When it comes to the UI, I guess it depends on what you’re used to. The LibreOffice UI is a lot more similar to the UI used by MS Office 2003, so I’ve always been pretty comfortable with it. But Microsoft’s “ribbon” UI which debuted back in 2007 is now old enough to vote, so I can see how there are people out there where that’s all they’ve ever used.
Personally, while I’ve learned to deal with it in Word and Outlook, even after all of these years the ribbon still pisses me off every time I have to use Excel.
The ribbon was contentious but most people are familiar with it and it has advantages like taskcentricity and less clutter. LibreOffice has an experimental ribbon that I think should be worked on, mainstreamed and set during installation or in the settings.
UX in other areas should be improved. Lots of little annoyances add up for new users and can break their opinions. It’s not hard to look over the UI and see things which have no business being there, or should only appear in certain contexts, or could be implemented in better ways. I think the project should get some MS Office volunteers into a lab and ask them to do things and observe their problems. I’d have power Word, Excel, Powerpoint users come in and do non-trivial things they normally do and see where they trip up or even if they can do what they need.
When it comes to the UI, I guess it depends on what you’re used to. The LibreOffice UI is a lot more similar to the UI used by MS Office 2003, so I’ve always been pretty comfortable with it. But Microsoft’s “ribbon” UI which debuted back in 2007 is now old enough to vote, so I can see how there are people out there where that’s all they’ve ever used.
Personally, while I’ve learned to deal with it in Word and Outlook, even after all of these years the ribbon still pisses me off every time I have to use Excel.
The ribbon was contentious but most people are familiar with it and it has advantages like taskcentricity and less clutter. LibreOffice has an experimental ribbon that I think should be worked on, mainstreamed and set during installation or in the settings.
UX in other areas should be improved. Lots of little annoyances add up for new users and can break their opinions. It’s not hard to look over the UI and see things which have no business being there, or should only appear in certain contexts, or could be implemented in better ways. I think the project should get some MS Office volunteers into a lab and ask them to do things and observe their problems. I’d have power Word, Excel, Powerpoint users come in and do non-trivial things they normally do and see where they trip up or even if they can do what they need.