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 I'd go through it step-by-step.
We use PowerPoint as kind of a better version of
paper prototypes.
This technique has several advantages: prototypes can be made to feel somewhat interactive, because the content
is electronic it can be modified more easily than paper, and (best of all) the
usability participant uses the mouse and is on the computer, so it feels natural to them.
In my opinion, paper prototypes always suffer a little bit because of the
weirdness of asking people to pretend paper is the monitor and a pencil is the
mouse. (Although I guess with the advent of Tablet PC's, this is becoming less
weird...)
Note: The following technique will only work for PowerPoint 2002 and above.
Previous versions did not include sufficient support for transparent AutoShapes.
The way we normally set up PowerPoint prototypes is this:
- Put screenshots of all of the different UI states you want to test onto
different slides.
- If your UI is mostly popups on top of a static frame, you might consider
putting that static frame into the slide master background; that way, you
only need to put the UI which changes on each slide. (Click View,
Master, Slide Master to access the slide masters.)
- Next, you want to make sure PowerPoint doesn't advance your slide show
to the next slide whenever the user clicks. This is so you can simulate
interactive click behavior within the prototype. Click Slide Transition on
the Slide Show menu, turn off the setting to Advance Slide On Mouse Click,
and then click the Apply All button to apply the setting to all slides.
Now, that your overall prototype is set up, it's time to add interactivity. Let's
say you have a button, and when
someone clicks on that button, you want it to simulate bringing up a menu. Easy
enough, assuming you have added slides containing pictures of both states
(pre-menu and while the menu is up.)
- Using the Drawing toolbar at the bottom of the screen, draw a box over
the hit target for the button. (You can use any other AutoShape you want, it
doesn't have to be a rectangle.)
- Now, right-click the shape and click Format AutoShape on the context
menu.
- On the Colors and Lines tab, set the Transparency to 1% and remove the
border entirely. This will make the shape virtually invisible, yet will
still allow you to receive mouse clicks on it. (If you make it entirely
transparent, PowerPoint doesn't register mouse clicks on the shape.)
- Now, right-click the shape again, and click Action Settings on the
context menu. This is where you determine what should happen when the button
is clicked.
- Normally, I choose "Hyperlink to:" in the dialog and then choose to which
slide it should navigate. You could also be fancier and have an external
program launch, a sound played, or run a custom macro. If you wanted a snazzy
rollover effect, the Mouse Over tab in this dialog would be the place to do
that.
- Repeat this process for each slide to which you want to add interactive
behavior.
You're good to go! We've found that this technique has yielded some very
useful prototypes with a minimum amount of work.
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 things about the Ribbon like "it's just a fat toolbar and takes up all my space." We wanted to lose as much unnecessary weight as possible; you might remember how I feel about interface squalor.
In our current builds this week we finally got vertical spacing of the UI elements pretty much how we expect it to be when we ship Beta 2. So I thought it would be a good time to take some measurements to see where we were "out-of-the-box" vs. Word 2003 with the default Standard and Formatting toolbars up.
The question I wanted to answer was: "how much extra space does the 2007 UI take vertically vs. the 2003 UI."
So, I counted up all of the vertical pixels in Word starting directly below the title bar and extending to the last pixel of the status bar. From this, I subtracted any pixels devoted to displaying your document. This left me with the count of "pixels devoted to the UI." I did Word because it's the app in which vertical space is the most critical.
The results:
- Word 2000: 143 vertical pixels devoted to UI
- Word 2003: 140 vertical pixels devoted to UI
- Word 2007: 135 vertical pixels devoted to UI
It seems that we're on our way to achieving the goal of creating a richer UI taking about the same amount of space as the common out-of-box experience with the current version.
And, the new UI uses 230 fewer horizontal pixels as well because the Task Pane is off by default.
And, you don't have to spend extra UI space to put up the Picture toolbar, the Table toolbar, the Mail Merge toolbar, the Reviewing toolbar, the Word Count toolbar, the Drawing toolbar, etc., etc. All of this is built into the 135 vertical pixels already allotted to the UI.
