Philosophical investigation
By Thomas Zander
Its been about 13 months since KOffice2.0.0 was released, the first in a series of an office suite that is itself over 12½ years old. What we said in the 2.0.0 release announcement was that it was not yet ready for end-users. One of the effects of that first release is that we have received a lot of attention from various places. Attention that in general has helped us a lot in getting KOffice more mature. But unfortunately we still don’t have a “ready for end-users” label on any of our KWord releases.
This lead me to ask the question; what does it actually mean to be end-user ready. And how do we know when we got to that target. In my investigation towards that answer another question got answered; what is the way to get there (call it a roadmap, if you will).
Back to the question of what is end-user ready. The first thing to decide is who is actually a KWord user? There is a usability concept called “persona” which answers that question. I won’t go into the theory here as thats well documented on more reputable usability sites but personas are a good fit. This quickly lead to the discovery that the KDE community already did the research and we have personas on techbase!
My work is currently limited to KWord alone, which is where my expertise lies as I’m the maintainer of that part of KOffice.
The result of this work is that we now have 4 personas, each a person that has a real name and a set of hobbies and likes/dislikes. If we ask those users what he or she requires from KWord for it to be ready for use we end up with 4 different definitions of what it means to be ‘end-user-ready’.
This actually makes a lot of sense so I went ahead and ordered them into how hard it is to support them (how much work needs to go into KWord to satisfy the user). The full details are documented on the KOffice wiki
Susan is a recreational user with a sharp focus on web and social media, there are only a couple of usecases where she would use KWord as a word processor. Susan would use KWord to make flyers to advertise her upcoming party and send that around as PDF or ODT or just print it. Susan would also use KWord for the occasional letter or for writing her resume.
Matt is a student geology he will be managing a lot of images and place them into documents that can easilly span 100 pages.
Santiago would use a self made template to write his documents and he’d use multiple columns plus floating frames to make his documents. Santiago would use various variables like ‘last printed date’ since being able to get that info out of the doc makes him feel smart.
Berna is an office worker she would have the highest demands for KWord of all.
KWord will start working towards end-user-ready in the order as the users above appear, the first user that can call KWord ‘ready’ is Susan and in usual open source style we will be ready when we are ready. But we will measure this progress using bugzilla where this milestone is defined and tasks that need to be done are marked with the appropriate persona as a target. In the last week I went through all bugs and open tasks and all the important ones are tagged with the appropriate milestone.
This means that if you are interested in using KWord you can check which features are missing by listing the open tasks for the persona that matches you most. I expect upcoming releases to mention the progress that has been made to make KWord end-user-ready for each user.
If you want to help out; please check bugzilla (start on our wiki). Especially the junior-jobs should appeal to new users.
July 15th, 2010 at 17:30
Nice overview. Thank you for sharing the persona-based roadmap. This gives much more of an insight into where KWord is right now than anything else I have read.
July 15th, 2010 at 17:38
For me the only thing that is missing in KWord for it to become usable for me is better support for creating and editing tables. Other things already work very nicely for my usage pattern.
July 15th, 2010 at 18:54
I wonder on what group I would fit because my demands would be:
1) I can share ODF documents (text) with any OpenOffice.org user.
Right now not even the simplest text format is not preserved with same fonts. The text is few letters shorter, text is bigger with same font+size and very specific order formated documents gets rendered wrong in KWord.
2) The fonts looks ugly (there came fix for that in the development version (git?) release) and should be better way to be antialiased and managed.
3) My one big visual problem is that the document does not look good in the application. I must admit that the visual look is not so high in the developers to-do list. But it is something what draws normal user attention. The document should have shadow, it should be flexible so it has good space between the application edges and have a flexible space between document pages (possible to tweak to be a 0-25.4mm).
4) Possibility to hide the menubar. Me and my friends have all the needed functions in the sidepanel. The menubar is just taking space, especially in the netbooks what class of portable computers are very much used in schools).
Technical missing features? Not so much, only standard support and the “eye candy”..
July 15th, 2010 at 19:17
@Fri13; one of the things that is in the list of the Susans requirements is fixing several usability issues. Among others making more pretty default templates.
