Microsoft Office and the new UI

Anyone paying attention to what Microsoft is doing with its new version of Office already knows that one of the biggest changes is a redesigned user interface. Most significantly, they are ditching the ubiquitous main menu and replacing it with what is called the ribbon. This is an attempt to help make Microsoft Office, which has grown in complexity over the years, easier to use. It's a bold step, but one that I expect will influence application user interfaces for the next several years (who knows, perhaps SSP will have a ribbon some day) . I was recently made aware of a blog site by Jenson Harris (via Jeff Atwood's recent post) who is the Group Program Manager of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team. Jenson had a series of posts describing the how Microsoft arrived at this new user interface mechanism (starting here). In his series, he talks about the Customer Experience Improvement Program that was introduced with Office 2003. For users who agreed to participate (and there were many), data was collected about their use of Office which was then submitted to Microsoft for analysis. This information was useful in making objective decisions about how to design the Office 2007 interface. One thing that amazed me about is that, prior to the 2007 version, decisions on how the user interface should be improved, including what features are most used, were made based on subjective opinions and anecdotal evidence from within the development teams at Microsoft. Now I can understand why smaller companies would use such methods and I can understand why this would have been the case at Microsoft ten to fifteen years ago. However, I would have thought that given their size and resources that they would have used more objective methods prior to Office 2003. Interesting. It was also interesting to learn that the command most often used by Office users is...(drum roll)...PASTE.

(BE81)

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