Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

One of the most well-understood and salient principles underlying the ergonomics of graphical user interface design is Fitts' Law . Named for Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University, Fitts' Law is a mathematical model of fine motor control...

On Thursday, I wrote about how Office 2003 renders the user interface using a table of several thousand colors . Some of you commented that we're crazy to do so much work. Perhaps, but keep in mind that I'm not just talking about the menus and toolbars;...

One of the efficiency affordances added to Office over a decade ago is the Recent Documents list. At the bottom of the File menu in Office 2003, you'll see your four most recently-opened documents listed; you can click one of them to open the file...

It was with a bit of surprise that I read a flurry of stories on Friday with breathless headlines like "Microsoft backs off the Ribbon in Office 2007!" and "Microsoft Cuts Office 2007 Ribbon!" Part of working at a company like Microsoft is that people...

I've written in the past about the approach we took to organizing options in Office 2007 , including a misguided detour in creating an "expert mode." Today I want to start a discussion of some of the options available in Word 2007 by sharing those settings...

As you probably know by now, each of the Office 2007 programs (both classic UI and new UI) have the ability to render themselves in several different color schemes. What determines which color scheme is used when, and what are the defaults? Before...

A few months ago, I made an attempt to give you a sense of the kinds of changes to the user interface you'd be likely to see between Beta 2 and the final product. In particular, I guessed that we had made over a thousand individual tweaks to the contents...

Some of you have noted that recently I've been writing a little less frequently than in the months before. For a long time, I did five articles a week; recently, I've been doing three or four most weeks. One reason for this is that I've been trying...