What lead me to do this work is that I had the feeling people that are working on KOffice have been working on stuff they care about but will not really have too much of an impact on how many users will use the apps. For example working on fixing a rendering glitch in a high end feature like drop-caps is all fun, but not all that useful if people don’t want to use the application because much more basic stuff is missing. Being able to hide the toolbox is indeed a good example.
The effect of documenting the milestone “Susan” and the other personas is that we are all clear that if there are no more tasks to support Susan we should focus on making things pretty and otherwise dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Making it perfect for one user (naturally without hurting others in the process) will make KWord much more usable for everyone.
I’m looking forward to hitting that milestone, please lend a hand any way you can. Userbase still needs a lot of attention for KWord, for instance
July 15th, 2010 at 22:12
@Fri13:
ODF isn’t a formant that assures that a document will look the same in two different application. Even between MS Office and OOo is happens that text can have a different length. That’s something that can’t be completely avoided in practice.
Of course ODF compatibility gets improved all the time.
Unforunately that is mostly a Qt problem. We are waiting for Nokia to fix that.
July 16th, 2010 at 13:32
I can’t help but think that Susan would be better off using a different application than KWord for her flyers, e.g. Krita or Karbon. I get the feeling that a lot of people used Microsoft Word in the past for such a task because they had Microsoft Word installed on their PC, but no better graphics software than MS Paint, and obtaining better graphics software was not feasible because it cost money. People used a hammer to drive in a screw, because all they had was a hammer.
Is it worth spending time on optimising KWord to do what Krita or Karbon do better? Would it be worth spending time optimising KWord to help people maintain spreadsheets in KWord tables, or should we be trying to educate them to use KSpread instead?
July 17th, 2010 at 00:53
@Karelien
Thats a good point you bring up, and one that actually should get some more attention.
One thing that obviously you need for such a flyer usecase is to have a good way to handle graphics. Vector graphics and bitmap graphics. Another is to have a good way to composite all these things together.
In KOffice things like vector graphics that Karbon uses are actually shared between all applications. You will essentially find that many of the tasks you need are available in Karbon as well as in all other applications. Including KWord. So I do see your point, but KOffice has brought sharing technology to a new level that your example of MSOffice is not even coming close to.
The majority of photo manipulation can be done in KWord too, although actual retouching and manipulations that a gimp or krita can do are not possible in KWord. This is mostly because the Krita guys say they don’t want to allow editing of graphics using the KOffice component system.
Bottom line is that I think KWord is good for this usecase because a core component you need is a physical page size and a straight forward way to place content at specific locations on that page. Which is where KWord shines most.
The integration with real graphics applications is actually pretty smooth and you can even edit you vector graphics and colors and all right from inside KWord.
Now, your second example of using tables instead of kspread thats one example I fully agree with. Not only are KWord tables immature and not all that useful right now, the spreadsheet function is best left to the spreadsheet.
July 21st, 2010 at 01:24
I like the KOffice stuff that I have used so far, including KWord, KSpread, and Kivio (I can’t seem to find Kivio available for download anywhere now — what happened?). It is easy to use these applications for what they are meant to do. The biggest opportunity that I’ve seen is integration with Microsoft Office formatted files (.doc, .xls, etc). In addition to working full time, I’m also a full time student. My university is Microsoft centric in their teaching and available applications, so I’m using Microsoft Office for many of my reports, spreadsheets, presentations, and other documents. I have had a lot of trouble pulling these file up in KOffice.
The office apps I’m using now include OOo (in place of Microsoft Office), OpenProj (in place of Microsoft Project), and Dia (in place of Microsoft Visio). All of my instructors know that I’m a Linux guy, a KDE guy, and that I am definitely NOT a Microsoft guy. I’ve shown them KOffice, as well as the office apps that I’m forced to use currently, and they have agreed to let me use them in place of the Microsoft stuff. My sorrow is because I prefer KOffice to any of the office and production applications that I’m currently using in look and feel, so I’m excited to see my KOffice more stable!
I look forward to KOffice being more compatible with Microsoft formats soon so that I can use KOffice on a more regular basis that what I’m able to use it now.