History
Posts about the history of user interface in Office and at Microsoft.
I was reading through commentary from people who attended last week's MIX conference in Las Vegas. Running across Miguel de Icaza's kind words reminded me that I hadn't posted a follow-up about my MIX talk yet. Last week, I presented a session at MIX
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Yesterday, I mentioned the new contextual spelling feature that is part of Office 2007. Writing the post reminded me of a story from years past... One of the things we've tried to do from time to time is reduce the number of modal alerts that pop up as
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Earlier this week , I somewhat humorously referred to people who close windows on the left side as "Windows 3.1 lovers." What did I mean by that? The now-ubiquitous close button in the upper-right hand corner of windows was only added to the operating
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This is the fourth 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 I discussed the UI mechanisms added to Office 2000 intended to reduce the perception
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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
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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 the
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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
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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
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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 by
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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 prototype
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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 a part
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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.
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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've
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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,
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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 commonly
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