Issue 104466 - Recovery dialog is confusing
Summary: Recovery dialog is confusing
Status: CONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: General
Classification: Code
Component: ui (show other issues)
Version: OOo 3.1
Hardware: PC (x86_64) All
: P3 Trivial (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: AOO issues mailing list
QA Contact:
URL:
Keywords:
: 99799 (view as issue list)
Depends on:
Blocks: 97765
  Show dependency tree
 
Reported: 2009-08-24 16:14 UTC by mairin
Modified: 2013-08-07 15:31 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: DEFECT
Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---


Attachments
Here is how the dialog looks today. (37.35 KB, text/plain)
2009-08-24 16:15 UTC, mairin
no flags Details
Mockup suggestion for improving recovery dialog. (40.46 KB, image/png)
2009-08-24 16:15 UTC, mairin
no flags Details
patch to implement this (1.56 KB, patch)
2009-09-14 14:18 UTC, caolanm
no flags Details | Diff

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Description mairin 2009-08-24 16:14:18 UTC
The OO.o document recovery dialog is confusing. I just realized after having to
put up with it every time I load OO.o for the past year, that I could click
cancel and the dialog won come back for the old documents I don't care about
that were in it.

The problem is the button to kill the dialog is called "Cancel", and because the
dialog pops up during the initial startup process for OO.o, I always thought
that "Cancel" meant "Cancel opening OO.o"

I think that using clearer language on the button would be better, something
like, "Cancel Recovery" or "Cancel Recovery and Continue"

I've attached a screenshot of how the dialog looks today and how it could look
with the different button (I also moved the progress bar to the bottom, it
doesn't make sense on the top if you haven't started recovery yet.)
Comment 1 mairin 2009-08-24 16:15:03 UTC
Created attachment 64350 [details]
Here is how the dialog looks today.
Comment 2 mairin 2009-08-24 16:15:34 UTC
Created attachment 64351 [details]
Mockup suggestion for improving recovery dialog.
Comment 3 caolanm 2009-09-14 14:13:09 UTC
*** Issue 99799 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 4 caolanm 2009-09-14 14:18:23 UTC
Created attachment 64754 [details]
patch to implement this
Comment 5 caolanm 2009-09-14 14:19:19 UTC
confirmed as an issue, reported a number of times
Comment 6 Olaf Felka 2010-09-22 15:37:46 UTC
@ cd: Please have a look. This issue has had 3.3 as target but slipped from our
attention. Do you think this issue makes sense for OOo 3.4? I think renaming the
 'Cancel' button will be a good improvement.
Comment 7 carsten.driesner 2010-09-23 08:24:46 UTC
cd: I am not a UX  expert but a software developer. I want to get feedback from
the UX team if this minor patch is an improvement from their point of view.

cd->fl: Can you please give us some feedback about this patch?
Comment 8 frank.loehmann 2010-09-23 08:55:18 UTC
- Proposed text is too long and uses '&'. Text proposal: 'Abort Recovery'.
Enlarge button to fit text in other languages.

But I think we face many more issues here:
- Modal 'Document Recovery' dialog blocks office, so user could not work with
office after restart if dialog is open.
- All documents have to be recovered. (No check boxes in front of documents)
- Cancel process shows up a 'Save' dialog in some cases. I know there was a
technical explanation for that behavior, but users do not care at that point
(see modal dialog) and want get back to work.
- Could not send a report, if user does not want to recover.

Could we at least kill the 'Save' dialog and introduce the check boxes?
Comment 9 carsten.driesner 2010-09-23 10:22:42 UTC
cd->fl: Thanks for the info. I will try to find a volunteer to work on the
recovery dialog.
Comment 10 mairin 2010-09-23 13:34:29 UTC
I am a UX expert; I'm an interaction designer with Red Hat.

I do not think the label "Abort Recovery" is going to solve the problem.  #1,
the word "Abort" in at least the English language is not the best word to use.
#2, it doesn't solve the problem I articulated in making it clear which button
is the one to press to actually start OO.o. Renaming "Cancel Recovery" to "Abort
Recovery" does little to address this issue. The reason I added "Cancel Recovery
& Continue" to the button text was to make it clear which option would allow the
user to ignore the dialog.

Maybe a "Ignore" button would be nice.

Does the recovered document go away when you hit the cancel button, or does it
keep coming back? It seems to appear every time I use OO.o but I don't know if
that is because of my usage or because it retains the canceled document. If it's
due to the latter, ignore is more accurate anway.
Comment 11 frank.loehmann 2010-09-24 10:56:50 UTC
@mairin:

Please feel free to change the string to whatever is appropriate for an English
native speaker. The original string was just too long, so that the button to
cancel would have been more prominent than the one to start recovery.

If you see the recovery dialog coming up each time you start office, you are not
our target audience :-). Hopefully most users will not see this dialog at all or
at least not very often. But if they face it, the current process it too complex
and unexpected, because users just want to get back to work.

When we started the recovery project (see [1][2]) we had the goal to recover
user's work environment and to receive an error report regarding that crash.
Competition had different strategies implemented. One just stored documents and
showed them in a list after starting the program again. The other did a
screenshot from the whole desktop and recovered the office system below the
scenes, what took ages before the user was able to continue to work (and
happened quite often ;-). We decided to clearly state what happened and ask the
user to support OOo by contributing the crash report.

Main problem (IMHO) is that the current recovery process is not optimal today.
We have seen this in usability tests where users were lost, because they just
expected to get their Office back. Instead of Office they get a kind of modal
wizard dialog blocking OOo completely. Others did not trust the recovered
documents, or just had no documents open worth recovering.

Today I would not implement it the same way again. So scratching an itch in
current recovery process seems a little bit like lipstick on a pig :-) That's
why I listed some open issues of the current process to make others aware of the
general problems we have in that area.

Main problem seems to me that office does not start when clicking the OOo icon
or loading a document. Recovery, in whatever way, should be shown on top of the
restarted program. In that context even the 'Cancel' button would be sufficient
to get back to OOo. Sending crash reports should be asked once and done
automatically, if the user agreed. IMHO recovered documents should just show up
in a list, so that the user could pick one, if desired.

[1]
http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/errorreporter/error_report_2_0_ui_specification.sxw

[2] http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/recovery/Autorecovery.sxw  

[3] http://specs.openoffice.org/collaterals/guides/text-style-guide.html
Comment 12 frank.loehmann 2010-11-30 16:16:11 UTC
@CD: As discussed today, we should simplify this and make use of the new pane
framework instead of fixing the current design.
Comment 13 Martin Hollmichel 2011-03-15 21:00:51 UTC
set target to 3.x since not release relevant for 3.4 release.