Tuesday, 9th October 2007, 1 Comment »
The usability of word processing toolbars
During the recent E-Government Bar Camp I may have far to vigorously complained, loudly and slightly drunkenly, over a how bad I think word processors’ user interfaces are, especially Open Office.
I may have used the words along the lines of The open source community has the ability to take huge exciting risks, without fear of bean counters and financial doom hanging over it, and evolve the user interface into something so much better than the metaphors we’ve got now.
.
Jono DiCarlo’s Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software pretty much sums it up much better what I rambled on about.
Anyway, with my ranting still ringing in my ears I decided to start lurking around the Open Office UI Project a few days later and see how I could actually do something about it (I’m on taking January off and want to do something useful). I even started playing around with some ideas on making the toolbar better.
I’m of the opinion (and please correct me if I’m wrong) that at least 90% of the people that use word processors don’t know how to use them properly nor do they use 90% of the functionality. They don’t understand concepts like ’styles’ or they’re just to lazy to use them. Basically in my concept I wanted to
- focus on the stuff most of us generally do - Headings, paragraphs, lists and tables
- eliminate those extra style abilities that the lazy fall back on from the toolbar
- remove any additional ‘mystery meat’ icons (what does that compass do?)
- have common understandable page style names (instead of ‘heading 1′ - ‘Page Heading’)
- show what the style looks like
Maybe in January I’ll send some more time looking into it.
One Comments to “The usability of word processing toolbars”
[...] wanted for a while now to get more into contributing to open projects, however time and being to get actual achievable results had put me off. Until Mozilla called for [...]