bb's blog

A big problem of KDE Activities is their name. It builds up a poor mental model and thus makes life hard for users. With this post we ask you to help us finding a better name for the underlying concepts.

When I talk to people about our quest to make KDE Activities work, one of the things I hear most often is: “I never really understood what they are!”. There are several reasons for that, a very obvious one is: They are buggy (e.g. concerning non KDE apps).

But by now I think an even bigger problem lies in an unfortunate choice of metaphors. Both, “Activities” and “Virtual Desktops” are actually not well suited on their own – and a mess, when combined together. [Continue reading…]

The Libreoffice UX team presents two proposals for an improved dialog to insert special characters. While the first option was designed with a good balance between effort and benefit in mind, the second solution would be really awesome.

The Libreoffice UX team discussed possible improvements for the dialog to insert special characters, in particular the feature of recently used items. But today we have more than one solution since the current dialog would still be technology-driven instead of user-centric. [Read on…]

The Libreoffice UX team presents a proposal for an improved integration of content management interoperability services (CMIS). It was the outcome of the second ‘design session’ that will be conducted regularly.

Topic of last week’s Libreoffice design session was the integration of content management interoperability services (CMIS). Here is the outcome of this meeting. [Read on…]

The Libreoffice UX team presents a proposal for an improved dialog to tweak the entries of table of contents. It was the outcome of the first ‘design session’ that will be conducted regularly.

The Libreoffice UX team started last week with another type of meeting, the design session. The goal is to discuss one issue in detail along with possible solutions, mostly a mockup. This includes a clear description of the issue, functional and non-functional requirements, as well as constraints for the design. Based on these artifacts we design the mockup together via screen sharing.

Last week’s topic was the Entries tab on the dialog Indexes and Tables.

[Read the full article]

We ask for your feedback on a future scenario on what Activities and Virtual Desktops could evolve to.

It has been quite some time since we asked you to share your experiences with Virtual Desktops and Activities. Meanwhile we have been thinking through the enormous amount of feedback you provided. It was very inspiring. Thanks a lot for contributing!

We discussed intensively how to proceed now. We definitely want to continue to involve you into the further process. So, we thought it would be kind of boring to present simple results of the two “crowd-requirements-gathering” we did. Also it is kind of hard to respond for you to such a report.

Instead we decided to tell you a little story. And we would like to hear from you how attractive this scenario would be, if you were the actor in the story. Why do or don’t you like it? What would need to happen to make it better?

How Peter uses his Computer

Peter is a busy person, working for different customers. Privately he likes to travel and plays games. He also likes watching movies with his spouse. And for all this he uses only his laptop… [read on]