And, remember that when you want the most space possible for your document, you can collapse the ribbon entirely by double-clicking the selected tab, giving you 111 of those vertical pixels back.
I was pretty enthused by the results, and I wanted to share them with you.
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 you can
find all of the details on the Microsoft web site.
In particular, I'm jazzed about the very affordable Microsoft Office Home and
Student 2007 which, in addition to all the improvements I've been telling you
about in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, also includes the great new OneNote 2007. Of course there are
several different versions available to meet your needs, so you should
check them all out.
Now is also a great time to
sign up to receive a copy of
Beta 2 on the Office preview site. We're committed to shipping a great Beta 2
for you, and so I hope you'll
let us send it to you to try out
when it's available.
This 2007 release has really been a labor of love for so many
of us. It's been said many times that this is the most significant Office
release in over a decade--maybe ever. I believe that's true, but more
personally, I know it's a release that the team is really proud of and are working
so hard to get in your hands.
There are improvements and innovations in so many key areas: user interface, open
file formats, a new graphics engine, redesigned charting and diagramming,
workflow and business process integration, instant search, RSS, and time
management in Outlook, document themes support across the apps, a redesigned
Access, a new OneNote, SharePoint, and SharePoint Designer, Groove, Publisher,
Project... and this only scratches the surface. I'm leaving out
literally hundreds and hundreds of improvements, huge and small.
For those of us working on the new user interface for the 2007 Office
system, it's tweak tweak tweak as we work every day to improve the product based
on the feedback given by so many of you.
There's still a lot of work left to get the product ready, but 2006 will be the year productivity
software takes a huge leap forward.
It is an honor to have you along for the ride.
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 with the user interface. Look for new articles every Wednesday.
Howard
Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt
group.
My name is Howard Cooperstein my work has been primarily on OfficeArt, the drawing and graphics
features shared across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and FrontPage. I was
also the User Interface lead for PowerPoint 2002. For Office 12 I am the lead
for the Office Themes team.
A big part of the Office 12 user interface story is how fast you can create a
great looking document. This is the first in a series of articles explaining
how we fill up Office 12's galleries with great looking choices.
Office 12 dramatically improves the aesthetic quality of formatting and this
becomes really clear when you look at documents created with previous versions.
In our research we looked at a lot of customer documents and for the most part
they are professional looking but quite plain, relying on the default styles for
text, tables and graphics. Obviously, PowerPoint with its Design Templates has
the most colorful and graphically rich documents. But, even so, the tables,
charts and diagrams on those slides usually aren't as polished as background on
which they sit.
Let's look a little closer at what exactly is going awry with
formatting. As mentioned above default styles are most often used and these
styles are far less than compelling. For example, take the default table and
chart styles (pullease!)
Individually, each has serious visual design issues. Taken together there's
the additional issue that they don't match each other in type face, colors, or
shading style. Office 2003 has some limited capabilities in Word and PowerPoint
to tie content styling together, but for the most part each piece of content is
singing its own style tune. It's easy to see how documents frequently end up a
cacophony of styles.
Default issues aside, Office 2003 can make a great looking document if you
know all the right features to use, in the right ways. We came across some
stunning examples in Word and PowerPoint, in particular. Why do the vast
majority of users fail to create documents like this? Fundamentally it's because
1) very few users are skilled in graphic design and 2) the existing user
interface fails to account for fact #1. Hey, we can't all go to design school!
Our tools should let us focus on our work and make many of these design
decisions for us. Office 12's galleries which insert pre-styled content and
apply multiple formatting settings in a single click are well poised to address
the UI issue, but you still need a way to put that visual design sense into the
galleries.
Enter Office Themes. While similar in name to an existing feature in Word,
Office Themes are an entirely new way to specify the colors, fonts and graphic
effects to be used in a single document.
The Office 12 Ribbon uses this design description to provide galleries of
Quick Styles that always match the Theme of your document. The Themes and the
Quick Styles are created by visual designers. The natural result: people create
documents that sing one (beautiful) song.
