Styles and Symphony
IBM has released a free office suite based on OpenOffice called Symphony.
It seems they’ve done a nice job overall. The UI looks nice and clean and the website includes a list of easily accessible templates.
One problem with the UI, however, is its emphasis on presentational formatting. IBM is hardly unique here (Google Docs, for example, has no support for user-defined styles at all), but I’d like to think UI designers can do better.
Consider this screenshot:
Styles are present in the right-hand panel, but they are grouped within the local presentational styling section called “Font.” An average user will, not surprisingly, tend to fall back on the presentational attributes to get the formatting they want.
We know that semantic document authoring has all kinds of benefits; from easier document reuse and repurposing, to enhancing accessibility, and so forth. What if instead the panel had a top-level and more prominent “style” heading:
Style ----- paragraph: ________ character: ________
Provide a wide-variety of excellent templates with a full gamut of possible (semantic) styles, make them available on the internet with previews and browseable from within the application, and users can instantly see benefits from this.
Obviously one needs to make it easy for users to quickly modify formatting, but must this require a “font” panel? Is there really not a better way?
Here’s a nice example from Apple’s Pages:
Styles are front and center in the UI, users can instantly see what they will look like when chosen, and each of them are about the meaning (heading, caption, etc.) of the content, rather than what it looks like (big, bold, etc.). I’d like to see something like this from the OpenOffice universe.
[...] A few days ago I commented positively on Apple’s Pages styles UI. This is without having actually used it. Having just tried the latest version of the application, I’m rather appalled at how limited the styles support really is. [...]