[kem]

Part of what concerns me about the UI discussion with LO is that the choices are held up as either Microsoft ribbon-style UI, or the current UI, as if because Microsoft adopted it and there wasn't a complete mutiny, it was a good idea.

Remember that Microsoft Word is entrenched in lots of places for various reasons, and it would take a major screw up before people wouldn't continue using it. I think what happened with the ribbon is that there were somethings that were better, and other things that were not, so people shrugged and went on with their lives.

This doesn't mean the ribbon was better.

Personally, for me, the ribbon is inconsistent. The context-aware part is good, but it's implemented inconsistently. So for me, I prefer the current LO UI even as I see room for improvement.

The upshot is that these discussions of LO "being so far behind the times" strike me as odd, because they come across as assuming that change is necessarily good for change's sake.

There are more serious problems with LO in my mind, such as the equation editing markup system--it's something that used to be light-years ahead of Word with, and now is lagging significantly.

[chipotle_coyote]

I suspect a lot of times what people are picking up on when they say that LibreOffice looks antiquated is less the underlying UX choices than the actual aesthetics of the application. The last time I looked at LibreOffice (about a year ago) it had the look and feel of an Office 2003 competitor. As silly as it may sound, it can be hard to get past that perception. A (relatively) simple design refresh might do wonders.

Having said that, I don't really like LO's actual UX choices. Every time I try to use it, I get infuriated trying to do something relatively easy. (Take setting up different headers/footers on the first page of the document. I appreciate that making these "page styles" is theoretically more flexible, but just about every other word processor I use simply gives me a checkbox labeled "Different First Page.")

[Silhouette]

It's also disappointing, though unfortunately rather characteristic of OSS UI discussions, that the only options most people here are even considering seem to be the traditional (old MS Office) toolbars and the (new MS office) ribbon.

From a UI point of view, if your best idea is to do what the established, dominant, commercial/proprietary software has already had for some time, you obviously can't ever be better than your competition. You're permanently playing catch-up.

If your goal is just to provide a free-as-in-either clone of that established commercial/proprietary software, maybe that's OK.

If your goal is to produce the best software you can to help users get their office work done, to make something better in its own right and not just because of economic or philosophical priorities, then the first thing a good UI designer is going to do is step back and start asking lots of questions about the fundamentals. What work actually needs to be done? How do users want to do it? How can office software help? Are the features and UI of a traditional word processor or spreadsheet or presentation software of 20-30 years ago still useful and relevant in 2016?

Working with textual information and tables is surely still useful, and so is collecting and combining information to form some coherent overall presentation, but office work today is also often about working with information from many different sources, and examining it in different ways, and doing these things collaboratively and in real time. There are many successful online tools based on these ideas today, but a lot of them are an attractive UI on top of simple functionality like storing team to-do lists and providing real-time chat. I'm not sure how many of these systems can cope with larger projects and more demanding work yet, the kind of thing that might be written up in a word processor as a set of 100-page reports that would form the basis for a multi-year project, or managed using spreadsheets with many tables and complicated formulae to derive the information that users need in a convenient format.

Personally, I think there's a lot of potential yet for more powerful and useful and productive office software, but not within the narrow bounds of the traditional model that the likes of MS Office and LibreOffice follow. Unless you have people looking at the big picture and being creative about how to represent information and interact with it, discussions about what colour the chrome should be or whether to use a traditional toolbar or context-sensitive ribbon probably have relatively little value. There is only so much benefit to achieve with cosmetic tweaks, no matter how pretty your icons are.