In Office 12, Word, PowerPoint and Excel all support the new Theme
architecture. They all read the same theme file format. Not only will the
styling of content match within a document but you can make documents,
presentations and spreadsheets that match each other. And all of your content is
dynamically linked to the theme; change your theme and your entire document will
transform its colors, fonts and graphic effects to match it.
In upcoming posts I'll cover more details about the remarkably compact design
magic inside each Office Theme file and discuss the design goals behind the
Themes and Quick Styles user interfaces.
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 post here.
But thinking about this so much gave me the inspiration for today's post.
Whenever I write about keyboard access in Office, people send comments along the
lines of "I wish it was easier to figure out what the keyboard shortcuts in
Office were."
There are, as you might expect, a lot of web resources on the
subject. But I recommend
the great
Office Online site, which has an
incredible stash of information to help you use Office. Click the Assistance
link on the left side to start digging in.
To save you time, I've compiled the list of guides to keyboard shortcuts for
all of the Office programs. Don't miss the "Show All" link at the top of each
page which formats the page in a way suitable for printing.
The Office assistance team has also created a number of other useful
resources around using the keyboard with Office. Here are some of them:
These are just a few of the over 100 articles on using the keyboard in
Office. You can
view the
full list here. And don't worry, the keyboard shortcuts will continue to
work in Office 12.
Now you're ready to impress friends, family and co-workers with your
mouseless command of Office.
As I've mentioned before,
Task Panes made their first appearance on the scene in March 2001, in Office XP. If you want to get the background on Task Panes, why they were added, and their role
in modern Office UI, read
this
article or, better yet, the
entire "Why
the UI" series.
Because of our oft-stated design mantra "everything's in
the Ribbon"
some people have speculated that Task Panes are not a part of Office 12. This is
not precisely true, although the content of many Task Panes have moved to the
Ribbon and the role of Task Panes in the product has become more focused. There
are many fewer of them, and the few which are left are more consistent in their
behavior and reason for existing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
First, let's talk about the mechanics of the Task Pane as it existed in
previous versions. The Office XP/2003 UI includes a single, full-height pane docked to
the right side of the window. This single pane could show one Task Pane at a
time, and you could switch between the available ones using a dropdown menu at
the top of the pane.
The Task Pane in action (Click to view full picture)
The Task Pane was used for at least four different kinds of UI.
First, it could act as a place to show secondary document information based
on selection. The
Styles and Formatting pane in Word, the
Office
Clipboard, and the
Watch Window in Excel are good examples of this type of pane.
Second, the Task Pane was used as a kind of replacement for a wizard when it
was deemed important to have access to the document while running the wizard.
The
Mail Merge pane in Word is an example of this.
Third, the Task Pane was sometimes used as a replacement for what should have
probably been a dialog box. The
Attachment Options pane in Outlook 2003 WordMail
is an example of this.
Fourth, the Task Pane was used to show a set of visual choices, such as the
Slide Design pane
in PowerPoint 2003. These were mostly items moved out of dialog boxes so that
the results of the visual choice could be seen without blocking your document content.
So, it already wasn't totally clear how the Task Pane was to be used. Adding to the confusion was that a number of the Task Panes had automatic
launch behavior. This could be frustrating. For example, the Clipboard pane
took over that space if you happened to press CTRL+C a few times in succession.
When we designed the Ribbon, we knew we had to reconcile it with the
role of Task Panes. We considered removing all of them from the product
entirely, but there were a few which did seem to make sense within the new
design. So we struck a set of design principles to govern when and how would
allow the use of Task Panes:
- All Task Panes which had content consistent with the Ribbon were removed and integrated into the Ribbon. Slide Design in PowerPoint is an
example of this, where it became its own Ribbon tab. This accounts for most of the Task Panes in the product.
- Task Panes never come up automatically. They are always turned on or off
by the user, and always from the Ribbon. This is how we've stayed true to
"everything starts with the Ribbon." If you want a Task Pane as part of your
document workspace, you can turn it on and we'll never mess with it.
