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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice needs some UX/UI volunteers, bad.

Not only LibreOffice, this is somewhat a general sentiment I have about most Open Source Software. If I were a designer I'd love to be part of such an important project like this.

I don't get why designers are always doing stuff like redesigning website X for free, without being asked to, but miss great opportunities to be in the spotlight by participating in projects like GNome, KDE or the likes. There are many examples of good OSS projects that could use some UX/UI love, one that comes to mind right now is Moodle, for example.

Is it designers that don't like to participate in OSS? Are programmers making it harder for them to join these type of projects or is simply the fact that they don't bring to much excitement or challenge to the design community?

>Not only LibreOffice, this is somewhat a general sentiment I have about most Open Source Software. If I were a designer I'd love to be part of such an important project like this. I don't get why designers are always doing stuff like redesigning website X for free, without being asked to, but miss great opportunities to be in the spotlight by participating in projects like GNome, KDE or the likes.

Because redesigning famous X website does bring them attention in their circles AND its something that they can do by themselves in little time.

Whereas participating in projects like Gnome/KDE is a messy, long term, no pay, proposition where they'll also have to put up with the opinions of non-designer contributors and be at their coding mercy.

Plus, they like to work on the platforms they use, and almost every professional designer uses either OS X or Windows.

Then redesign LibreOfice for Windows (in Photoshop) and hand over the artwork to the programmers, which, I think, would gladly implement something good-looking.

If it only worked this way.

For one, a Windows designer has access to Office if he wants an office suite. Why would he use LibreOffice? The price wouldn't entice him much, Office costs less than what he makes in a day's project.

Redesign it in OS X then? Given Office on OS X is 32bit and still contains apps that require the Rosetta emulator it would be a good choice.

Then again, I doubt designers ever hit the limits of Office on OS X.

Benchmark to entry and then constraints.

Like level one of a libreoffice effort would be to organize all the buttons on all the dialogs and make sure they are consistent, or something like that. There are probably a couple hundred standard ones, it's not sexy. It is some work though.

A level 10 would be doing something like reinventing the ribbon from office, which might be more of a gtk+ task than a libreoffice task, and the libreoffice guys might not even think that's in their domain or their problem. I think that could be a justifiable position too.

You have to actually collaborate a lot with the team just to find all of the work for both of these. Ux guys don't seem to be dedicated enough to those projects. And fwiw, the projects themselves might not be open to spending energy "reskinning" especially when libreoffice has so much other technical debt.

"A level 10 would be doing something like reinventing the ribbon from office, which might be more of a gtk+ task than a libreoffice task, and the libreoffice guys might not even think that's in their domain or their problem."

I think 'reinventing the ribbon from office' is exactly what I don't want as a daily user of Libreoffice/OpenOffice. Surely we can have a competition to find a new paradigm for an office UI? Ubuntu searchable menus (HUD) coupled with execution of the command from the search results would be something I'd be interested in.

>Ubuntu searchable menus (HUD) coupled with execution of the command from the search results would be something I'd be interested in.

You mean like the OSX help system? Yes, feature discoverability is the main issue I have with Office ribbons. For this reason alone it's IMO not well thought through. iWorks still has the best / most consistant UI, if only its features weren't so lacking. I'd much rather have LibreOffice copy these concepts, such as the info window, table insert hotkeys and spreadsheets with multiple tables per sheet.

> Ubuntu searchable menus (HUD) coupled with execution of the command from the search results would be something I'd be interested in.

Is that something beyond what Ubuntu already has? Just hit enter or click on the result and it executes.

Some developers don't appreciate the value of separating data from UI. A UI designer says, "Give me the data and I'll present it." But if they get a mixture of data and UI code, there's a serious problem, requiring a rewrite. If you're lucky, the project is already using UI templates, but that's no guarantee that they're flexible. It can be hard to keep a designer's interest if they're waiting on a complete refactor just to make a new UI even possible.

The worst I've seen is where users have been encouraged to embed UI elements (such as HTML or nonprinting ASCII) in raw data or settings to trigger certain functionality. That'll drive a UI designer to drink.

Maybe designers do that because it is a much more direct way to get hired or land a contract. Doing design for something like LibreOffice or Gnome has a really long turn-around time and your efforts are somewhat dependent on your teammates. Then, if your design is released, your potential employers/clients need to translate what you just did to how it is relevant to them. OTOH if you just redesign their website, that is a direct solicitation to them.

I guess it's not quite as easy as whacking up something in HTML and CSS, which might justify the recent trend towards supporting that in as many things possible.

