give aways and that not all have been distributed.
<lizm> OK, thx. Kay did tell me just this morning that they still had some things left over.
<christoph_n> 500??? 100 for the attendees, and 400 for the organization team? ;-)
<FrankL> The second presentation 'Getting usagetracking data, technical and security aspects and a look in the future how to provide the data' has been visited by only 10+ people.
<christoph_n> Liz, the general interest in UX topics wasn't that intensive in comparison to the Renaissance presentation.
<christoph_n> But, the UX topics in general were very visible. Especially IBM employees had several presentations with regard to Lotus Symphony. Fortunately, they adressed "general usability topics"...
<christoph_n> That means that the interest inside the teams is growing. Now we need to communicate the "very large impact" on the product quality - to convince the others involved in the product development process.
<FrankL> Unfortunately not and sometimes the QA sessions ran in parallel...
<christoph_n> Next topic workshops?
<FrankL> Yes.
<FrankL> Workshops had the problem to ran in parallel to the QA Camp.
<christoph_n> Maybe the others missed it: Unfortunately, we had only very small time slots for the workshops. That resulted in a shortened workshop by Andreas (Product Design) and the consolidation of the "Usability Done Live" and "Usage Data" workshop.
<FrankL> and the internet connection was broken in Workshop II...
* lizm hat die Verbindung getrennt (Read error: 104 (Connection reset by peer))
<christoph_n> What fun :-|
<christoph_n> Same for Liz ;-)
<FrankL> But Christoph dealed verry good with that situation :-)
<christoph_n> Workshop II (Usability Done Live) was based on usage data which required the attendees to use the internet connection to get the data. That resulted in a bit ... talking instead of doing.
<christoph_n> Although nobody requested help in advance, we got some nice topics in the workshop (three). One could be addressed without reliable internet connection --> to improve the search on the extension website with low effort
<christoph_n> Funnily, this topic has been raised by Frank Mau who was (also) there in the role of the Usage Data Tooling expert ;-)
<FrankL> BTW Liz has some hardware problems that is why she dropped off...
<christoph_n> (computer hardware, I guess *g*)
<FrankL> (She needs a paper clip to restart the Sun Ray ;-)
<christoph_n> Frank talked to me after the workshop. He considers to blog about the result of the workshop - maybe some of the ideas could even be integrated on the page. That would be great...
<christoph_n> A paper clip or Clippy?
<phaoUNTOtom> Clippy wouldn't get out of her screen.
<christoph_n> Before anybody asks. No, I hadn't had the time to summarize the results. I'll try to adress this today and to add some more information at: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/User_Experience_Done_Live
<christoph_n> One last thing (sorry for the monologue): Kami proposed a topic wrt his extension which can be used to insert Barcodes in documents. Although we didn't had time for his topic, he contacted the UX team on the ux-discuss list today! Woah!
<christoph_n> That's from my side...
<FrankL> But Clippy the paper clip had retired some years ago :-)  Microsoft made some videos showing how his life ends after being an annoying star :-)
<FrankL> OK, I have nothing to add.
<FrankL> So we are done for today?
<phaoUNTOtom> Do you care as an end user I ask some questions regarding Renaissance?  I promise it won't take long.
<christoph_n> Okay, then more generally: I'm sorry that I hadn't had the time to blog during the time being at the OOoCon. I will try to blog about that in the next few days. Maybe I'll try to play a little bit time machine and to blog each day minus 7 days (today, addressing the November 2nd). Stay tuned ;-)
<christoph_n> @phaoUNTOtom: sure
<phaoUNTOtom> When christoph_n said "provide more choices instead of selecting a good default among those choices" what does that mean?  I think that distinction is critical in the user's minds.
* lizm (n=chatzill@nat/sun/x-jivfahcltemokgiv) hat #ux.openoffice.org betreten
<christoph_n> Nice to have you back, lizm.
<lizm> Hi, that was wierd. Sorry I missed so much.
<lizm> I'll read the minutes. ;-)
<lizm> What are we discussing now?
<lizm> Or is the meeting over already?
<christoph_n> Okay, let's start. Soon, Andreas will send his presentation to the OOoCon team. There you will see that he talks about how to clean up the existing interface and to reduce the steps required for functionality which is required very often.