- Allow people to have multiple Task Panes up at once. To put people in
better control of their screen real-estate, we've turned all of the Task
Panes into lighter-weight panes that you can arrange as you like. If you
want to include both Styles and Formatting and the Research pane as part of
your workspace, go for it.
- No Task Pane will show up at startup. This includes the Getting Started
pane, which has been removed from the product.
- No inter-Task Pane navigation. There's no dropdown list of Task Panes;
the UI is organized into one place--the Ribbon. You can open the Clipboard
pane from the Clipboard group on the Ribbon but not from some one-off list
of panes hanging from Mail Merge.
The goal was to provide a predictable, consistent experience in which you are
in control of what windows you see as part of your workspace. The Ribbon remains
the one place to browse for functionality--there's no deep well of Task Panes to
spelunk into. On the other hand, the panes that some people do love--such as
Styles and Formatting--remain a part of the experience that you can turn on if
you wish and we won't interfere with it through "auto" behavior.
Finally, to clarify the developer story: we added the ability to use the Task
Pane in custom solutions in Office 2003 as part of the Smart
Documents developer story. The good news is that this capability still
exists and, in fact, has been upgraded pretty substantially in Office 12 as
well.
I spend a lot of time here writing about the new Office 12 UI. And why
not--it's the project I work on and I'm proud of the work our team is doing.
But in reality, the purpose of any UI framework is to support the programs
using it--and ultimately to enable them to provide awesome user experiences.
One of the things that blows me away in Excel 12 are the new data
visualizations. This is an area in which the new UI technologies (the Ribbon,
Galleries,
Live Preview) and new capabilities in Excel
(Conditional Formatting
improvements, new graphics functionality) come together to make something
great.
I use Excel a lot, but I'm not an incredibly hard-core user; generally, I
throw some data in the grid and push it around. Excel for me is a decision-support tool.
I use it to analyze and visualize my data to help make good decisions.
For that reason, the fact that I can make something like the following
picture in just one click in Excel 12 is enough already that I dread having to
use previous versions.
Just one click to apply this automatic formatting in Excel 12
I'm sure it must have been possible to make things like this in Excel
2003--probably through writing fancy VBA code or by finding and buying $200
add-ins.
But I never spent the hours necessary figuring out how to create something
like this. Now that I have these capabilities at my fingertips, I find them indispensable.
"Format as Table" and "Conditional Formatting" on the first tab of Excel might
just be the two commands I use the most frequently in Excel 12.
What really rocks is seeing
Live
Preview in action with Conditional Formatting. As you hover over all the
choices in the gallery, your data is instantaneously updated to show you what
the visualizations look like. Finding the most meaningful one takes just a few
seconds. This is all working in current builds, and it's one of my favorite
parts of Office 12.
If you use Excel to analyze data, you owe it to yourself to read
all about
Conditional Formatting on the venerable Excel team blog. (I'd recommend
starting at the bottom and reading up.)
Have a great weekend everyone!
Today, just thinking aloud...
A minor design conundrum we face is as follows: based
on the data we collect, we
can see that within certain sets of related features, some of them are used much
more frequently than others. Should we ever act on this data by showing only the
most-used features in a set?
Let's take three of the most common "sets" of icons in Office: "Bold - Italic
- Underline", "Left Justify - Center - Right Justify", and "Undo - Redo".
Conventional wisdom and common practice dictate that wherever one of these
icons tread, all of them should appear. I don't think I've ever seen a user
interface with just Bold and Italic and not Underline. (At least not one that
actually has an underline feature...)
Yet, when you look at the data, Bold is one of the most-used features in
Excel but Underline hardly registers. Left Justify and Center are used 100x more
than Right Justify in Word. And Redo might as well not even exist next to the
towering fame of Undo.
The design challenge comes when we want to pack high-usage commands into a
small space, such as when we decide on the default content of the
MiniBar or the
Quick Access Toolbar. People want efficient access to Bold, but they probably
don't need as quick access to Underline. In the past, we've always treated those
three icons as a set, but could we get away with only Bold and Italic?
