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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Fwd: Re: KOffice's usability
From:       Sven Lueppken <sven () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-11-08 11:37:59
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Hi all!

I was talking to Aaron J. Seigo about KOffice's usability yesterday because I 
believe that there many improvements have to be made. He already made a few 
proposals which seem quite appropiate to me but I hope we even get more stuff 
done in the next days / weeks.  I put usability on top of my personal TODO 
list as I would really like to see a cleaned up KOffice 1.3 :) (Yes, that 
also means I volunteer to work together with the usability team ;)
So, what do you think?

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: KOffice's usability
Date: Thursday 07 November 2002 12:24
From: "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo@olympusproject.org>
To: Sven Lueppken <sven@kde.org>

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Hi Sven...

On Thursday 07 November 2002 06:42, you wrote:
> I'm one of the KOffice developers and quite concerned about it's usability.

yes... functionaly it is becoming quite complete but the usability is
 trailing behind that...

> How easy to use is it? What can be done better? I would really like to

i think it is easy enough to use for most, but could be made much better.
 some key candidates for simplification include:

 o the initial document dialog
 o the configuration windows
 o the menu and toolbar layouts

the initial document dialog that appears when first starting up a koffice app
has several problems IMHO.. some things that would help it:

 o make "Open a recent document" another tab on "Create document from
template" tab widget
 o get rid of "Start with an empty document" and just have that as one of the
templates

that would leave just the tab widget and the option to open an existing
document. the action to open an existing document might simply be a push
button that opens a file dialog and then opens that file as soon as it is
selected in the file dialog. this button should be hidden when selecting File
- -> New.

this would get rid of all of the radio buttons and make the whole thing that
much simpler without sacrificing any features whatsoever.

one might also think about making this initial dialog a part of the main
window or even to hide the main application window while this dialog is
shown. it seems (and is reasonable that) having a modal dialog pop up in
front of the "actual window" frustrates many users as they feel less in
control and like the initial document window is preventing them from getting
at the main application window (which it is).

there are several such items in koffice that could benefit from a similar
working-over. perhaps the besit first step is to identify as many of these as
possible that are shared between all koffice apps and work through those one
at a time. once that is done then looking at specific applications would be a
good idea. what do you think?

take care ....

- --
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
    - Albert Einstein
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-------------------------------------------------------

Regards,
-- 
s v e n  l ü p p k e n
KDE Developer, sven@kde.org
Get KOffice 1.2 from http://download.kde.org/stable/koffice-1.2/
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