<christoph_n> @lizm: phaoUNTOtom asked what one of my earlier statements does mean.
<christoph_n> @lizm: It is about "When christoph_n said "provide more choices instead of selecting a good default among those choices" what does that mean?  I think that distinction is critical in the user's minds.".
<FrankL> FYI: Andreas is on vacation today.
<christoph_n> @phaoUNTOtom: Assume that if "inserting picture" is a usual task for users, why not ease this task to think about what interaction is really required. There are many little tasks which could benefit from a deep analysis.
<phaoUNTOtom> I think if you can distinguish that for the users during your efforts to communicate, that will go a long way.  I, in fact, have made proposals and had to catch and stop myself when I realized I was suggesting new functionality.  It is hard sometimes for us to distinguish between the two.  ;-)
<christoph_n> @phaoUNTOtom: One of the attendees asked something like "why not let the user chose"...
<lizm> I understood your comment to mean that the users still want the UI to be customizeable, and I think that is something we can fulfill when still giving best of knowledge default settings. Or am I getting it wrong?
<christoph_n> ... that would mean to offer multiple ways to accomplish one task. This isn't bad in general, but it means that we won't care about a _good_ default which fits the needs of most of the users.
<lizm> But isn't the defualt what we would focus on and just leave the customizeable bit in there for the advanced users to do their thing.
<christoph_n> @Lizz: Generally yes, but here we talk about two users being at the same time developers who already know in advance how OpenOffice.org works in detail. That means choice for them might make sense, but not for the other (roughly) 100 million users :-)
<christoph_n> For most people choice is just bad, because we have to make them think. It would be better to provide one very good way to do something ... and providing customizability (this does also include Extensions and proper APIs to enhance OpenOffice.org in special cases).
<christoph_n> @phaeoUNTOtom: That was one of the questions which have been raised? Was the description somehow understandable?
<christoph_n> @phaoUNTOtom: Concerning your last statement; sometimes it is hard for us, too :-)
<phaoUNTOtom> I have seen the effort to communicate better in the blogs such as http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/, and that is good!!!  Thanks.
<phaoUNTOtom> Yes, I see it here again.  :-)  That is the magic.  If you can convey the difference in your efforts to communicate, that will be helpful to us.  :-)
<christoph_n> Unfortunately, the videos don't work on my computer. But the Q&A session should be (also) available at: http://media.lscube.org/oooconf/4%20Nov%202009/Sala%20Etrusca (morning session).
<phaoUNTOtom> Hopefully, my feedback as an end-user is helpful.
<christoph_n> Then please provide us feedback if anything isn't quite understandable. Once, I proposed to tell everybody what might be interesting at ux-ui or ux-discuss. If this might be intersting for some more, we may even cover it in a blog posting. Okay? Btw, you said questions (plural). Anything more you are interested in?
<phaoUNTOtom> Not really.  I may come up with some more latter and will be back here.  :-)
<christoph_n> Definitively :-) That is something we rely on. The only thing we are unable to promise is to discuss any comment in detail - from experience we know how much time it takes. But in general, we rely on feedback. We don't think to build an interaction concept that fits to us ;-)
<christoph_n> Anytime :-)
<christoph_n> FrankL, LizM, * - anything else?
<FrankL> Nothing to add from my side today.
<lizm> no not from me today. I've been putting my nose into marketing and blogs, so not much for Renaissance.
<christoph_n> Important message: Thank you all for helping us to prepare the OOoCon UX contributions.
<christoph_n> Nothing from my side, too. So goodbye everybody!
<phaoUNTOtom> Communite doesn't mean talk more--just more effectily (and hopefully less talk is needed)
<phaoUNTOtom> . . . and less of your time is needed to communicate.  :-)
<phaoUNTOtom> Maybe it will take more time up front, but the overall time hopefully is less.  :-)
<phaoUNTOtom> That's all.  :-)
<christoph_n> Thank you, phaoUNTOtom. Some people ask too generally which requires muuuch time. Asking back may sometimes give the impression that we won't discuss it. That's sometimes a pity...
<christoph_n> Bye!
<FrankL> Bye!
* phaoUNTOtom hat die Verbindung getrennt (Remote closed the connection)
<lizm> bye