Same with text justification: the data would dictate only putting Left and
Center on the MiniBar, perhaps to give way to a more-used command like
Highlighter. But would people wonder and criticize why Right Justify isn't
there? Do the Left and Center buttons stand alone, or do they require Right in
order for people to intuit what they do?
There are other options, of course. We could turn text justification into a
dropdown menu, as recent versions of another commercial word processor does. But
then you're requiring an extra click to get to any of these features--and at
that point, having it on the MiniBar isn't saving you much time anyway.
It is safe to say that we're at least considering dropping a few icons from the
MiniBar (only) in order to make room for features people use more.
Perhaps the hardest pill for me to swallow though is having Redo on the Quick Access
Toolbar. Undo absolutely belongs there; it is one of the most-used features in
Office and it needs to almost feel like part of the frame--something always
available regardless of the tab of
the
Ribbon you're on.
But Redo is used in fewer than 3% of work sessions. And the Quick Access
Toolbar is
prime real-estate--a place we don't want to take up any extra space
whatsoever for superfluous icons. So could you have Undo without Redo? Where
would Redo go? It's not used so infrequently as to remove it altogether, so it
has to have a home. The current design, in which both Undo and Redo are in the QAT, is the trade-off we feel best with so far.
Does the product's complexity go up much because of the extra Redo
icon next to Undo? The good news is "probably not," because you expect to see Undo and Redo
together--in this case the extra icon just completes the Back/Forward metaphor
seen in so many apps today (especially the web browser.)
I guess a related question would be: Does having a well-known icon missing
from a set (say, only Bold and Italic and not Underline) actually cause
cognitive dissidence because it feels wrong? These are all interesting questions
to look into...
Speaking of options, did you know you can show two time zones at once in the
Outlook calendar?
This tip works in all versions of Outlook.
Go into Tools.Options and click the Calendar Options button and then the Time
Zone button. Alternatively, you right-click the time bar on the left side
of the calendar and choose "Change Time Zone" (this is the best way in Outlook
97.)
Now you can turn on any second time zone you wish. You can label one or both of
them to help you remember what they are.
A word of warning: use caution with the "Swap Time Zones" button. It does a little
more than you might think--it promotes your secondary time zone to be your new
Windows system
time zone as well as making your old primary time zone
secondary. This means that your system clock will change, meaning that you
probably only want to do this when you're physically located in a secondary time
zone and want to swap everything (Outlook and Windows.)
The good news is, if you swap by mistake, a simple press of the Swap button
again will put you back.
You can read more about time
management features in Outlook 12 here.
It may seem based on my writing that the ideas behind the Office 12 user
interface kind of popped out of the sky and or that we went with the first things
that came to mind.
In reality, many people contribute creative ideas, and deciding which one is the
best is no easy task. We debate and discuss and weigh the details, and in the
end we have to make a decision.
Sometimes, especially in the early stages, we bet on the wrong idea.
Hopefully we catch many of them through the
testing of early prototypes,
but occasionally it's not until something is in the build and we use it for a while
do we realize that it's totally wrong. It's our job to find and fix those mistakes.
One of the mistakes in Beta 1 of Office 12 is something called "Expert Mode."
I haven't written about Expert Mode yet because I've known we were going to
change the design for some time and I wanted to wait until we had settled on the
replacement design so that I could relate the entire story. I know there are
those on the team cringing right now even seeing the words "Expert
Mode" on the screen...
Here's the background: there are many, many settings in Office. Organized
into rows and rows of tabs in Office 2003, Word alone has hundreds of options,
many of them obscure.
The result of having so many options is that most people never change any of them. They
open the dialog box, shudder in fear, and then close it. Yet, many top feature
requests are things already in Options. ("I want to change my default font.
I want to always save in this format. I want to change the name used to mark
comments." etc.)
These useful options, which I call "user preferences" were mixed up with
many, many advanced settings which made the preferences hard to find.
