KOffice Sprint Food for Tought 2: User experience

This is the second Food for Thought mail in preparation for the KOffice
sprint. This time it's about the user experience.  Other titles could have
been "workflow" or "Usability" or "The big picture".

As I have indicated on IRC, I think we have a great infrastructure in Flake,
Pigment, etc, but that we lack thinking about how the user will work with our
applications. I feel that we have concentrated much on getting features
ready, but that the features don't fit into each other very well.  With this
I don't mean technically, but workflow wise.

A few cases in point:
* I created an empty KWord document and inserted a chart by moving it from the
the "Add Shape" tool and into the document. That part worked well, but then
the Default tool was active and I couldn't edit the chart itself, only the
size, rotation, etc. To do that I have to click on the very non-obvious icon
for the "Chart Editing Tool" that appears in the toolbox on the left.

I can see the logic behind this behaviour: For any shape that we insert, we
may want place it and size it before starting on the internal settings for
it. Fine, but some (many?) users will find it difficult to find the chart
tool and start configuring the chart itself. After a few times, they will
have learnt the behaviour and will be fine.  

What I'm after is is this a designed behaviour or just a side effect of the
design of the flake library?

* After the insertion of the chart, I clicked on the text area above the chart
and started to type some text.  Oops!  No text appears because the text tool
isn't activated. This is worse, because it's completely confusing.  Surely
not very many users will want to move or resize the text areas, but they will
want to edit text.  It turns out that double clicking on the text area
activates the text tool and now I can start entering text.

Perhaps a better way would be to make a default tool for each shape be
activated when the shape is marked?

* Now I have typed a full line of text, and I start on the next line.  But
oops again! The chart doesn't move -- it isn't anchored on the text by
default.  So instead it starts wrapping around the text. Granted if I move
the chart, the text rewraps around it beautifully, but I don't want that. I
want it to move down the page as text is inserted above it. The big problem
is that I couldn't find anywhere at all where to change the anchor of the
shape. Is there a way to anchor a shape to a paragraph or character and not a
page?

These are just examples, and I don't want to point specifically at KWord. It's
just that I used KWord for my little test, and I'm sure that most of the
other apps have similar quirks. Some of these issues have nothing to do with
the apps themselves, but more with the design of Flake.

What I think is really important is that we look at these workflow or big
picture issues and really try to put ourselves into the shoes of our users. I
don't care if we release 2.0 with or without feature X or Y. What I care
about is that with the features we *do* provide, the user experience should
be really smooth.

This is something that the tech track should have as its main objective during
the sprint. Plese make thorough reviews of the applications with the focus on
providing a good user experience rather  than work through all items in all
menus or toolbars. The latter is not unimportant, but far less important than
the former.

        -Inge

PS.
Some smaller nitpicks while I'm at it:
 - The grouping and ungrouping  of shapes is on the Tool Options
Dialog / "Advanced" tab of the Default Tool. This is a really obscure place.  
It should be somewhere else.
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