The KOffice Project Results of the GUI and Functionality Design Competition for KOffice 2.0
Competition Results
The jury has been very pleased to receive a large number of high-quality, innovative and fun entries. Entries varied from rethinking the entire work flow for office workers to a careful analysis of the weak points of the current general practice, with wonderful and weird ideas on the text-entry process in between. It turns out that it is possible to find new directions for Office software.
Some general trends were clear across the entries: a palette-based interface was a recurring theme, for instance. That's something we've seen before in the Adobe applications or on NeXTStep, but not generally applied to Office software. Something to be considered for KOffice 2.0! Not all suggestions were entirely practical or even feasible, but that was exactly the intention of this competition: to break through the familiar mold and get fresh ideas.
The decision was quite hard, but in the end the jury was in complete agreement:
The winner is Martin Pfeiffer, for his thorough and innovative rethinking of the entire process of creating and working with documents and tools. Manik Chand Patnaik deserves an honourable mention as runner-up for his meticulous analysis of the way office software could work better. Dennis Pennekamp deserves to be mentioned for his innovative and fun proposal to use Krita and KPresenter together to podcast comics -- which was only one of his many really innovative ideas.
All submitters have reason to be proud of their work and the jury is very grateful for their submissions. We especially wish to commend those people whose native language is not English for their courage. They labored under the additional handicap of a sometimes unfamiliar language and still managed to present their ideas.
Entries
As promised, all entries are available under the GPL. The capsule reviews below are in many cases not representative of the depth of the ideas presented in the proposals themselves. Also note that the KOffice developers have not committed themselves to implementing any of these ideas.
Aiveras Kirejevas
Aiveras advocates a palette-based interface with some interesting twists. His very nicely done mockups show the replacement of the "Window" menu by a tabbar, document versioning and an interface extensible through plugins that are grouped into task-related collections. Aiveras' ideas have the advantage of being eminently implementable. SQL for text is an interesting suggestion for a replacement for the find & replace dialog.
Aron Allen
Aron presents an interface that contains a thumbnail of the current page, a toolbox and a tool area that present different options dependent on the selection of a main menu item. His proposal thus does away completely with the need for dropdown menu scanning.
David Metz
David Metz has two main points: he wants to do away with the need for explicitly saving documents, and he wants to move all control functionality into floating palettes. No menus or toolbars anymore! The consequences of this decision have been carefully examined by David.
David Reaves
David did not have time to complete his entry, but mailed us his basic idea: a toolbar button that would enable the access to toolbars through using the scroll wheel of the mouse.
Dennis Pennekamp -- Getting more out of KOffice 2
Dennis Pennekamp -- Krita Podcasting Plug-in
Dennis Pennekamp -- Freestyle Art
Dennis' ideas were consistently the most innovative among the entries. Maybe not always completely practicable, his idea for a new text editing engine is the first truly original rethink of the text entry process we've ever seen. His Freestyle Art concept should be very useful in practice, though. Coding it is going to the problem!
Jeroen Vaes
Jeroen's particular idea for the implementation looks very practical and implementable. There's a shade of Corel Painter palettes here -- his startup widget is very well thought-out, as are his ideas on adding notes to documents.
Luc Marschall
Luc went back to the absolute basics: the handling of windows and tools. Much fundamental thought went into his entry and Luc carefully examined all possible consequences of his initial ideas.
Manik Chand Patnaik
Manik Chand Patnaik very carefully examined user interface and usability issues in KOffice and has come up with very good and detailed proposals for improving the user interface from the smallest details to the larger workflow and presentation issues. Especially appreciated were his concerns about security and font technology.
Martin Pfeiffer
Martin Pfeiffer, our winner, has gone back right to the roots of the problem and has started with the question "what is it we're trying to do, actually". Working from that principle, he arrives at an interesting, innovative workflow-based solution that is both ambitious and takes the human factor into account. The idea of "patterns" to style parts of documents is very interesting. Added to that, there are a number of larger and smaller suggestions for improvement.
Moritz Zimmermann
Moritz presented his ideas in such beautiful mockups -- although some of the credit must go to the icon set he used -- that it was hard not to be mesmerized by them. His interface looks very practicable and implementable. The interface is proposed to be self-learning. Again, we have Adobe like dockers with a tab dock.
Николай Шаповалов
Николай's main goal has been to reduce the amount of pixels occupied by user interface control elements and to maximize the amount of space available for the user's document.
Sandis Neilands
Sandis' vision is to do away with having a multitude of specialized applications. Somewhat like Gobe Productive, he wants one application that allows users to combine different types of data in one document. Then he goes one step further and wants to make it possible to reflow content into another shape: from book to presentation, from spreadsheet (cells) to document again. A very innovative idea, this, and Sandis earns extra points for actually including engaging use cases.
Sergiy Kudryk
Sergiy, like Николай, wants to reduce the amount of non-document pixels on screen as much as possible: he goes further and wants to work in full-screen only, with a kpdf-like navigation bar to the left, and an optional floating toolbox.
Thomas Zander
Thomas has concentrated on one aspect: collaborative workflow. His proposal is to use KPlato, the new project planner component in KOffice 1.5 to monitor and enable the document creation and editing workflow in small groups. A good idea, one that further demands integration with kde-pim.
Tom Chance
Tom Chance concentrates on the creation of documents. His interface reminded us on the one of hand of LaTeX, and on the other hand of a content management system like Infrae's Silva. Style and content are to be separated completely in his proposal.
Will Hardy
Will Hardy proposes a "waterfall" model of editing, where content creation and content editing are separate phases. There are several quite good ideas in his submission, one of which is the paragraph property cut-out that "travels" with the current paragraph. His interface is also a model of clarity and simplicity.
Preston Brown
Unfortunately, email problems (I suspect spamassassin, but cannot prove it) prevented Preston Brown's submission from entry into the competition. However, he graciously allowed us to add his proposal to the results page after all. Preston rearranges the KOffice workspace into a well-organized sidebar alongside the traditional document area, giving an improved user experience while at the same time not obsoleting all the current user skills. The difference between writing and reviewing documents is well noted.
David Tournaire
The last entry to arrive, by David Tournaire, 18 december 2006. Just added for completeness.
Last update: 2008-02-15
