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Contextual UI (RSS)
Yesterday morning we were sitting in the office of one of our usability researchers watching some DVCAM tapes from tests conducted a few weeks ago. We had a discussion that got me thinking about a set of tests we ran several years ago to determine the
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Tonight we spent a few hours finalizing the contextual tab colors for Office 2007. As you may have seen in pictures of the new UI, each set of contextual tabs has a color associated with it. This helps to uniquely identify each tab set for familiarity's
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Creating a drawing in Office is different is a few key ways from other features we expose on the Insert tab of the Ribbon. Most notably, individual shapes are usually part of an overall drawing. It's less common that someone intends to draw a solitary
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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
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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
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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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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
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Yesterday, I talked about "command loops," in which commands not available at the same time in a modal user interface can cause frustration or reduced efficiency due the mode switch required to access both of them. When we looked closely at the command
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A common question I hear: "Are there dialog boxes in Office 12?" The answer is a definite "yes." Dialog boxes remain a part of the Office 12 user interface, and many of the "tried-and-true" dialog boxes from past versions of Office remain untouched in
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Right-click contextual menus were first introduced in Office 4.x (which included Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0) and went on to become a ubiquitous part of using software starting with Windows 95. The basic idea behind context menus was to give power users a
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