I also think that the attractiveness of one of these projects can vary quite heavily depending on whether you're a UI/UX designer or a programmer, and there's always the opportunity cost of giving up working on something new and fancy.

"If I were a designer I'd love to be part of such an important project like this."

Great: pop your screen mockups somewhere first though. LibreOffice/OpenOffice has a LOT of users, and many of us have the interface and shortcuts wired into our neuron structure. Basically, gradualism might pay benefits...

I'm fairly sure the public's complaint with gnome 3 is that it has a ux team - which has resulted in ux changes the public hasn't necessarily appreciated. From what I've seen gnome has far more ux changes designed and documented than implemented - much of the uneven treatment is due to coding bandwith.

Good point. Designers are always giving fre psd's away. Maybe they could do the same, but for Linux UI components.

But you know, it might be that they work primarily in photoshop, which is runs on Windows / Mac OS??

I'm almost 100% sure all of the projects you've mentioned have at least one UI/UX designer. The problem as I see it is that you can't just throw more designers at a problem and have it work any better or faster.

>I don't get why designers are always doing stuff like redesigning website X for free.

Simple.

Because if they did assist with FOSS projects much of the time they would be dealing with developers who (a) think they know what users want better (b) have no respect for designers and (c) believe obscure feature X is more important than UI.

Remember this is the same group of people e.g. on Slashdot/Reddit who think the iPad is an overpriced toy and think people are sheep for buying it.

After the GNOME 3 disaster, it's understandable why many developers within the open source community have become skeptical of designers and their contributions.

Within a single release cycle, these designers managed to destroy what was once among the most vibrant of all open source projects. The existing GNOME users have been alienated by the absolutely horrible UI. Among their ranks were many good developers and other contributors, too, whose absence now prevents the project from recovering. A large portion of these users moved on to KDE or Xfce, rather than MATE, causing further harm to the GNOME project and community.

There are other cases, too. Windows 8 and the UI changes starting with Firefox 4 are other recent, and major, examples of the work of designers going terribly wrong. The end result is software that is nearly unusable, or much less usable than previous versions.

The skepticism you describe is very well earned and deserved.

This neatly illustrates another problem with redesigning popular software: no matter how much time you spend, no matter how beautiful you make the design, the people who're already using it are used to its current layout, and don't care about learning a new interface.

If you could give people a completely fresh, unprejudiced choice between Gnome 2 & 3, Windows 7 & 8, or Firefox 3.5 & 18, I bet many of them would choose the newer version. I don't think (most of) these UI decisions are objectively bad, and over the long run they might even pay off. But when the user upgrades and suddenly can't see how to make it Frobnicate, they get angry.

After you've learned hundreds of interfaces over 3 decades, you learn that newer can be, but isn't always better. So when I see YAIR, (Yet Another Interface Redesign), I get a case of deja poo, (I have seen this shit before).

Given that FOSS developers are, in some sense, their own users, (a) and (c) are not always unjustified.

For my personal use case for LibreOffice specifically, I don't give a damn how ugly it is, and I'm willing to have some patience if it's a bit slow, but crashing or hanging on a 160-page document is unacceptable. So adding a designer to the project wouldn't add any value to me.

This might be another good reason for the UNIX philosophy of keeping functionality (command line) and GUI separate.

I agree with the point that there is a lack of respect for designers in the area, and IMO more significantly, they would not be allowed full control of design; hard work could easily be ruined by differing opinions.

But FFS why did you have to bring apple in to this. Absolutely nothing to do with this, quit it.

> I agree with the point that there is a lack of respect for designers in the area...

That's because it looks like everything designers are touching (Gnome3, Unity and partly Firefox) starts to turn to crap.

Yes, I completely respect Designers and I understand that they can do wonders for every FLOSS project and I know that this sentence is completely biased...but there are many examples out there were a designer (or multiple) are trying to stuff their vision down our throats without any afterthoughts.

>But FFS why did you have to bring apple in to this. Absolutely nothing to do with this, quit it.

No, actually he made a very good point by bringing Apple into it. Apple, see, is the very place were design and UX reigns supreme over other considerations (of course they also have faults, every team has).

So, OSS developers bashing Apple and its UIs, are not the very best community to nurture biding UI designers.

It's worth noting that one of the code changes he talks about is going to have a big impact on UI:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WidgetLayout

With the previous code, the dialogs couldn't flex or expand, so they had to be sized for the longest translated text. Which, as you can imagine, was not only ugly but poor for usability.

It is now much easier for them to redesign dialogs for UX/UI reasons.

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