Designing and engineering the new Office 12 user interface has been the most challenging project I've ever worked on. Over the last two months or so, you've had a chance to start to get to know me and some of the design philosophies I believe ...

I saw the following post as a comment below a news article on Office 12: "with its fancy skin, it appears Office has abandoned low-vision users forever." Nothing could be further from the truth. We have accessibility experts within every team...

Taking a few minutes to tie up some lose ends and highlight some opportunities... On the Word command usage contest : As of the first 32 comments, no one has guessed the top five most-used commands in Microsoft Word correctly yet. Not...

My first experience in Office was working as an intern program manager on Outlook 98 . During that summer I learned one of the key usability lessons that carried over into the DNA of the Ribbon: the importance of labels. Part of the user experience...

This is the sixth part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. You can read the last installments here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 . Microsoft is tracking...

I attended college for the first time when I was three years old. The College of Wooster Nursery School , that is. One of the best features of nursery school was that they went to great lengths not to leave anyone out of activities. Probably the most...

You've written an add-in to Microsoft Word. It creates an entry point at the bottom of the Tools menu. "Crikey! There is no Tools menu. Call Sgt. Pepper immediately!" We know there are thousands of add-ins, macros, and other projects that extend...

Microsoft Office is more than a suite of applications. It's also an important development platform. A change as big as the new Office 12 user interface has implications for developers. There are thousands of publicly available add-ins written to ...

Answering some of the questions asked about our recent usability efforts ... Q: Can you tell us how many usability engineers are involved in all those activities? A: Yes. Q: How do you like the eye-tracking stuff? A: It...

This is the fifth part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. You can read the last installments here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 . Over the last...

I've revealed in the past how many of the Office 12 UI decisions we make are influenced by what we learn in collaboration with our usability and research team. Personally, I find usability tests scary. You have an idea, discuss it with others...

My earliest memory of Microsoft: I was 4 years old in the fall of 1980 when my dad brought home the first computer either of us had likely ever seen in person: a TRS-80 Color Computer I , brought home straight from Radio Shack. Loaded up with 4K of...

Yesterday, I discussed the way the Ribbon scales to different window sizes. I've also mentioned that you can collapse the Ribbon by double-clicking the selected tab or by pressing Ctrl+F1. One piece of the design I haven't yet written about but...

A question that has been asked a lot is: "How does the Ribbon scale down?" Anytime you see the Ribbon demoed live, you'll see it at 1024x768 resolution. Why? Simply because that's the native resolution of most projectors. If you saw my presentation...

This is the fourth part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. You can read the last installments here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 . Last Monday , I discussed the UI...

A few weeks ago I showed you a neat trick that you can use in Word to quickly fill up a document with sample text. Not to be outdone by its sibling, Excel also features a few ways to swiftly fill up a worksheet with sample data. We use these...

There are three ways to use the keyboard to get work done in the new Office 12 UI. Type 1: Keyboard Shortcuts Let's start with the simplest and most direct form of keyboard access: keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are single key combinations...

Tomorrow, I'm going to introduce the keyboard model for the Office 12 user interface. But before I do that, I would feel remiss starting the conversation about keyboards without introducing my unappreciated friend, the Dvorak keyboard. I...

One of the tenets of the Office 12 user interface is that we don't want people to have to look "under rocks." I don't know why we say "under rocks." Maybe I made it up, maybe I heard it somewhere, who knows. The picture I get in my head is an...

This is the third part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. You can read the last installments here: Part 1 Part 2 . Last week we started a walk...

Because you can never predict what name will end up sticking. Back when my team was working on the UI redesign of Outlook 2003 , one of the areas we were designing was what marketing later named the " Navigation Pane ." But official feature naming...

Yesterday, I talked about "command loops," in which commands not available at the same time in a modal user interface can cause frustration or reduced efficiency due the mode switch required to access both of them. When we looked closely at the...

The Ribbon is an example of what's called in academic circles "modal" design. Broadly, this means a design which is split into "modes", only one of which is active at a time. In the Ribbon's case, this means that the features are grouped together...