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
Yes, I feel bad recommending LibreOffice to people who only used paid software, as the UI is quite a hurdle.
Installing a theme and symbol-pack was the first thing I did, even before editing or writing something…
I never tried looking into UI options, I use just OnlyOffice nowadays but LibreOffice should consider turning that on by default if it’s an option.
OnlyOffice also has a 10/10 screen when you open it, instantly asking whether you want to open a text document, PDF, make a slideshow etc. It’s just very polished and they actually put effort into the UI.
I don’t think LibreOffice is ‘bad’ either, the functionality is great and the foss license is superior to Onlyoffice
But when I compare it to Word and OnlyOffice (especially OnlyOffice since it’s free and open source) it lacks that polish and good default settings.
Not everything has to be to be VIM, good defaults are very important especially for novice users. And OnlyOffice has understood that very well.
I would like for LibreOffice to succeed. Therefore I hope they take some design cues from OnlyOffice or have a good UI developer even come up with something better. Basically I hope the guy in the post is going to town and heavily modernizes the current default LibreOffice layout.
So, you compare classic menus in one of them with a ribbon menu in the other? Don’t you know how to compare? Do you also compare car speeds with one driving in reverse and the other i 5th gear?
It kinda doesn’t? The first time you open a file (because let’s be honest we don’t open the program itself usually) 4 popups show up, which you close because you want to see the damn file, and then the UI change is all gone.
Having the user click some buttons from popups on the first launch to enable the good UI is bad UX. Simple as.
I’ll give you an example since you clearly don’t understand heuristics.
Look how OnlyOffice highlights selected buttons with a light gray tint.
LibreOffice on the other hand highlights them with very strong blue color, which draws the users attention and distracts them from the document.
There are many more very bad design choices that LibreOffice makes, but it’s just a cluttered mess in general and can really put in some work to hide away all those buttons. Yes if you know where they are and use them every single day then it’s more efficient, but it takes up a lot of (mind) space to see all those buttons all the time.
Oh, so in a colorful toolbar, you are distracted by a single color? Sounds like an ADHD issue, and not a real world one. I have never seen or heard anyone but you say (Oh, I really can’t work with this, I’m soooo distracted by the light blueish color that is behind the selected option)…
Here’s a pro tip. You can change the color of the selected option in you menu. You can even chose different themes that changes that. I’m sorry to hear, that this is a dealbreaker for you. I surely hope that you’ll stay away from LO or other free software, because you are too fragile to use them anyways.
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 UI 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
Yes, I feel bad recommending LibreOffice to people who only used paid software, as the UI is quite a hurdle. Installing a theme and symbol-pack was the first thing I did, even before editing or writing something…
I honestly fail to see what’s wrong with the UI? Sure, it’s not pretty but it is functional as it is.
The insane amount of clutter. Compare LibreOffice to OnlyOffice
tbf you are not using the tabbed ui in LO. it improves things quite a bunch.
I never tried looking into UI options, I use just OnlyOffice nowadays but LibreOffice should consider turning that on by default if it’s an option.
OnlyOffice also has a 10/10 screen when you open it, instantly asking whether you want to open a text document, PDF, make a slideshow etc. It’s just very polished and they actually put effort into the UI.
it usually asks you the first time you run it, but people sometimes gloss over it because they are just used to closing nag screens.
yeah, libreoffice is sufficient but it could very much use some polish. i hope this news means we get an improvement.
I don’t think LibreOffice is ‘bad’ either, the functionality is great and the foss license is superior to Onlyoffice
But when I compare it to Word and OnlyOffice (especially OnlyOffice since it’s free and open source) it lacks that polish and good default settings.
Not everything has to be to be VIM, good defaults are very important especially for novice users. And OnlyOffice has understood that very well.
I would like for LibreOffice to succeed. Therefore I hope they take some design cues from OnlyOffice or have a good UI developer even come up with something better. Basically I hope the guy in the post is going to town and heavily modernizes the current default LibreOffice layout.
They are comparable. Three bars with icons, normally you don’t have that vertical window on the right.
It looks dated for sure, but it’s not that cluttered.
So, you compare classic menus in one of them with a ribbon menu in the other? Don’t you know how to compare? Do you also compare car speeds with one driving in reverse and the other i 5th gear?
LibreOffice is always this cluttered. It’s an outdated mess of a GUI.
I guess you don’t know how to set it up, even though it takes your hand and shows you. That’s just sad… :-)
It kinda doesn’t? The first time you open a file (because let’s be honest we don’t open the program itself usually) 4 popups show up, which you close because you want to see the damn file, and then the UI change is all gone.
Having the user click some buttons from popups on the first launch to enable the good UI is bad UX. Simple as.
I’ll give you an example since you clearly don’t understand heuristics.
Look how OnlyOffice highlights selected buttons with a light gray tint.
LibreOffice on the other hand highlights them with very strong blue color, which draws the users attention and distracts them from the document.
There are many more very bad design choices that LibreOffice makes, but it’s just a cluttered mess in general and can really put in some work to hide away all those buttons. Yes if you know where they are and use them every single day then it’s more efficient, but it takes up a lot of (mind) space to see all those buttons all the time.
Oh, so in a colorful toolbar, you are distracted by a single color? Sounds like an ADHD issue, and not a real world one. I have never seen or heard anyone but you say (Oh, I really can’t work with this, I’m soooo distracted by the light blueish color that is behind the selected option)…
Here’s a pro tip. You can change the color of the selected option in you menu. You can even chose different themes that changes that. I’m sorry to hear, that this is a dealbreaker for you. I surely hope that you’ll stay away from LO or other free software, because you are too fragile to use them anyways.
Oh so after getting valid examples of objectively bad UI design you start complaining?
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 UI 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
Check out ONLYOFFICE for what a UI should look like.
Recommend OnlyOffice instead. It’s like LibreOffice but it doesn’t look like complete garbage and actually modern.
Recommend NOT using onlyoffice.
Elaborate?
LibreOffice is great, beats OnlyOffice in many areas, and OnlyOffice is controlled by a company.
Imo OpenOffice is much friendlier to use than libre office. I would never recommend libre in the state it’s currently in.
Waiting to see what Collabora ends up looking like as the only real viable alternative.
I think you should support openoffice then… Why are you here in Open Source?