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LibreOffice’s New Website: Meet the Design Team

LibreOffice is getting a shiny new website! We’re still working on it, and everyone interested in testing and helping out can join our mailing list for updates.

But today, we’re talking to the team who created the new design. Say hello to Dan Gallagher, Cat de Leon, Irene Geller, Helen Tran and Zarema Ross. Together, they identified needs and use cases for the website, created mockups, and then moved on to more concrete designs. Let’s see what they have to say…

Tell us a bit about yourselves!

Dan Gallagher: I’m a UX Designer coming from a background in psychology and education. I’m interested in creating intuitive designs based on human psychology. I’m currently living in Chicago, IL. In my free time, I like to box, make music, or play Dungeons and Dragons.

Cat de Leon: My name is Cat and I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area. I have an untraditional background, having majored in math in college, worked in higher education as an institutional researcher, and recently worked as a social media manager. Luckily, I’ve found my dream job in product design! If I’m not designing, I’m probably eating good food, playing video games, playing tennis, watching NBA games, or working out. I will never reject an opportunity to see a picture of your pet. 🙂

Irene Geller: I’m a digital designer from New Jersey (USA) with a focus on UI, visual assets, and branding at the moment. But I began my creative life as a traditional artist, just painting, drawing, and teaching others, too!

Helen Tran: I’m from San Francisco, California. My hobbies include finding scenic sights and building on my UX Research career on the side. I’m a killer for awesome views!

Zarema Ross: Originally I’m from Russia. Today, I live and work in the USA as a UX designer. Before my career in design, I finished an MS in Economics and Management, conducted market research, analysis, and built strategies in the oil and gas industry. I’ve led 10 subsidiaries, approved budgets, and was involved in financial planning.

Being skilled in turning data into actionable information to improve business results, andbeing passionate about solving problems, I end up becoming a User Experience Designer. I get my inspiration from my hobbies such as traveling, Russian ballet, Broadway shows, contemporary art galleries, and digital trends (AR, VR, etc.).

I consider myself a dreamer and a futurist. I hope new technologies will bring enhancements into our everyday lives, and will offer the opportunity to all people around the world to use them. That is why today, I’m working on different UX design projects, helping the world become a better place.

New banner for the front page

How did you get involved in the LibreOffice website redesign project?

Dan Gallagher: I was connected with a member of the website redesign project through a friend. We hopped on a video call and discussed the project, and it sounded like a great opportunity! I had used LibreOffice before, and I really like the idea of giving free office tools away to anyone.

Cat de Leon: I was recruited by Christine Louie and Lisa Lin who did the initial research for LibreOffice’s redesign project. They brought on a team of designers and researchers to continue their work and bring their concepts to life.

Irene Geller: During the 2020 pandemic year, I attended several webinars about UX/UI, to keep myself occupied, fresh on industry knowledge, and to be quite honest, sane. Apparently, at one of these webinars- we don’t even remember which one!- I had connected with Christine Louie (who is now a UX Researcher at Facebook). I must have made a positive impression in the live comments section, because some time after the webinar, Christine reached out to me about volunteering to assist with LibreOffice’s website redesign project. Since I was already a user of LibreOffice in my day-to-day life, I thought it would be an interesting project to take on!

Helen Tran: I met Christine, who was the lead UX Researcher, through a webinar – and after getting to know each other she reached out to me for this amazing opportunity to join the LibreOffice website redesign project. I got to meet the rest of the team which included Lisa, Dan, Cat, Zarema, and Irene who were also all a pleasure to work with. Thanks to everyone who contributed as this team and the team at LibreOffice made this project such a success! 🙂

Zarema Ross: I was invited into the project by one of my colleagues from the UX bootcamp I went to. I liked LibreOffice’s mission to support the community and develop software that everyone can use. I’ve met an amazing team of software developers and UX designers. I really enjoyed working on the project, as it was well organized, and I had a chance to collaborate with cross-functional teams from software developers to the marketing team, as well as run workshops with them in order to improve the information architecture.

New graphics and cleaner design

What particular aspects did you work on, and what was it like?

Dan Gallagher: I focused more on the sketching, wireframing, and documentation of the project. It was my first time working on a team of designers and researchers – it was amazing to be able to share my work and get feedback at every stage of the design process. Every call, someone suggested something I wouldn’t have thought of if I were working alone. I was fortunate to be on a team of skilled and dedicated designers!