(How many of you regularly change "Suppress extra line spacing the way
WordPerfect 5.x does" or "Don't expand character spaces on a line that
ends with SHIFT-RETURN"?)
Our solution? A feature called "Expert Mode." When you opened up the new
Options screen, only the
useful, understandable options were present. The idea was that people would find and set their preferences and
never need to be exposed to the rough underbelly of the product. If you really
needed an advanced setting, you could find an obscure checkbox to turn on
"Expert Mode", at which point a bunch of extra settings would show up in place
and in green (to show you that they appeared.)
Well, you can probably guess where this is going. (Sounds like at least a
distant cousin of
Personalized Menus, doesn't
it?)
If you never, ever, ever needed anything except for the things we designated
as "preferences", the design worked great. You never saw Expert Mode, and
you'd have a very clean and easy-to-use Options experience.
On the other hand, if you need even one Expert Mode setting even once, your
user experience is destroyed. First, you have to find the checkbox to turn on
Expert Mode (and we didn't make it easy.) Second, as soon as you do, every
section of Options is filled up with extra settings. They show up in-place,
meaning that there's not even anywhere to go scan for the ones that newly showed
up. Third, no one is ever going to do the extra click to turn Expert Mode off
again--so either we "auto" turn it off, or the user is stuck with a confusing
mishmash of advanced settings mixed in with the more commonly changed settings
forever.
Despite its shortcomings, we thought the design would work and we put it into the product;
in fact, it's there in Beta 1. Unfortunately, we were wrong..
It soon became abundantly clear that we had made a mistake.
We couldn't get the classification of Expert Mode right; more people than we
thought needed one or two Expert Mode settings and nearly all of them
required assistance to get Expert Mode turned on. Once Expert Mode was activated, even if they only needed
to change something once, the experience degraded to
be not much better than Office 2003.
So, after Beta 1 we demoted Expert Mode to the design scrapheap. Instead, we
gathered together the most commonly sought-after user preferences and put them
on a simple, straightforward first page. Advanced settings which don't fit cleanly into a top-level
category are grouped together into an easily-scrolled Advanced section, with group
headers helping to organize the flow.
The advantages of this design: a clean layout and organization for user
preferences. An easily browsable, single list for more advanced application
settings. Looking for one of these doesn't degrade the Options experience and
doesn't require a checkbox to activate. And best, like the Ribbon, there's no
"auto" behavior--everything has a clear, browsable home that remains the same
session to session.
I'll write in detail about the new Options in a future post, complete with
screenshots. There are some pretty nifty improvements.
You may remember that
last week
I described the textual separators that we use in Office 12 menus to improve
a few
specific scenarios.
Another way we've enhanced menus is a design we call "rich menus."
The idea is simple: include descriptive content within the menu itself to
help people find the right choice. Although
Super Tooltips provide another
mechanism to add descriptions to commands, rich menus are ideally suited for
short menus in which the feature names themselves wouldn't necessarily be
successful at conveying what a feature is for.
Take, for example, the very useful
Freeze Panes feature in Excel. This
feature makes it possible to "freeze" part of the grid on the screen so that you
can see it even as you scroll a different part independently. It is frequently
used to keep a set of title cells in view as the data scrolls next to it.
Many people wish there was a way to do this in Excel, but can't figure out
how. Even if they stumble upon the "Freeze Panes" item on the Window menu,
clicking it provides no real hint of how it is to be used. Turning it on doesn't
make it clear what it's used for and, in fact, can make it seem like your
spreadsheet is broken.
Although power users couldn't live without Freeze Panes,
few people stumble upon it and are able to use it by themselves. Eventually,
someone shows them what it's for and how to use it, or they are motivated to
read a book or web site in which they are walked through how it works. In fact,
thousands of web pages are devoted to imparting the trick to the uninitiated.
In Excel 12, here's what you see when you click the Freeze Panes button in
the Ribbon:
This screenshot illustrates a couple of different parts of the Office 12 UI.
