March 14, 2008
How Office 2007 UI came to be – Video
Jensen posted his talk at Mix online – with a great history of toolbars in Word (how many do think there are in 2003?) and how the 2007 design came to be.
Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog
Last week, I presented a session at MIX called “The Story of the Ribbon.” I talked a bit about the general design process we used to come up with the Office 2007 user interface, to iterate on it, and to evaluate it. As part of the discussion, I showed for the first time some of the early prototypes we worked on (and abandoned or refined) along the way.It’s always fun to present substantially new content, and this was my first time giving large portions of this talk. The audience was great and, although you can’t hear them on the video, they seemed to be into it and enjoying the presentation. It was a lot of fun!
3 Comments to “How Office 2007 UI came to be – Video”
March 15th, 2008 at 7:59 am
_Nobody_ likes the ribbon, and its cousin in office 2008, the elements gallery, is stupid and slow and sullies an otherwise solid product. Why must MS insist on such cludge, and not even given minimalist users like myself the option of turning it off?
March 17th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I like the Ribbon. It seems to me a scalable way to offer lots of functionality.
I’m still can’t use Word worth a darn. The nitty gritty details of how the program reacts to keyboard and mouse input goes tangential to my expectations, crippling my ability to compose in the program. Autocorrect, extending selections beyond what I carefully picked with the mouse, incomprehensible application of styles. These all drive me nuts. What’s worse is that every other program out there is creeping toward the same style.
WYSIWYG is totally wrong for composing documents anyway. Nice tool for polishing up the format for presentation, but too distracting and too limiting for putting ideas together.
Mostly, I use a quality text editor, and create my documents as plain text, hand-written HTML, or TeX. MSFT is the first company I’ve worked out where Office documents are commonplace.
All that said, the Ribbon is the one thing I do like about Word and the other Office products. Since our screens are mostly landscape, and our documents are mostly portrait, I would have preferred something vertical to make the best use of screen real estate.
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