Hi,
This message is cross-posted to discuss ,
users and devui, in order to
reach a broad audience. However, I would be happy if most of
the
comments / discussion / etc. could be sent to discuss only
(not sure if
the reply-to header works here).
WHAT
I would like to propose an OpenOffice.org User Experience
(UX) project.
WHY
It is time to raise the curtain and to make OOo user
experience
engineering more transparent to everybody who is affected or
who is
interested. There has been a lot of discussion about UX work
recently,
and to put it straight: being an integral part of OOo's
product
development process, it simply is inappropriate for UX to
act like a
"black box" component, especially since the entire
development process
becomes more and more open.
In fact, UX work already happens in many places on OOo, e.g.
as part of
feature specifications or spread across various issues. But
there is no
central home base for our activity on OOo, which makes it
hard to see
and understand what we do.
By increasing the visibility of our work, we make it easier
to find,
understand, and comment on UX work. Even more important, we
would like
to motivate others to participate and to contribute to the
user
experience design of OpenOffice.org.
The new project shall serve as a single point of contact for
all user
experience related inquiries, and vice versa, it should be
the single
point to learn about possible areas of involvement in the UX
space.
Last but not least, the UX project should serve as a link to
other open
user experience projects, e.g. educational projects or other
open source
projects.
HOW
Starting as an incubator, we would like to launch UX as a
new project.
Some years ago, we took first steps towards
"hijacking" the UI (user
interface) project and to transform it into a dual project,
but we were
never serious enough about it, and so this failed. One
reason might have
been, that the UI project was intended to be something very
different:
in the beginning, it was targeted to developers, and it's
main content
was the UI source code. Typically, UX people are not
developers, and
don't deal with source code too much. But more importantly,
the scope of
UX embraces more than UI only. Here is a first draft of our
charter to
explain what makes up UX:
"We are the OpenOffice.org User Experience Community.
Our intention is
to improve the usefulness and usability of OpenOffice.org
for our users.
We work in close cooperation with development, quality
assurance, Sun's
User Experience Design Organizations, marketing,
documentation, and -
last not least - the OpenOffice.org community. We use
methods and
strategies in the areas of user-centered software design,
user research,
expert evaluation and UI-design to achieve our main goal, to
make our
products more successful in the market."
So I propose to start with a new UX project. Where
necessary, we can
move UX related content off the UI project and into the new
one.
Regarding roles, I would like to start this project as the
project lead.
Leading Sun's StarOffice UX team, I work on StarOffice and
OpenOffice.org for about ten years. Together with my team, I
feel
thrilled to seed a hopefully growing UX community on OOo. As
for the
Co-Lead of the new project, I would like to propose
Matthias
Mueller-Prove, who is probably well known by many of you
already. Since
2002, Matthias works as a user experience engineer and
interaction
designer at Sun.
AND NOW...
Please feel free to share your thoughts on this proposal.
Again, I would
like to have the discussion taking place at the mailing list
discussooo, but I will summarize and cross-post to devui and
users as
appropriate.
Thank You.
Lutz Hoeger
--
Sun Microsystems GmbH Lutz Hoeger
Nagelsweg 55 Sr. Manager User Experience
StarOffice
20097 Hamburg http://www.sun.de
Germany mailto:lutz.hoegersun.com
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