The Document Foundation is the small non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. It oversees the project and community, and is now expanding with new developer roles. So let’s say hello to Dan Williams, who joins the team to work on design and user interface (UI) improvements, with an initial focus on macOS: Tell us a bit about […]
excited to see what this means for the project, the poor UI/UX of libreoffice is easily its most glaring flaw imo
it works, but it’s far from ideal. a lot of features are tucked away behind unintuitive context menus, and on some systems you need to do a bit of configuration for it to look right. for example, it uses bitmap icons by default, so if you use a hidpi screen the icons will look atrocious until you figure out how to switch them to vector icons.
and an ugly UI is a problem by itself. it’s uninviting, unwelcoming. it gives a feeling of jank, of amateurism, and not in a good way. if you open the app for the first time and immediately think “this looks like it was last updated in 2003”, it’s not a good thing.
That are well documented and don’t change once you figure out where they are. “UX” is code for “we’ll rearrange everything you need twice a year and force you to constantly re-learn our app because fuck you.”
if you open the app for the first time and immediately think “this looks like it was last updated in 2003”, it’s not a good thing
Why not? To me it’s reassuring because it means the procedures I memorized years ago probably haven’t changed. It’s the same reason people like the command line so much. Office software is a solved problem and arguably peaked in 2003 before MS Office started adding all the bullshit, it doesn’t need to be updated every single year.
it works for you because you got accustomed to it. cool! genuinely! but not everyone is a power user, not everyone will want to sift through documentation to find out how to do the thing they want that’s easy to do with word
from the non-techy people i’ve spoken to who’ve used libreoffice, they all agree that it’s worse than ms office because it gets in the way more. it’s harder to do stuff, because it’s less intuitive to them.
people in 3d modeling use blender. people in audio production use audacity. people in office work and schools, usually, do not use libreoffice, because if you can afford ms office it’s just better for them. maybe that will change with office now being ai-infested webviews held together with gum, javascript and ever increasing subscription prices… then again, that hasn’t slowed down adobe
imo the upcoming audacity 4 is an incredible example of open-source ui redesign, and should be an inspiration to everyone. the ui is sleeker, faster, easier to use, and yet it’s still familiar to existing users! but you can do good stuff without recreating the whole ui from scratch like they did, of course
it works, but it’s far from ideal. a lot of features are tucked away behind unintuitive context menus, and on some systems you need to do a bit of configuration for it to look right. for example, it uses bitmap icons by default, so if you use a hidpi screen the icons will look atrocious until you figure out how to switch them to vector icons.
and an ugly UI is a problem by itself. it’s uninviting, unwelcoming. it gives a feeling of jank, of amateurism, and not in a good way. if you open the app for the first time and immediately think “this looks like it was last updated in 2003”, it’s not a good thing.
That are well documented and don’t change once you figure out where they are. “UX” is code for “we’ll rearrange everything you need twice a year and force you to constantly re-learn our app because fuck you.”
Why not? To me it’s reassuring because it means the procedures I memorized years ago probably haven’t changed. It’s the same reason people like the command line so much. Office software is a solved problem and arguably peaked in 2003 before MS Office started adding all the bullshit, it doesn’t need to be updated every single year.
it works for you because you got accustomed to it. cool! genuinely! but not everyone is a power user, not everyone will want to sift through documentation to find out how to do the thing they want that’s easy to do with word
from the non-techy people i’ve spoken to who’ve used libreoffice, they all agree that it’s worse than ms office because it gets in the way more. it’s harder to do stuff, because it’s less intuitive to them.
people in 3d modeling use blender. people in audio production use audacity. people in office work and schools, usually, do not use libreoffice, because if you can afford ms office it’s just better for them. maybe that will change with office now being ai-infested webviews held together with gum, javascript and ever increasing subscription prices… then again, that hasn’t slowed down adobe
imo the upcoming audacity 4 is an incredible example of open-source ui redesign, and should be an inspiration to everyone. the ui is sleeker, faster, easier to use, and yet it’s still familiar to existing users! but you can do good stuff without recreating the whole ui from scratch like they did, of course