Andre’s Blog

Ok here’s my notes in raw form…

Beyond Menus and Toolbars in MS office.
VanUE talk by Jensen Harris

Next event has Mike Tam to talk about Icons.

About Jensen

• Mediocre Site of the Day was his.
• Has a music degree, not a compsci degree

About Office

• Office has 400 millon paid users
• Office 2007
• showing office 2007 beta 2 for first time
• The very first presentation done in Powerpoint
• New aspects of interaction design in Office
• this is a huge risk for MS, but they figure it will pay off
• 11 billion dollar per year business

Top Design Goals:

• -make the software easy to sue
• help people save time
• make it easier to discover more of the functionality people in office

Random Notes

• if you can save 400 million people 5 secs per day, that’s a boost to GDP
• support the creatiion of great looking, powerful documents
• avg chart was design for vga in 87 with 4 colors, looks ugly.

Why people say about office:

• “office is good enough” – for what!! I added this.
  
• “I’m sure there’s a way to do this, but I can’t figure out how”
• “Office is quite complex, I would be better at my job is I could use office better”

More Random Stuff:

• office outgrew menus and toolbars, too much functionality
• the top way people find things by scanning the ui, not help or anything else

Data Collection:

• 1.2 billion data sessions
• 1.8 million session per day
• over the last 90 days they’ve tracked 352 million command bar click
• couldn’t have done it without data
• they use heat maps of feature hits
• how they’re use mouse or keyboard
• what are the features used the most
• or what are the cool features no one can find
• what features are used lots but suck (let’s fix those)
• the word 2003 tools menu is mess…all features added since the menus were designed

Design Tenets of Office

• focus should be on content not ui
• reduce the number of choices at a given time, increase users sense of mastery through contextualization
• increase efficient access to features
• bring out the soul of the program; embrace consistency but not homogenity (existing programs are similar so they all suck)
• give features are permanent home, prefer consistent location over smart UI
• straightforward is than clever

• Core Goal: Sense of Mastery
• People spend more time 1 on 1 with office than with their spouses, building relationships with software applications
• you have to remove to simplify
• if you can make someones day a little bit better, how much better is their life going to be?

Ribbon UI

• the ribbon replaces menus and toolbars
• everything is on ribbon tab
• people cannot find things through icons so you labels
• data bars are cool
• conditional formattiang
• styling updates realtime in doc on mouse overs
• trailing highlighting is cool gives sense of motion

• can make really nice docs really fast
• jensen wasn’t even sure how to do some of this stuff in current word
• i like the highlighting box nice look and adds other info
• because of education right clicking is a lot more popular, and you can provide contextualized options
• object based tools like table tools only used when 
• every object has tis own color
• tools and objects are highly related and only 
• galleries allow you to visualize the result of a feature as oppose to the shortcuts
• don’t worry about settings just go for the one that looks closest and then tweak later if you’re a power user
• think about features instead of commands
• people have fun and can play with it
• live preview – i wonder if this has performance issues on slower machines 
• results oriented design
• hover to see results visually without having to click – reducing steps and clicks
• instant feedback/gratification 
• tactile UI

• super tool tips explains why may want to use a feature and commone uses
• use images as well in super tool tips
• relationship between groups and dialogue boxes for advanced features (dialogue boxes haven’t changed)
• advanced users like to use keyboar for efficiency
• mouse fade in as you get closer to options, use mouse motion to activate ui
• minitoolbar aka floaty, minibar
• office button for things you can do with your doc (file, save, share, publish)
• word, excel, powerpoint,outllook (authoring), access get the new UI
• don’t have classic mode.  thought they’d do a half ass new version if they new they could fall back on the old ui

• October 2006 – shipping with Vista in January 2007
• new colour schemes also, ben likes black
• how did fitz law fit into the new ui, bigger icons are easier.  target acquisition is harder 
• home tab is the features that people use the most
• they found 2 options that weren’t even hooked up to code at all!
• expects this UI to support the product for the next 10yrs, the UI will scale
• use contextual tabs 
• new file format
• .doc replaced by docx which is an xml file that’s zipped and has pngs and stuff packed in
• you can read and right the new doc format back to office 2000
• ui is all defined via xml – ribbon x
• a team of 2  graphic designers building galleries for 2 yrs
• 40,000 charts
• 100,000 word docs
• more focused on power users and niche users in future releases
• most interesting thing learned: some directional things that users have so ingrained that they can’t possibly overcome

usability testing:

• paper prototypes
• card sort tests
• task oriented two way mirror tests
• focus groups
• single person feedback

•     beta testing

•     blogging

•     outreach (like

longitudal studies

•     having people in the lab for a week

•     gave to customers then visited every week

• truman show they had cameras at his house always could see his screen…what he’s surfing on the web – ok that’s weird
• original ribbon was designed in 2 days and a lot of stayed
• the first time they had one team to the ui and user experience for all the office apps

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 12:36 am and is filed under Software Development, Usability – HCI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.