Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

Here's an Outlook party trick suitable for cruise ships, family reunions, and kids birthday parties. Up until now this secret trick has been known only to Outlook insiders--a kind of "secret handshake" passed through the generations of Outlook team...

One of the most interesting epiphanies I've had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: "help" in Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts. How can this be? I think my biased assumption was that experts know how to...

Last week, I wrote about Segoe UI , the new font used to render the user interface of Office 12 and Windows Vista. I intended it to be a little fluffy "FYI" piece. Little did I anticipate the flurry of comments and feedback and e-mail and...

Thursday and Friday are Microsoft holidays, so the next new post will be on Monday. In the meantime, here's a "holiday" treat for you. Thanksgiving in the United States is a holiday that always occurs on Thursday. However, one year Microsoft...

Unless you've just awakened from a Rip Van Winkle-style hibernation, you probably heard that Microsoft released the Xbox 360 last night at midnight. The local news in Seattle was stationed outside of the Best Buy I normally go to in Bellevue...

An important element of the new user interface in Office 12 is a feature we call "Live Preview." The basic idea behind Live Preview is simple: whenever you hover over a formatting option with your mouse cursor, Office shows you what your document...

Before I start today, a special note: if you haven't done so yet, you might want to read yesterday's entry . We shipped Office 12 Beta 1 (yea!) and I pulled together a set of articles designed to jumpstart your knowledge of the Ribbon, contextual...

As you may have seen , yesterday evening we released Office 12 Beta 1 to our technical beta testers. We finished up build 3417.6 last week and declared it to be Beta 1, followed by a few days of media verification (testing the CDs) and getting...

We're not just introducing a new UI in Office 12--we're also introducing a new UI font. Windows 95 used "MS Sans Serif" as the UI font in Western locales. It was a straightforward font which looked fairly good, if plain, at small sizes. Office...

OK, here's what happened: The article I intended to post today, I couldn't. And now the day's almost done (except, of course, here on the left coast of the US where it's still mid-afternoon and in Australia, where it's already tomorrow.) So instead...

This is the eighth 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 Part...

Open the About dialog box in any Office program. Near the top, you'll find the build number of the program you're using. If you are using Office 2003, you'll probably see something like 11.5608.5606. If you are using Office 12, you might see something...

Today, we got back a pile of data from a recent card sort exercise. We brought in 17 Word users and 9 Excel users and gave them a huge stack of virtual "cards" containing the name of a command and a short description of what the command does. They...

Yesterday, I wrote about our fight against interface squalor. The most dangerous features from this perspective are the ones that appear to need to be available "all the time." Each one of these occupies a space in the window that can never be...

One of the never-ending challenges associated with designing the Office 12 UI is managing screen real-estate. One of the tenets of our design is to leave as much room as possible to work with the document. On the other hand, there are always more...

This is the seventh 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 Part 6 . Last Monday...

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...