Cat de Leon: Before this project, I have only done solo projects so working with a team has been absolutely fantastic. I’ve enjoyed every conversation and meeting I’ve had with this team and I hope to continue our relationships after we’re all done here. I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed connecting with our stakeholders all over the world, like Ilmari, Heiko, and Mike! Our team would probably agree that we’ve gotten far more well versed in time zones after this project. 🙂

Irene Geller: I helped with creating high fidelity UI designs that captured our stakeholders’ key goals for various webpage designs. However, the best part of this project wasn’t working as an individual designer – but as a team!

We used Figma for all of our design work, which allows multiple users to collaboratively work on a design, in real-time. That was a new experience for me as I usually work as a “design team of one”. I found that we often came up with our best ideas when we worked together!

For example, one time we met up to look over the page designs that Cat, Dan, and Zarema had completed. I immediately saw which elements worked best in each approach (ie what fit the stakeholders’ goals best), and quickly combined them together in one new page design, with adjustments to make it all cohesive. Everyone responded positively, so we spent the remainder of the meeting polishing all the elements of this new design. When we presented it at our next stakeholder meeting, they absolutely loved it – an immediate success! That showed me the power of collaborative design.

Overall, it was a real pleasure to work with such talented and smart individuals for a good cause. It certainly made the pandemic lockdown a little brighter, too!

Helen Tran: I worked as a UX Researcher for this project. I helped recruit participants, ran usability tests, and interpreted data to test the projected website launches. It was an amazing experience! It was definitely enjoyable to see the combined efforts made by everyone on this team go into play during the usability runs to witness how individuals engaged with the various features. This experience was rewarding from start to finish seeing the behind the scenes work to a polished website based on all of our hard efforts.

Zarema Ross: Working within an international team of UX designers and Software developers (in the USA and Germany), I:

  • Led design workshops with cross-functional teams to explore innovative solutions for problems and opportunities identified through research and data
  • Performed content audit, validated the SiteMap, restructured the information architecture
  • Sketched designs, created low and hi-fi mockups
  • Iterated on designs and performed usability testing
  • Contributed and maintained the UI kit and style guides

At the end of the day, it was teamwork that drove us to the results we have. I would like to say special thanks to our UX design team: Helen Tran – the time we spent on usability testing, deriving the insights from the research; Dan Gallagher, Cat de Leon and Irene Geller- for the brainstorming we did together, going from lo-fi to hi-fi designs.

And a redesigned download page

What are you interested in doing next?

Dan Gallagher: I’ll continue freelancing, working on personal projects, and searching for a full-time job. Working on this project was a great experience to highlight on my resume, it shows I work well within a team and can balance user and business needs!

Cat de Leon: Now I’m a product Designer for CaaStle. And I just know that wherever I go in future, I’ll be solving users’ problems to the best of my product design abilities and I’ll be having a blast doing it. Thank you so much for this opportunity, LibreOffice!

Helen Tran: I’m interested in growing my UX Research career! I’m ready to dive deep and hop along new projects to learn and enhance my UX skills. Hoping for many more grateful experiences like this project! 🙂

Zarema Ross: I’m interested in the topic of accessibility and inclusive design. I’m currently working on Accessifier which is a crowdsourced web app that provides accessibility ratings of specific apps for users with accessibility needs. I also do UX design on a freelance basis. And I’m looking forward to collaborating with new people, exchange knowledge and create impactful designs. Here’s my LinkedIn page.

Many thanks again to the whole team for their work! And as mentioned, anyone can join our website mailing list to help us to finalise, test and promote the new website. Let’s make it happen together!

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Tender to implement master document fixes (#202106-02)

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.

We are looking for an individual or company to implement master document fixes.

The documentation team regularly publishes guides and books. The underlying workflow requires to fix bugs and issues with the master document feature of Writer.

The scope of this tender is to fix at least the following issues:

  1. ToC is never shown in Master Document if it is in ODT in a section with a hide condition
    https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103612
  2. Exported PDF of master document with hidden sections containing headings shows headings anyway
    https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142129
  3. Creating master document from *.odt breaks cross-references
    https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128106
  4. TRACK CHANGES: linked files changes are not shown in the master document
    https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121166

The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version.

The bugs must be fixed and verified.

