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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    KOffice Sprint Food for Tought 2: User experience
From:       Inge Wallin <inge () lysator ! liu ! se>
Date:       2008-10-03 13:12:11
Message-ID: 200810031512.11664.inge () lysator ! liu ! se
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This is the second Food for Thought mail in preparation for the KOffice 
sprint. This time it's about the user experience.  Other titles could have 
been "workflow" or "Usability" or "The big picture".

As I have indicated on IRC, I think we have a great infrastructure in Flake, 
Pigment, etc, but that we lack thinking about how the user will work with our 
applications. I feel that we have concentrated much on getting features 
ready, but that the features don't fit into each other very well.  With this 
I don't mean technically, but workflow wise.

A few cases in point:
* I created an empty KWord document and inserted a chart by moving it from the 
the "Add Shape" tool and into the document. That part worked well, but then 
the Default tool was active and I couldn't edit the chart itself, only the 
size, rotation, etc. To do that I have to click on the very non-obvious icon 
for the "Chart Editing Tool" that appears in the toolbox on the left.

I can see the logic behind this behaviour: For any shape that we insert, we 
may want place it and size it before starting on the internal settings for 
it. Fine, but some (many?) users will find it difficult to find the chart 
tool and start configuring the chart itself. After a few times, they will 
have learnt the behaviour and will be fine.  

What I'm after is is this a designed behaviour or just a side effect of the 
design of the flake library?

* After the insertion of the chart, I clicked on the text area above the chart 
and started to type some text.  Oops!  No text appears because the text tool 
isn't activated. This is worse, because it's completely confusing.  Surely 
not very many users will want to move or resize the text areas, but they will 
want to edit text.  It turns out that double clicking on the text area 
activates the text tool and now I can start entering text.

Perhaps a better way would be to make a default tool for each shape be 
activated when the shape is marked?

* Now I have typed a full line of text, and I start on the next line.  But 
oops again! The chart doesn't move -- it isn't anchored on the text by 
default.  So instead it starts wrapping around the text. Granted if I move 
the chart, the text rewraps around it beautifully, but I don't want that. I 
want it to move down the page as text is inserted above it. The big problem 
is that I couldn't find anywhere at all where to change the anchor of the 
shape. Is there a way to anchor a shape to a paragraph or character and not a 
page?

These are just examples, and I don't want to point specifically at KWord. It's 
just that I used KWord for my little test, and I'm sure that most of the 
other apps have similar quirks. Some of these issues have nothing to do with 
the apps themselves, but more with the design of Flake.

What I think is really important is that we look at these workflow or big 
picture issues and really try to put ourselves into the shoes of our users. I 
don't care if we release 2.0 with or without feature X or Y. What I care 
about is that with the features we *do* provide, the user experience should 
be really smooth.

This is something that the tech track should have as its main objective during 
the sprint. Plese make thorough reviews of the applications with the focus on 
providing a good user experience rather  than work through all items in all 
menus or toolbars. The latter is not unimportant, but far less important than 
the former.

	-Inge

PS.
Some smaller nitpicks while I'm at it:
 - The grouping and ungrouping  of shapes is on the Tool Options 
Dialog / "Advanced" tab of the Default Tool. This is a really obscure place.  
It should be somewhere else.
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