LibreOffice: The Next Five Years • Hacker News Board

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#141

Post by mapgrep » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

Democrats in the US House of Representatives just approved a $741 billion defense spending package. It will almost certainly clear the senate and be signed by the president.

Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40 LibreOffice developers and maybe say 20 more. There would be no need for these acrobatics around source availability.

I understand why the companies need to do this. But there is an existing system for funding things with widespread benefits to society. It’s called the government.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#142

Post by danShumway » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

sxg wrote: post #103

osrec wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex trader, I can confirm that the new ribbon interface, when it first came out, caused me and my colleagues a world of pain. We knew all the shortcuts keys in the old version. The ribbon UI meant that a big chunk of the previous shortcuts didn't work anymore. Killed our productivity for a good few months.

Had the ribbon interface been the original UI and the traditional menu-based interface the new UI, it sounds like you and your colleagues would have still faced the same frustrations. To me, it sounds like your issue is with change rather than the effectiveness of either type of UI.

For me, that's the point.

For a program as ubiquitous as Word (and as complicated as Word), unless there were clear benefits from the new interface, it shouldn't have been changed. The change itself was the problem.

Your comment is getting at an important, fundamental UX principle: all conceptual change is inherently painful, and every time you ask a user to re-learn something you are always wasting their time, even if the new design is better.

Sometimes a UX designer looks at two interfaces as completely separate, and thinks their job is just to pick the best one. The reality is that usually UX decisions can't be separated from the current state of the app. UX design is more like surgery, and the invasiveness of the operation has to be a consideration.

Having said that, I'm mildly skeptical that the interface didn't need to be changed. The old interface for Word was extremely user-unfriendly. If you go through a few of the interviews about Ribbon[0], there was some really interesting thought put into the new approach around discoverability, and while I'm not sure I agree with all of the theory they used to justify it[1], the changes did seem to be addressing a real problem.

But I think it's debatable whether or not the discoverability benefits were worth the pain, and I think there may have been better ways to roll out the changes.

[0]: sorry, too lazy to hunt them down and link them

[1]: I am mildly skeptical of contextual menus/toolbars. They're not wrong, they just have drawbacks that people don't always consider. Sometimes it's useful to tell people what is disabled, and to give them grounded, unchanging "landmarks" in the UX that they can use orient themselves while using a program.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#143

Post by Pxtl » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

Jonnax wrote: post #38

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X…

I don't think anybody is bemoaning the loss of the old Office buttons. The buttons were always kinda bad.

The problem is that the ribbon also killed the menu bar. Menu bars are a standard, known quantity across every application, which clean easy semantics for keyboard access. On some OSes they even augment the menus with searchability, celebrating the power of plain text.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#144

Post by rubber_duck » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

red_admiral wrote: post #76

Jonnax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X…

I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doe…

Your argument supports his - Ribbon is better for discovery, keyboard shortcuts are there for routine performance.

It's not just begginers who value feature discovery.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#145

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

signal11 wrote: post #120

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

> Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Almost anything could be described as a fad. Interactive computers were seen as a fad once. Punched cards were good enough! The command line was good enough! For complex applications (roughly defined as, lots of nested menus), the ribbon UI is an improvement as it s…

>Almost anything could be described as a fad. //

I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?).

There's stuff you want to do that punch cards don't allow, eg duplicate a program virtually; but there's not stuff people wanted to do that menu based wordprocessor UI prevented.

Ribbons fine, but no advance for me over menus, on balance I prefer menus but that might just be familiarity and age.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#146

Post by HeckFeck » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:26 PM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #79

ghaff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>perfected after years of refinement and familiarity That can be a problem though. One person's familiar tool with its well-known quirks and peculiarities is a newcomer's inscrutable and illogical interface.

Generally, though, you shouldn't optimize GUI:s for new users but for intermediate users. [0] Cooper, "About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design"

That should be a tenant of UI design, especially for any kind of productivity software.

Think of the Blender, GIMP or Sony Vegas GUIs. Daunting the first time you open them, but after you've successfully finished a few creations you'll begin to appreciate their power.

For any serious work, overly-simplified GUIs are quickly exhausted. They may get a pass for IM or social media apps, but I can't think of many other useful applications.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#147

Post by ghaff » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:28 PM UTC

monk_e_boy wrote: post #135

ghaff wrote: post #51

There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that discussion which is the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking personally, I'm very glad that there is a free software office suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I sincerely hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing them around to people and trying to merge their edits and comments is never again the norm for me. Shared docu…

Agreed - students have already moved to google docs or MS Word with OneDrive. We are used to giving feedback using these tools, students making changes and getting those signed off by us. Full history of changes. Full history of lecturer comments. Backed up online. Editable on phones, laptops, PCs... This is the world they are expecting when they enter employment, or start their own start up.

To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that there's still the level of apparent interest in standalone LibreOffice that there is. I work somewhere that was almost exclusively a LibreOffice shop but we adopted one of the online services. Although we didn't really force people to switch, I don't know the last time I've seen a LibreOffice document even if I imagine some people still use it.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#148

Post by jellicle » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:28 PM UTC

Jonnax wrote: post #38

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X…

> It's bad UI if people just learn where to click.

That is literally the entire and sole purpose of a user interface.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#149

Post by shawxe » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:29 PM UTC

edoloughlin wrote: post #134

Jonnax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X…

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I…

I agree with this completely. It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category than it is for me to scan through a bunch of irregularly sized tiles for the icon and description of the configuration I need. For me, all of the pictures just lower the density of the information and cause it to take longer to parse every single time.

I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. I would think that it would be easiest for new users (as it is easiest for myself) to have options sorted into neat menus with uniformly sized elements where information is laid out in a vertical list (which is how lists are written in basically all left-to-right and right-to-left languages) so that it is easier to parse quickly.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#150

Post by tester34 » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #33

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

Your school was wrong to teach any program. Ui follows fads and always will. Thus you need to learn how to use any ui that might come.

I don't think so, but I also don't think that it's going to be popular opinion around foss/computer people

MS Office software is used around shittton of workplaces and from time to time in day-to-day life, so making people somewhat proficent at it is good for everybody except MS competitors.

I'm not sure what do you mean by teaching "UI" - they teach how to get things done with given software.