All technology standards of relevance, as well as their targeted versions for this tender should be declared or defined in the offer’s description of implementation.

A key item of the deliverables for this tender and therefore also a decision criteria – besides qualification, references, price, and completeness of fullfilment – is extensive is documentation about the approach chosen to implement or fix the above items. We expect bidders to provide documentation on both the code and the non-code parts of this tender, e.g. methodology, structure and technical aspects. The Document Foundation will publish this under a free and open source license and make it available to the general public. Publications will be in the Help system and in the Guides books.

If the bug fix incurs in a change in the user interface or user procedure, it should also contain the necessary instructions to activate the procedure.

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of C++
  • Experience working on the LibreOffice source code

Other skills

  • English (conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

We use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work on the program code must be licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

Bidders will get a preference for including a partner or independent developer who has not been involved in a successful tender before. For such developers, who have not yet been part of a successful tender bid, we aim on a best-effort basis, but without any guarantees whatsoever, to provide some mentoring in understanding the code base and the process in contributing to the code. We expect that time and efforts on the bidder’s side for this should not be part of the paid work for this tender. Please mention such need of LibreOffice development mentoring in your offer.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to certified developers and/or members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

When budgeting, we anticipated that this project (all items combined) to take in the region of 5 days of work. Should bidders’ assessment result in a significantly different number, please reach out to us before sending your bid, so we can clarify upfront.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications for the aforementioned tasks, your offer in form of a fixed-time, fixed-budget approach, and the duration period for the implementation in calendar weeks after the final awarding of the tender, via e-mail to a committee at tender20210602@documentfoundation.org no later than July 5, 2021.

Applicants who have not received feedback by August 2, 2021 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

All bidders are invited to ask their questions on this tender until June 23, 2021. Questions and answers will be made public in a collected and anonymized form.

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Tender to implement automated ODF filter regression testing (#202106-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.

We are looking for an individual or company to implement automated ODF filter regression testing.

The default file format of LibreOffice is ODF, the Open Document Format. From time to time, there are regression bugs reported towards these filters, that involve loss of data. The respective unit tests do not provide sufficient coverage to prevent these regressions to happen.

The scope of this tender is:

  1. To implement an early warning system for such problems, to avoid them in the future and improve the overall quality of the software. As a recommended approach, we propose to use the ODFunDiff tool (https://git.libreoffice.org/odfundiff), which was developed specifically with the relevant functional and performance requirements in mind. Initial development of this tool was targetted towards LibreOffice 5.2/5.3, so updates to the code are likely necessary. Also, it may be necessary to fix some hypothetical additional non-determinism in LibreOffice, which was introduced in version 5.3
  2. Extend the crashtest report scripts (e.g. this one) with an additional report about ODF differences, which were detected during the 27,000 ODF roundtrips. This test should use last run’s ODF files as reference to compare against
  3. Raise and mention potential resource problems (like disk space) with existing infrastructure, e.g. the “crashtesting” virtual machine

Further information can be found in this presentation from a past LibreOffice Conference.

All technology standards of relevance, as well as their targeted versions for this tender should be declared or defined in the offer’s description of implementation.

A key item of the deliverables for this tender, and therefore also a decision criteria – besides qualification, references, price, and completeness of fulfilment – is extensive documentation about the approach chosen to implement the above items, covering more than just the pure implementation. We expect bidders to provide documentation on both the code and the non-code parts of this tender, e.g. methodology, structure and technical aspects. The Document Foundation will publish this under a free and open source license and make it available to the general public.

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of C++
  • Experience working on the LibreOffice source code

Other skills

  • English (conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

We use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work must be licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

Bidders will get a preference for including a partner or independent developer who has not been involved in a successful tender before. For such developers, who have not yet been part of a successful tender bid, we aim on a best-effort basis, but without any guarantees whatsoever, to provide some mentoring in understanding the code base and the process in contributing to the code. We expect that time and efforts on the bidder’s side should not be part of the paid work for this tender. Please mention such need of LibreOffice development mentoring in your offer.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to certified developers and/or members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

When budgeting, we anticipated that this project (all items combined) to take in the region of 15 days of work. Should bidders’ assessment result in a significantly different number, please reach out to us before sending your bid, so we can clarify upfront.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations offer in form of a fixed time fixed budget approach and the duration period for the implementation in calender weeks after the final reward of the tender, via e-mail to a committee at tender20210601@documentfoundation.org no later than June 30, 2021.

