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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
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I know I seldom do two posts in a day, but in addition to Rich's guest article , I wanted to point to a very interesting article Sander, one of our designers, wrote on the Excel blog . The article is focused around the charting experience, but he posted
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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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One of the most challenging aspects of developing the new UI has been making sure that everything ends up loaded into the airplane before it takes off. Confused? Let me explain. Sometimes I think about shipping Office like an airplane taking off. Our
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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 a
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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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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
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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
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The success of a user interface depends on getting the details right. That's not to say that a little bit of fit-and-finish work can save a horrible design, but a good idea won't thrive either unless enough of the little details are right. I know that
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A comment we've heard again and again about the Office 12 interface after people use it or see it demoed live is: "wow, it's so much better than I imagined just by seeing the screenshots." Several people made that comment to me once again after my talk
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One of the major engineering feats associated with shipping Office is making sure it runs fast enough. This effort, which we classify under the broad heading of "performance" includes responsiveness (how quickly a button responds when you click it), throughput
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Unless you've just awakened from a Rip Van Winkle-style hibernation, you probably heard that Microsoft released the Xbox 360 last night at midnight. The local news in Seattle was stationed outside of the Best Buy I normally go to in Bellevue , giving
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One of the never-ending challenges associated with designing the Office 12 UI is managing screen real-estate. One of the tenets of our design is to leave as much room as possible to work with the document. On the other hand, there are always more and
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I saw the following post as a comment below a news article on Office 12: "with its fancy skin, it appears Office has abandoned low-vision users forever." Nothing could be further from the truth. We have accessibility experts within every team in Office,
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My first experience in Office was working as an intern program manager on Outlook 98 . During that summer I learned one of the key usability lessons that carried over into the DNA of the Ribbon: the importance of labels. Part of the user experience effort
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