1. Introduction
OpenERP is a full featured business application suite, with more than 700 modules. Despite the
complexity of technical work and the importance of the community members in the development of
such a huge project, our goal is to make a software easy to use, user friendly, consistent while
remaining fully open.
That's one of our main challenge: provide tons of features while remaining easy to use.
OpenERP SA has setup a useability team whose role is to continuously simplify the software, his
installation and his configuration. This team is responsible of maintaining this document which
covers all useability guidelines for OpenERP developers.
The guide is in two parts: one description of every concept or OpenERP and their impacts in the
useability and a set of guidelines at the end of the book.
The particularity of this manual is that it will take account the opinions, advice and help of the
community. Indeed, everyone can contribute in writing of the usability manual thanks to way and
format use to write this doc. The notes of the Usability team will be inserted as and as in the
manual. The community can also add notes or send its ideas.
Continuous Improvement Process
With about 200 full time developers, OpenERP is evolving every day. The useability team
continuously looks for ideas to simplify OpenERP for new users.
These ideas are discussed between OpenERP SA, the official partners and members of the
community. In order to discuss about ideas, we have setup an open team on Launchpad to discuss
every proposition. If you want to join our useability team, click here:
https://launchpad.net/~openerp-expert-ergonomy
You can also subscribe to this mailing list to be part of the main discussions about how to improve
OpenERP's useability: https://launchpad.net/~openerp-expert-ergonomy
Once an improvement is approved by the useability managers, the community of OpenERP SA
develops the softwares according to the proposed improvements. You can check the developer guide
for more information about how to contribute to OpenERP:
• http://doc.openerp.com/contribute/08_documentation_process.html#building-the-
documentation
• http://doc.openerp.com/developer/index.html#book-develop-link
Main useability improvements are reported in this book as a set of guidelines. The useability team is
responsible of synchronizing the book content with the best practices on OpenERP. If you want to
contribute to this book, you can get the Launchpad branch here:
https://code.launchpad.net/~openerp-community/openobject-doc/trunk
All changes done, regarding important improvements, will be posted on the blog of OpenERP
where you can also leave your comments, advices or your ideas. (http://useability-
openerp.blogspot.com/)

2. In order to benefit from the feedback from any visitor on this website, every one can leave a
comment on any page of this book. The useability team will review all comments every month and
update the book accordingly if required.
The book is written only in english, then translated by the community members in several
languages. For more information about our translation process, check here:
http://doc.openerp.com/contribute/09_documentation_translation.html
In order to check that all OpenERP modules respects the useability guidelines, the check of these
guidelines is part of the quality certification process of new modules by OpenERP SA. So, we
check that all official modules respect the above guidelines in order to make them become official.
The useability team is also in charge of sensibilising the developer teams. So, when the useability
team detects developments which are not conform to these guidelines, they must contact the authors
and ask the author of the module to improve his code according to specific guidelines. In this
feedback email, the useability team makes the link the each guidelines that are infridged.
Having set this process, a full time team of several developers and functional experts, we expect
OpenERP's useability to improve very quickly in the time. If you want to propose a new
improvement, the easiest way is to send an email to the useability mailing list with your suggestion:
openerp-expert-ergonomy@lists.launchpad.net
If your improvement is validated by the useability team, we will assign a developer and a member
of the useability team will improve the guidelines.