Bug 79554

Summary:	The default location of the drawing toolbar shows bad UX
Product:	LibreOffice	Reporter:	werner.robitza
Component:	Drawing	Assignee:	Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	christoph.spamforme, heinzlesspam, momonasmon, serval2412, werner.robitza
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description werner.robitza 2014-06-02 14:27:21 UTC

I've just installed LibreOffice Draw and started the program for the first time in my life.

It took me 10 minutes (including research on the web and watching tutorials) to find out how to draw a line or rectangle.

Turns out, there is a drawing toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

This is really bad user experience. No sane user (tech-savvy or casual user) would look for the most important actionable items on the bottom of the screen, where usually the most unnecessary information is gathered (e.g. status bars, word count, page numbers, etc.)

I asked three colleagues (including computer science majors) who have also had no experience with LibreOffice Draw to please draw a line for me. They all took more than a couple of minutes to achieve the goal and were becoming quite frustrated doing so. Instead of finding the right drawing tool they randomly clicked through the toolbar items in the top toolbar (e.g. line properties, etc.).

Many user interaction tests have shown that the most important items in computer programs and web pages are best placed in the top / top left region.

Please move the drawing toolbar to the top, or alternatively to the left edge of the screen (like where it is in Dia or Photoshop).

Comment 1 Julien Nabet 2014-06-02 19:13:28 UTC

I put it at NEW just to confirm this behavior (pc Debian x86-64 with master sources updated yesterday), for the UX part, I'm not UI expert.

Stefan/Christoph: any idea?

Comment 2 Stefan Knorr (astron) 2014-06-03 08:57:27 UTC

I tend to agree with the reporter on the problem.

Resolving it, however, is not as simple as moving this one toolbar to the top.

The placement of this toolbar is consistent with how it is placed in other parts of LibreOffice (namely, Impress, Writer, and Calc [accessible in the latter two via the main toolbar's Show Draw Functions button]). If your test users had moved around applications instead of being thrown into Draw...

There are also already two rows of toolbars at the top of the window. A third row would probably be rather less helpful. Moving the two toolbars around, one would again run into consistency issues.


The silver lining, however, is that the drawing toolbar is already replicated in the sidebar (can be activated via View > Sidebar). This presentation is not optimal in its use of space, and the sidebar is also positioned at the right, not at the left. In subsequent versions of LibreOffice, the sidebar should probably be used more...

Comment 3 werner.robitza 2014-06-03 09:34:57 UTC

Thank you for the reply. I haven't used other LibreOffice programs -- mostly because Draw on Windows is a strong alternative to Visio, and Visio is typically not available (while Word, Excel and Publisher are).

One thing I noticed is that the additional rectangle, line and circle toolbars that can be toggled via the menu. Those would allow one to draw as well -- maybe these could be made more prominent?

Comment 4 Maxim Monastirsky 2014-06-05 21:25:14 UTC

(In reply to comment #2)
> The silver lining, however, is that the drawing toolbar is already
> replicated in the sidebar (can be activated via View > Sidebar).
Not in 4.3, see Bug 73070.

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