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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    KOffice 2.2, usability and the Q4 sprint
From:       Inge Wallin <inge () lysator ! liu ! se>
Date:       2009-08-31 14:07:39
Message-ID: 200908311607.39489.inge () lysator ! liu ! se
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As far as I know, most of the KOffice development team agrees that we should 
frame the 2.x releases like this:
 - 2.0 Platform release, mostly (only?) for developers
 - 2.1 For early adopters
 - 2.2 For end users.
I'm not sure it has been written down, but that's at least how we have 
discussed it.  That 2.0 was a platform release is without doubt, since the 
release notes said so, and several blogs as well afterwards.

What I think is that if we want to make KOffice 2.2 suitable for actual end 
users, we should focus much of our efforts during the 2.2 development on 
improving the user experience.  In fact, I think that if we *don't* do this, 
we will not have a end user ready product when 2.2 is released.

The best way to do this would be to work with real usability people.  I have 
asked Celeste Lyn Paul (seele) if she would be willing to work with us during 
2.2, and she has said yes with some provisos. So it seems that we can actually 
do it if we decide so.

To start effort in a good way, I had the idea to invite her to the Q4 sprint 
in Oslo/Berlin. I brought up this idea in #koffice on IRC, but I got some 
opposition from people who were there at the time.  There were two different 
points:

 1. We have already decided to use the next sprint for API discussions because 
we want to freeze our API's and make people create plugins outside the main 
source tree.

 2. There was already a discussion about usability in an earlier sprint, and 
much of that is still to be implemented [1].

For the first point, I would say that these are not mutually exclusive.  Some 
people are very interested in the details of the API, others are more 
interested in making KOffice a very good end user product.  Thus they can 
happen at the same time in parallel.

For the second point, I would say that that page addresses a lot of details, 
but there is nothing about the big picture.  I think we could benefit very 
much from working with Celeste.  

So, I hereby propose that we take usability serious by inviting Celeste to the 
sprint and try to work with her over the 2.2 cycle.  Let's put articles like 
this [2] to shame.

	-Inge

[1]http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Meetings/November_2008_meeting/Decisions
[2]http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/enderle/the-endemic-problem-with-
free-products/?cs=35227

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