Hallo everybody!

As KOffice with every day reaches more maturity and feature parity with key players in office suite market we need to think more about its GUI. For now it is far away from its optimal state. Nevertheless the foundation ideas of this interface are great and provide good basis for world domination

The key problem in current interface is dockers. Not the concept of the dockers per se, but their interaction with the rest of interface. Now, lets sort everything out in an ordered manner:

1. The docker is too wide. There is a whole bunch of possibilities to make dockers less wide. As you can see on the picture, there are really multiple opportunities to slim it down:
http://yfrog.com/j8docker2p
This might be unnoticable on high-resolution and wide screens, but for people, who, like me have ThinkPad T60 when OVER 1/3 of the screen is occupied by the docker panel, this makes using KOffice application way harder.

2. There is no visual indication of hiding the dockers and visual means to hide them. It is really good that since 2.3 we will have a CTRL+H hotkey to hide the dock, but one can not do that with a mouse. And, believe me, there is a whole lot of people who would like to do that namely with a mouse, pressing the button (black with arrows):
http://yfrog.com/jckofficekpresenter2p
This is loosely modelled after:
http://yfrog.com/n3photoshopkp
Of couser, one may ask, why would anybody need to hide the key toolbox while working in office suite? The answer is: to concentrate on details and actual content (images, texts, fields) and to save space. The latter is veeery important for netbooks and old notebooks (like mine T60).
Another problem with CTRL+H is that it after I hide the dockers there is no indication if I have just closed them or hide. I other words, no visual indication that the dockers are hidden. And thus, no UI element to unhide them. Here is the way Inkscape copes copes with this problem:
http://yfrog.com/mrhidingindicationp

3. The dockers are unusable when used on the other side of the screen than left:
http://yfrog.com/51horizdockersp
I think we may add here that horisontal dockers would be just a great thing. I know, they work in KSpread (the formula line), but even in KSpread I need to adjust its height. Another important thing is that the dockers, when put horizontally would be horizontally-oriented, what is very important for KPresenter`s "Document" widget. That would be awesome to be able to scroll the slides horizontally.

4. The dockers are not zoomable The great way to make dockers usable is to make them zoomable as in Blender:
http://yfrog.com/86blender1p
In other words, it would be great if changing the size of the panel that hosts the dockers they would scale down.

Looks like I said everything that matters UI-wise.

Hope this will be of some help

P.S.
I use KOffice 2.3 Beta 2

Thanks for the feedback.

1. I think that is caused by the localisation. The controls are as big as they need to show the text. I assume that in the bottom combobox of the docker there is some big string.

2-3: This is partially due to the limitation of the Qt docker system and widget system. Currently Qt can scale or relayout widget dynamically. All docker would probably need to be rewritten using QML, so that won't happen in the short term.

Thank You for a quick reply. But I do not think that 1-3 are due to localization. If You will take a closer look at the pictures I have provided You will see that the key things that consume that space are not string-related - for example the distances between buttons.

....mmmm - just tried to switch into English - it seems You are right. I think I need to have a talk with our translators - maybe they could help.