First, it's a rich menu, meaning that a short description follows the name of
the feature. This makes it straightforward for someone to discover what a
feature is used for.
Second, following our design tenet of trying to make it easy to get the most
commonly sought-after results in a single click, you can now freeze the first
row or column, regardless of the selection. This is the most common use of
Freeze Panes, and through this menu, many people will be able to use the feature
who never could figure it out before.
Third, it shows the
textual
separators again, in this case separating the two different classes of
"Freeze Panes" functionality.
All of these enhancements conspire to help people use a part of Excel they
might not otherwise have been able to figure out.
One of the key design tenets of the Office 12 user interface is making sure that the set of features you need to look through is as small as possible. Communicating the relevant features makes the program feel smaller and simpler and saves you time in finding what you're looking for and discovering what's possible.
Contextual Tabs are the most crucial piece of this puzzle. By showing the Picture Tools only when they could possibly work (i.e. when you are working with a picture), and doing the same with all other objects, the core Word/Excel/PowerPoint experience is vastly simplified.
But there are other details to which we have attended in order to help work towards this design goal. A key advance is the work we've done to support top-level command disabling.
Here's an illustrative experiment. Launch Word, and then click Close on the File menu to close the empty Word document. Word is still running, but no documents are open--something we call the "fishbowl."
Now, drop the Insert menu. Most things are disabled, but some commands are not. Picture and References, for instance, remain enabled. So, hover over those menu items to reveal... oh. Actually, everything on the Picture submenu is disabled after all. In fact, everything on the Insert menu is actually disabled, but you have to visit the entire menu hierarchy to reveal that fact. This is just the way dropdown menus work, and it can be confusing and frustrating.
And why do menus work this way? Not a usability reason, but a technical reason. Back in the earliest days of hierarchical menus, checking through the entire hierarchy looking to see if all the children (and children's children) were disabled would have been an expensive and potentially slow process. A trade-off was made to reduce usability in order to improve performance.
Flash forward to today. In the Office 12 Ribbon, any time all of the descendants of a control are disabled, the top-level control is also disabled. This can save you an time digging through the UI trying to figure out which feature you want to use. Communicating the disabled state at the top level means having a more accurate picture of what's available and what's not without wasting time and clicks. And, of course, in many common cases we try to communicate why a feature is disabled through Super Tooltips.
This is another example of one of those little details we hope will make an impact in making Office simpler and more usable.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about holding down the Alt key while selecting text in Word to draw a box around it.
I received a lot of mail thanking me for the tip, which was nice. But three of the mails had something in common—they asked me to pass along to the Word team a specific related feature request: discontiguous text selection (the ability to select multiple independent ranges of text at once.)
Well, good news, faithful readers. Not only do I think that it's a good suggestion for a feature in Word, it's actually so good that it's already in the product! Today, it's all about the Control key.
Start by selecting some text in Word. Now, hold down the Control key while you select other ranges of text. Voila, discontiguous text selection at your disposal. Any formatting you apply will work on the entire selected range. This can be really helpful for a situation like formatting the first sentence of a number of paragraphs the same way.
You can select multiple ranges of text at the same time
Another less-known use of the Control key is to make a quick copy of the selected text.
Try this: make a document in Word and select some text. If you drag the selection and drop it somewhere else in the document, it will move the text to where you dropped it. So far so good.
Now, hold down Control and drag/drop the text to different location in the document. Notice that this time, Word makes a copy of the selected text and puts it in the target destination. You can use this trick to quickly make a lot of copies of selected text. I don't use this feature often, but a couple of times it has come in very handy.
For the most amazing trick of all: once again, select a range of text. This time, hold down both Shift and Control and drag the text to a new location. Notice that it inserts what looks like a copy of your text. Now, make a change to the original text you selected—the copied text mirrors the changes you made!
In fact, by holding down Shift and Control, you've created a link. Any change you make to the original text is automagically updated in the linked text. (You can even use this trick to link automatically updating text between two documents!)
