Of course, Microsoft did some of their... persuation of politicians and initially killed the project in 2017, but it seems that since 2020 it's back. I do think that LibreOffice could need some more full-time User Interface people to polish some rough edges (please none of the hackjob wanna-be UX people that ruin all modern apps by obnoxious popups), so that could be a good use of some tax money.
You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it. The problem with having UX people on a team is that they need to jusity their existence which they do by change for changes sake. I've yet to meet anyone who appreciates ms office UX changes that happen every 5 years and move everything around.
> The problem with having UX people on a team is that they need to jusity their existence which they do by change for changes sake.
This can be said just about any profession working in software. The real issue is that nobody wants to accept that software can be finished especially management - because then you don’t have anything to sell.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were designers who fought tooth and nail against arbitrary changes. Surprise surprise good UX designers understand UX. But its like the developer who fights for keeping the PHP website because it works.
Sorry i just dont like treatment non-programming workers as something lesser. So many software companies are sucessfull despite having fucked up technology (by programmers). And its sucessful only because they have great design or marketing or sales team.
Software always has bugs that need to be fixed. It is never finished because it has an infinite number of ways it can go wrong. The same is not true for any of the non-software parts of software design.
If you're a software shop you should have everyone who doesn't write code on a contract and not be afraid to terminate them when the product is mature.
A software can only ever be mature for a period of time. Technology advances, work practices change, and your software should adapt to it. Imagine text editing stopped at Notepad, or image editing at Photoshop 1.
Also, your second paragraph leaks of Americanism and undoubtedly, people are happier and healthier with stable jobs.
Not only does that metaphor not hold up (is UX obsolete in your opinion?), it's absolutely false.
This is software after all - surely you're aware how throwing out the old solution and trying to build a "better" one results in a long slog of making the same mistakes the old team/product made and fixed (but could have warned you about if they were kept around).
- the first is that the office paradigm suck, no matter the specific implementation. We need to teach people about good desktop computer usage paradigms, like "hey, learn LaTeX, maybe ConTeXt not a WYSIWYG tool", "hey learn R, or Python not a spreadsheet", and that's sound nearly impossible even if (I've tried) it's not on NEW/computer virgin users;
- the second is "the rest of the world", a Public Administration must deal with Citizens, let's say in EU we have started to roll out ID card as smart-card usable also for on-line authentication BUT most users do not have a reader, so many have invented crappy solution to use a smartphone NFC support to read them while authenticate on a desktop. The result is a good idea, having a smart card to identify users, a thing we should have spread since at least 20+ years in the past, turned into a mess. Similarly we have "certified mails" where a third party certify message delivery like a postal mail delivery, but again they are implemented in messy ways and nothing is really uniform across EU states.
These are the biggest obstacles not the software per se.
> You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it.
Clippy had its debut in Office 97, so let's please NOT copy that one. Other than that, yeah, I agree. Anything up to and including Office 2003 really, those were all great. (Also includes one of my favorite, underrated Office Apps, InfoPath)
I fully agreee. It's similar to older versions of Visual Studio.
On the other hand, I'm annoyed by the omnipresent File, Edit, View, ... stuff in the menu bar. Even if those functions make no sense for a given application. And then I have to open several brittle layers there to reach a certain function.
I think UI research can do better. And by that I don't mean stashing everything into a hamburger menu.
* Looking at the context of what the user is doing and dynamically showing options
* Using those dynamic interactions to surface lesser-known but relevant features that were previously hidden deep in menus along with hundreds of other features
* Adding a search bar for the user to explain what they're doing or find something they know the name of
Of course, Microsoft did some of their... persuation of politicians and initially killed the project in 2017, but it seems that since 2020 it's back. I do think that LibreOffice could need some more full-time User Interface people to polish some rough edges (please none of the hackjob wanna-be UX people that ruin all modern apps by obnoxious popups), so that could be a good use of some tax money.