bb's blog

On Usability and User Experience of Free Software

Libreoffice Human Interface Guidelines: First steps

The Libreoffice Human Interface Guidlines (HIG) have been given a new lease on life. In the first step, generic artifacts including the vision, personas, and an UX manifesto are presented.

The work on usability and design is often seen as some kind of anarchistic creativity: some people receive divine inspiration out of the blue and read tea leaves to decide how features have to be implemented. But that’s not true. Both the creative work on visual design as well as the composition of an effective and efficient user interface is hard work based on axioms. Those fundamentals are “written in stone” by Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) with the objective to improve the experience for users by making application interfaces more consistent and hence more intuitive and learnable. [Read on…]