Author: Mike Saunders

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Lagos, Nigeria, and I spend my time dabbling into user experience design with research, although these days, I’m diving deeper into research. I’m a big fan of books, especially well-written fiction. Music is also a huge part of my life. Let’s just say I love anything that sounds good and sing-alongs during work.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

I am an Outreachy intern working on improving the LibreOffice Writer templates with guidance from my mentor, Heiko Tietze. I have spent the last month understanding the community’s pain points by carrying out a survey, analysing their responses and working to create functional templates that they need. Currently, I am iterating on priority templates like DIN 5008 Business Letter, resume and academic writing templates.

I am also doing some more research on template standards and reflecting on how to create templates that would help users. My top priority is to understand styling and implement it in the templates I am creating and also curate template contents that fits into prospective user preferences.

Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?

During my Outreachy contribution phase, I had a list of open-source projects I could choose from, but at the time, I wanted to test the limits of my capacity. As a UX designer with no coding background, the first task for this project was to submit a patch on Gerrit.

Every other contributor left the task obviously because of the task complexity and I remember one of my mentors, Ilmari telling me that the competition had become less tense due to the number of contributors dropping the project. It was a challenge that pushed me out of my comfort zone as it was my first time interacting with code. That was it for me. Completing that task gave me a sense of achievement and made me even more excited to continue with the project.

Ah, it was challenging at first. I also dealt with anxiety because there was so much to do and I didn’t know where to start but later, the bits started coming together. Luckily for me, I have a mentor who has been supportive since I started the project back in December and who has made my experience seamless. Whenever I face a blocker, I know I have a mentor who is always ready to provide me with resources and connect me with other members of the community that have resources that would be useful for each project phases.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

I have decided to continue contributing to adding more templates to Writer and helping improve other aspects of user experience through user research and design after my internship ends. I like it here. Working on templates in Writer is challenging no doubt – but I think I like the way it stretches me, and helps me expand my skills in the area of research and thinking about a broader user audience.

Speaking from a UX perspective, I think LibreOffice could greatly benefit from a modernized UI mostly to improve accessibility and efficiency. When I started using the Writer interface, it was quite hard for me to navigate at first; there were no modal pop-ups to help sort of onboard me into the whole experience and so having to navigate all alone made me reluctant to use the Writer tool. I also look forward to the implementation of AI because seriously, it just makes navigation and usability way easier. For example, the implementation of AI-powered suggestions for formatting would make LibreOffice feel more modern.

Thanks to Ndidi for all her contributions! 😊