[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 135501] Change the default UI

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135501

--- Comment #58 from Pedro <vermelhusco1904 at gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Caolán McNamara from comment #37)
> I'd hate to see a dialog presented to the user on first start to pick their
> user-interface, that just seems horrible, like that terrible "pick your
> default browser as a feeble workaround for an anti-competitive ruling"
> windows has/had.

That's a matter of personal preference. IMO, that's a very simple way of
highlighting the choices for the end user. I think it's very positive, and in
that Windows case it even helped less known options to become more well-known
by end users. Such as it happened on Android when a browser and search engine
picker were shown to users. This helped less known, and more user-privacy
focused engines to become known and gain users. Which are all positive points.
Opera, Brave, Firefox gained a lot from that. Qwant, Duckduckgo as well.

> I think there are too many "user interface" options. Leaving aside the
> experimental options, we have in the user interface menu in the muffin
> section "tabbed, tabbed compact, groupedbar compact, "contextual single" and
> I have no real feeling for what the difference is between them all. It feels
> indecisive, as if it's uncertain which one is the right design. IMO, pick
> one, drop the others and then its a clearer decision as what the option
> between current and proposed ui would entail.

Those issues are something that must be worked on when making a dialog: what
are the purposes of the UIs, and present that purpose in a clear manner.
We can overcome that feeling of undecisiveness with a well-crafted dialog and
clear descriptions/tooltips on hover.
Each UI that was designed had a clear purpose in mind:

- The Tabbed UI is for users looking for something like the Ribbon UI, but with
refinements that address the weak points of it, namely the fact that it is more
compact to steal less vertical space.

- The Groupedbar is the Toolbar UI 2.0: an innovative UI that combines commands
and menus in related groups with the most used commands visible and the
drop-down menus showing the other commands on that group instead of a standard
toolbar where there's no connection between the toolbar items and the menus.

A discussion to be had that I think is important: what to do with compact UIs.
Those are responsible for the multiplication of UI options. If we want to
decrease the number of options in a consistent manner I would consider "hiding"
these ones. They're the Single Toolbar, the Tabbed Compact, the Groupedbar
Compact.
I would suggest to have a checkbox in a dialog "use compact UI". Then the user
could select the UI of its preference, click the checkbox and the compact UI
would be selected.
This would narrow down the number of visible options to 4:
1 - Toolbar, (mention in tooltip this is the UI with documentation)
2 - Sidebar,
3 - Tabbed,
4 - Groupedbar.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice-bugs/attachments/20200810/b5880ba9/attachment.htm>