Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

One of the features we built into the Outlook 2003 user interface is called Quick Flags. You can single-click next to any mail item to color it so that you can find it again later. Or, you can right-click to apply one of six colors to help you categorize...

Back in the article " Set In Our Ways? " I talked about one of the design issues we were thinking about at the time--namely, whether or not it was OK sometimes to break commands out of a set. In particular, we were thinking about the Mini Toolbar which...

For some reason (entirely unintentional) I've spent a bunch of this week babbling about keyboard issues. I guess you can tell where my mind is right now. So, I knew there was no better way to end the week than making sure you saw what's become...

First of all, due to a glitch in the system, Howard's article about the philosophy behind Themes in Office 2007 got posted very late yesterday. It's well worth the read, so if you didn't catch it yesterday, you might consider checking it out...

Howard Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt group. Last week I gave an overview of the new Office Themes capability. Thank you for all the great comments. This week I'd like to show you what's inside an Office...

I mentioned a few days ago that the team has been immersed lately in improving the Office 2007 keyboard model . We got a lot of constructive feedback around the model from Beta 1 and so we're hard at work addressing it for Beta 2. Today, I want to...

A couple of weeks ago when I talked about The Feature Bob Invented , I mentioned that we use PowerPoint as an easy way to prototype UI, especially in the early stages of design. A number of people have asked me for more details, and so today I thought...

As we continue to work on the visual design of the 2007 Office apps, we've been very conscious of looking for ways to slim down the overall UI of the apps. Early on (especially before people learned more about how it worked) some people were saying...

Today, the product I've been blogging about for the last six months as Office "12" officially became the 2007 Microsoft Office system . Along with the naming announcement, pricing and packaging information has been revealed, and...

Today I present the first of what I hope are many guest articles on Office user interface issues written by other folks from the product team. This first series of articles describes the new themes capabilities of Office 12 and how they integrate...

We've been working a lot lately on improving the Office 12 keyboard model, so my mind is trapped in a keyboard shortcut frame of mind. I don't have anything to share on this subject yet (we're still working on the design), and when I do I'll certainly...