Congratulations, you're now an official expert in the ins and outs of Word text selection.
Today marks the start of February, the "month of love." In commemoration, I want to ask you a question:
What software do you love, and why?
Some members of the high-tech illuminati start and end their discussions of design in terms of RAZR phones, iPods, and other cool gadgets. That's clearly where technology and coolness and the mainstream have all converged right now, and so I think it's only natural that people gravitate towards those topics.
But for my own curiosity more than anything else, I'm interested in shifting the conversation about desirability in design over into the computer software realm, at least for today. And I'm interested in hearing from you.
What's your favorite piece of software, modern or ancient? What makes it great? Is it something fun or something useful?
Can software provoke the same sense of "gotta have it" that a tech gadget can? What does it take to get you excited about software?
How much does a great user experience factor in to your feelings about a software product? Or is it all about the utility? Or about the people who make it? Or about attractive visuals? Speedy performance? Extensibility? Some combination of all of these factors?
What exemplifies a great software experience for you?
Use the Comments link below to tell me your thoughts.
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 first comment to Monday's post: all of the features I listed are on the Tools menu. Many of you also sent me the correct answer via e-mail.
The point I was trying to make is simply this: don't over-romanticize how ideal the current menu structure of Office is. Although any organization of disparate features is going to have strengths and weaknesses, there's nothing "magical" about File Edit View Insert Format Tools Table Help. I don't want to belabor the subject any further—if you want to read more about the relationship between familiarity and the classic menus, read last Monday's post.
Instead, I wanted to get to an interesting comment Ben R. made last Monday: is it inevitable that there's always going to need to be a "junk drawer" of leftover commands in an application and how is that handled in Office 12?
It caught my eye because "junk drawer" is a term we use as well. I think of a junk drawer as being features piled together primarily for the convenience of the UI designer. The Tools menu is a great example of a formalized junk drawer—an entire menu envisioned as a kind of flea market of functionality.
The upside of the Tools menu is that it's easy to design. When the next four unrelated features get created, you know in which menu to stack them. The downside is that it creates a huge rock that people have to turn over every time they want to find something. There's no way someone could ever rule out "Tools" as a place a feature could be; predictably, when we watch people look for features, they spend a ton of time being sucked in by Tools. (Even though the thing they're looking for is hardly ever there.)
Feature organization is an inexact science. Whenever we propose a new content organization for a set of features, one of the standard questions we ask ourselves is "is this a junk drawer?" And, honestly, sometimes it's a painful question to ask because you really have to force yourself not to create one. Some features flow completely naturally into a feature organization and some are always outliers. In a program as vast as Word or Excel, there are a lot of outliers, and finding the right home for each of them takes thought and creativity.
What tricks do we use to help avoid junk drawers? The first is that we try to force ourselves to use descriptive labels for tabs and groups. We specifically avoid words like Tools, Properties, Options, Edit, and Advanced, which lend themselves to the junk drawer mentality. When we do need a more generic term to help describe what's in it (for instance, the Design tab in PowerPoint), we try to use a word that hasn't been overloaded with meaning in Office already. This helps us to assert the meaning of that word and frees us from the expectation that it maps 1-to-1 with an old menu or toolbar.
The most important technique, though, is just vigilance. There have been a few times in which we almost resigned ourselves to relying on a junk drawer in a certain area and then someone came up with the key insight that brought it all together. Internally, we're constantly shifting content around in the Ribbon, improving the organization and relationship between features.
Why is it important to avoid junk drawers? In our experience, the more specific and logical your feature organization is, the less time people spend hunting around the UI to find things. Every junk drawer in the product is going to take a click any time someone's looking for something—so the productivity cost can be enormous.
So, to answer Ben's question. No, I don't think it's inevitable that even a large program like Word has to end up with a junk drawer. Ensuring that your program doesn't have one will likely cut down the time required to find and use features. The downside is that it's really hard to avoid this design pitfall, and might be extremely difficult to pull off in an existing product without performing a full, ground-up reorganization as we're doing in Office 12.