Applicants who have not received feedback by July 28, 2021 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

All bidders are invited to ask their questions on this tender until June 23, 2021. Questions and answers will be made public in a collected and anonymized form.

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Annual Report 2020: TDF and LibreOffice infrastructure

In 2020, the infrastructure team added new services, implemented a new Extensions and Templates site, and worked on a replacement for Ask LibreOffice

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software. The public infrastructure is powered by around 50 kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors, plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch, hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes – distributed across the hypervisors – except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS requirement is higher and the redundancy less important.

In 2020, the infra team added various new services, such as the new SilverStripe-based Extensions and Templates site. Some background to the technical and design decisions behind the site are here on the blog.

Meanwhile, Discourse was investigated as a likely AskBot replacement, while several VMs for deployment tests outside the scope of infra were handed over (such as decidim). The infra team worked on Moodle (an e-learning platform), build bots, integration of the Weblate translation platform into the TDF development dashboard, and a crashtest box (sponsored by Adfinis).

Along with the new services, there were many notable upgrades too. Some machines are still running Debian GNU/Linux 9 (codename Stretch), but most are now upgraded to Debian 10 (codename Buster). Other updates include: Nextcloud 16 to 20, Gerrit 2.16 to 3.2, LibreOffice Online 6.3 to 7.0, and Mediawiki 1.31 to 1.35. Finally, OpenGrok, Etherpad Lite, Weblate and the Grimoire dashboard received updates too.

Notable refactoring/improvements took place in the online help backend, along with the backends for bibisecting and mailing lists. The team started collecting metrics for download counters and the update checker, and worked on improving IRC bots, the monitoring setup, and a distributed backup solution.

Documentation was improved to make onboarding of new infra team members easier, while the SSO (Single Sign-On authentication) system was expanded with more services: Gerrit, the new extension site, Discourse, Jitsi and Moodle.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

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Projects selected for LibreOffice in the Google Summer of Code 2021

In March, we announced that LibreOffice will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a programme that connects students with free and open source software projects. GSoC helps students to implement new features, and provides them with financial support along the way.

Well, the projects have been selected, so here they are!

  • Bayram Çiçek – 100 Paper Cuts: This aims to improve LibreOffice’s user interface, implementing enhancement requests and solving the most annoying UX (user experience) issues.
  • Anshu Khare – Sidebar: It’s planned to revamp the current styles deck sidebar and to merge paragraph and character styles into one Text Style deck. Furthermore, the student wants to rework the filter workflow. Here’s a mockup (click for larger):

  • Tushar Kumar – Implement an interface for external data source import in Calc: Currently, Calc’s back-end data provider supports CSV, HTML, XML and and Base’s data provider. This feature is not yet ready for production, however, so this project’s goal is to improve it. Here’s a mockup:

  • Balázs Sántha – Implement table styles in OOXML (.docx) support: At the moment, table styles found in .docx documents are converted into direct formatting at at Writer’s core level. This project aims to take a step towards a solution for handling proper table styles.

  • Panos Korovesis – Make the SVM format independent of the VCL metafile + tests for the format: This requires the completion of the tests regarding SVM, and then the separation of the read and write functionality of MetaActions to new distinct classes.
  • Akshit Kushwaha – Tests for the VCL graphics back-end: Add more test cases to the pre-existing tests, running those tests in every back-end, and implement a usable UI for the users to test the graphic’s feasibility themselves. This should make graphics rendering smoother.
  • Shubham Jain – Write missing unit tests: Extend the tests in Libreoffice. There are currently more than 1300 bugs fixes which do not have tests written for them, so this project aims to bring down that number.

Good luck to all the students – we appreciate their work on these important features and improvements! And thanks to our mentors for assisting them: Heiko Tietze, Xisco Fauli, lmari Lauhakangas, Olivier Hallot and Christian Lohmeier (The Document Foundation); Tomaž Vajngerl, Muhammet Kara, Luboš Luňák, Miklos Vajna and Mike Kaganski (Collabora); Thorsten Behrens (allotropia); László Németh and Markus Mohrhard.

From August 16 – 23, students will submit their code, project summaries, and final evaluations of their mentors. Find out more about the timeline here, and check out more details about the projects on this page.

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