[oblio]

I don't think they haven't thought about it, but:

* what Microsoft did was a major change with many, many thousands of man-hours invested into it; and many of those hours were UI/UX research, usability studies, analysis for the data phoned home by Office; does any of this sound like your typical Open Source project work? :)

* the Ribbon concept is patented by Microsoft; so not Open Source friendly, which leads us to...

* the LibreOffice developers would have to come up with a novel concept for a GUI, which is superior to the existing menus; and one that doesn't fall into the traps that Microsoft Office already went through (see Harris Jensen's blog series called "The Why of the New UI"); I'm a big fan of Open Source, but unless it comes from academia (Office products are not known to be the main focus of academic research right now) or from startups (good luck taking down Microsoft Office! :) ), most of the user friendly GUI stuff in Open Source-landia is copy-cat stuff

Edit: I just saw bryanlarsen's comment. Glad to hear that they're trying. However quite a few of those attempts fit into stuff Microsoft already tried. But they might still prove superior to the current interface, so kudos to the LibreOffice devs for that ;)

[nothis]

>what Microsoft did was a major change with many, many thousands of man-hours invested into it; and many of those hours were UI/UX research, usability studies, analysis for the data phoned home by Office; does any of this sound like your typical Open Source project work? :)

No, and that's a problem!

Tell me LibreOffice isn't a MASSIVE project with thousands of man-hours invested in developing its under-the-hood features. How about finally recognizing UX design as a vital part of that effort? Or rather, its biggest flaw?

It's not as esoteric as copying "ribbons" or "reinventing the GUI". How about having buttons where the text isn't sticking 1 pixel to the left, some proper spacing to group elements belonging together and boxes that are aligned at all angles, so your eyes don't get tired after 5 seconds of reading the captions? How about sending 3 people into a real-life office environment where LibreOffice is used for a week and make detailed notes and interviews on which features are used most, are most annoying to use or most desperately missed and then rearranging the hierarchy accordingly?

I see such a massive amount of goodwill and idealism in the open source community but as soon as it's facing mainstream users it fails to recognize UX as an integral part of providing a viable alternative to commercial products. Microsoft absolutely needs competition in the Office space, I swear at them nearly every day for doing the simplest things they manage to make complicated. They can be beat. But it's not via features, it's via interface design.

[buovjaga]

> Tell me LibreOffice isn't a MASSIVE project with thousands of man-hours invested in developing its under-the-hood features. How about finally recognizing UX design as a vital part of that effort? Or rather, its biggest flaw?

Please don't misrepresent something you have not studied. UX is absolutely recognized as vital in LibreOffice. The point is, companies invest in development commissioned by their clients. So far there has been no client wanting to spearhead massive under-the-hood improvements to the UI system (yes, this would be very relevant to further work). The work done is incremental and admittedly not advancing quickly enough.

Volunteer UX/UI designers getting involved in open source is still a new thing, so the size of the UX team has mostly just stayed constant from the OpenOffice.org days.

[agentdrtran]

> UX is absolutely recognized as vital in LibreOffice

you can really tell by the amount of effort they put into it.

[cesarb]

Yes, and a lot of it was painstaking backend work. OpenOffice has its own cross-platform widget toolkit, which nobody else uses, and a lot of work in LibreOffice has gone to cleaning up that ancient code. For instance, all dialog boxes had hardcoded sizes and positions; each one was manually converted to a flexible layout in the Glade .ui format, and a backend was written to load these files and instantiate the corresponding widgets. Now that this conversion is mostly finished, it's become easier to modify the interface. But there's still work to be done.

[collyw]

I rarely use MS Office or LibreOffice, but I find it easier to locate stuff in the menus of LibreOffice.

[oblio]

In my experience, technical people are dogs, visual people are cats, would be the most succinct way I can put it.