Last Monday , I set out a simple brain teaser for the Word gurus out there. I listed a number of seemingly unrelated features in Word 2003 and asked the question "what do these have in common?" John Topley got the answer I was looking for in the very...

I'm not sure when menu separators were invented. They could well have been dreamed up at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, although I can't find any definitive evidence of it. Apple included them in the design of the Lisa user interface; below you can see an example...

A couple of us on the UI team were having a conversation about the comments to yesterday's post . Someone pointed out that it appears we've discovered a community on the internet of people just as obsessed about UI as we are around here. :) I wanted...

The success of a user interface depends on getting the details right. That's not to say that a little bit of fit-and-finish work can save a horrible design, but a good idea won't thrive either unless enough of the little details are right. I know that...

Another in my series of posts on personal favorite improvements in Office 12 ... Did you know there are a variety of underline styles available in Word? Ever want to double underline some text? Or put a dotted underline under certain words? Or...

It was a cold winter afternoon early in 2004, and we were in the midst of doing some of the first usability tests with a working, clickable prototype of the Ribbon. (Prior to that, most of our prototypes had been paper-based .) This particular...

A major component of the work around improving the Office 12 user interface is rethinking feature organization. As I've explained in past posts , there are many reasons why commands ended up in certain menus and toolbars--not all of them logical...

As faithful readers of this blog, you no doubt know that not every program shipping with the Office 12 "wave" of products has the new user interface . This means that, at least for the time being, menus and toolbars are still alive as...

Perhaps because I was never the kid who had the super sized 128-pack of crayons, I never developed much of an artistic eye, especially for colors. Having only the 16-pack, with nary even the free crayon sharpener is something I obviously rue to this day...

On Tuesday , I wrote about some of the new features in Outlook 12 and, in passing, I mentioned that Outlook was the single biggest consumer of the Ribbon . Not surprisingly, since I didn't explain the remark any further and because it seems to...

We have a number of ongoing, long-term projects designed to help us test the overall usability and learning curve of the new Office 12 user interface. One of the most important tasks has been a full deployment of Office 12 Beta 1 within a local company...

Because Office 12 represents the first time we've ever introduced a new user interface for Office, it is understandably garnering a lot of attention. Add to that the powerful new open XML file formats for Office 12 documents , and it's tempting to...

Here's a handy trick to kick off your weekend. You've got a few columns of text in a Word document, separated by tabs. They're not in a table. Now, you want to format just one of the columns without impacting the text in any of the other ones...

A lot of people are involved with helping to produce documentation and tools to help ensure a smooth transition to Office 12 and the new user experience. Although the data indicate that people will be able to be productive even as they first sit down...

In every phase of my life in which I've been required to create documents, a different set of symbols has been important to me. For instance, in high school, I studied Spanish, which meant figuring out how to type ñ and ¿. In college, as I repeatedly...

One thing you might have noticed in Office 12 demos and screenshots is that certain commands in the Ribbon have an orange dot as their icon. People have speculated on what the orange dot represents; guesses have ranged from highlighting features you...

Much is made in the business world about the 80/20 rule. Also known as the Pareto principle, the basic idea is that in many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Wikipedia has a good discussion of the principle , its myriad applications...

Often people ask us "how did you come up with the ideas for the Office 12 user interface?" That's a big question. And the answer isn't simple. What is easier to describe is the process by which we work to validate the design choices...

Yesterday, I walked you through some of the history of the status bar. Today, I'm going to write about what we've done in Office 12. It's not a radical departure from previous versions, but there are some nice improvements. I mentioned yesterday...

The status bar. A ubiquitous piece of the modern user interface, hardly anyone seems to pay it mind. That attitude often extends to interaction designers as well. The status bar, if you are new to the world of computers, is the (usually) gray strip...

It's a new year! Happy 2006! I hope you were able to enjoy some time off with family, friends, or maybe just catching up on some reading, video games, woodworking, cooking, football... If you're back in the office for the first time today and finding...