Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

This morning at the CeBIT conference in Germany, we revealed the new visuals for the Office 2007 user interface. You can see a few screenshots of the new look on the Office 2007 UI Preview Site . If you've got a craving to see even more, I've created...

This is the third part in my eight-part series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 2007. Last time we started a walk down memory lane by taking a look at the first five major versions...

This is the first in a series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 2007. Any discussion about the graphical user interface of computers today has to start all the way back at the Xerox...

This is the second part in my eight-part series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 2007. Today, I want to take you on a journey. A journey that starts back into the cold recesses of...

Today I present guest writer Brad Weed, Product Design Manager of the Office Design Group. He leads the team of designers responsible for the new Office 2007 skins I introduced yesterday . Today's Guest Writer: Brad Weed Coming off the season finale...

I'm sure many of you have experienced being the "one who knows about computers." In social and family situations this often means having to help to fix, clean up, or otherwise restore a computer experience which has fallen into disrepair. There are...

As was to be expected, the publishing of new Office 2007 screenshots last Thursday brought along a scary amount of attention. In its first eight hours, that article had already had received 100x more hits than the next-most-popular article I've ever written...

Today's Guest Writer: Brad Weed Brad Weed is the Product Design Manager of the Office Design Group. For many of the UI changes we've previewed this month, March really has come in like a lion. And as you watch your favorite team get eliminated in...

A great deal of the time spent in an Office development schedule after Beta 1 is put towards addressing feedback collected through the use of the product, both in our private beta program and through other research. One of the key areas in which...

One of the many ways we test designs with real people is through usability testing. Although in Office 2007 we've greatly expanded the range, scope, and types of testing we've done to include everything from remote testing to extremely early deployments...

Howard Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt group. This week's post is third in a series on Office Themes. The first post was an overview , in the second we looked inside an Office Theme file . This week I wrap up the...

Contextual Tabs are among the most important components of the Office 2007 user interface. They provide quick access to the contextual features which work with an object, much like context menus do. When you're working on a table, we add the Table Tools...

Today's Guest Writer: Savraj Dhanjal Savraj is a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team focused on user interface extensibility for Office developers. For Office 2007, we built the UI extensibility model around a simple idea: If your...

Many moons ago, I mentioned that one of the impetuses behind the new Office 2007 user interface was the realization that a large percentage of feature requests phoned in to product support were actually features already in the product. It was just that...

Today's Guest Writer: Savraj Dhanjal Savraj is a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team focused on user interface extensibility for Office developers. One of the key design features of RibbonX is the "pull" model, a model where Office...

A long-open issue in the designs of the Ribbon content for the Office 2007 programs has been what to name the first tab of the programs. In Beta 1, Word's first tab is called "Write," Excel's first tab is called "Sheet," and PowerPoint's first tab is...

One of the key concepts in the Office 2007 user interface is Contextual Tabs . Whenever an object is selected, the tools for working with that object are made available in the Ribbon. I've talked about them in an introductory article and just last week...

One of the mysteries of the menus-and-toolbars based UI of Office 97-2003 is "which menu items get icons?" If you look at the top-level menus of any of the Office programs, you'll see that some items have icons and some don't. As it was told to me...

Today I present guest writer Savraj Dhanjal, Program Manager on the Office User Experience Team. He is one of the members of our team focused on user interface extensibility for Office developers. Articles on the Office 2007 user interface developer...

Although the focus of my blog is the Office 2007 user interface, really the purpose of any software interface is to communicate what a piece of software is capable of and to make it easy and efficient to use the features of the software. So, while we...

This morning, new information was published on the Office 2007 Preview web site , including a new video of the UI in action and updated links to sign up to receive information about Beta 2. The build used in the video is a little old (it was shot in...

People care about the pixels a lot. And why not? Few things elicit as deep of an emotional response than how something looks. Is the design pleasing? Does it fit my style? Does it fit its purpose? Is it beautiful? Is it practical? Will it wear well...

It has been said that nothing is as boring as blogging about blogging. Which makes this article among the most boring I've ever written. Even just typing "boring" three times made me yawn. ( Are yawns contagious? ) Anyway, when people start blogs...

I was hoping it wouldn't come to this, but after six months of relatively civil discourse, a few people have decided to flood the blog with obscene and otherwise off-topic comments. I had to remove over sixty comments just yesterday. Although I reserve...