Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

re: Mythbusters: The Office "12" New UI

TC — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 11:28:36 GMT

Nice info. The more info. you provide on internal design processes, the more we can see the thought process behind them; they don't just happen by accident.

Having said that, thank %^$%@# you are moving away from that *($%@#$in' adaptive menu idea that surfaced in Office. That was the worst thought-out UI idea, that I have ever come across! "Hey, the user is getting too confident, let's frig-around with all his menus, so he has to learn them again!"

re: Mythbusters: The Office "12" New UI

jensenh — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 12:52:13 GMT

Down the road, I plan on discussing "Adaptive Menus" as part of a series about the history of Office UI. You are right that we're moving away from that model in Office "12."

re: Mythbusters: The Office "12" New UI

anona — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 15:26:16 GMT

A comment on speed? On the video, the UI behaves like a pig : when you click a menu option ; when you make a live preview of a very simple single page Word document.

Start Office 97 again, and be ready for a shock.

re: Mythbusters: The Office "12" New UI

BlueJay — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 17:37:03 GMT

I like that you can also turn on/off the ribbon. What I'd like to see beyond that is an "auto-hide" option that will show the ribbon when I move my mouse (or my pen on my tablet) up to the ribbon area. It looks GREAT! I can't wait for beta 1.

re: Mythbusters: The Office "12" New UI

jensenh — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 17:48:52 GMT

Our goal is to bring performance in-line with Office 2003.

Also, Julie's laptop is having problems. :)

Why Office 12 doesn't look like Mac OS X

Technovia — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 17:51:44 GMT

Since Microsoft gave PDC attendees the first look at Office 12, there's been a slew of reports around the web accusing it of - you guessed it - stealing the interface from Apple. Jensen Harris, of the Office UI team,

My list of interesting stuff PDC

Gautam Goenka (MSFT) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 05:49:02 GMT

My laundry list of product/technology/features that I liked at PDC (based mostly on keynotes):
&nbsp;...

My list of interesting stuff at PDC2005

Gautam Goenka (MSFT) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 05:57:32 GMT

My laundry list of product/technology/features that I liked at PDC (based mostly on keynotes):
&nbsp;...

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

Avner Kashtan — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:14:41 GMT

"Because we moved nearly all of the Task Pane functionality into the Ribbon, it is no longer taking up valuable space."

What does this mean for existing Office solutions based around a taskpane? Will it be discontinued? Or supported for backwards-compatibility, but stick out like a sore thumb?
Will existing Taskpane technologies (Smart Documents, VSTOv2, IBF) switch to working the ribbon, or will we have to convert solutions to RibbonX?

I know it's probably still early to tell, and being UX-focused your blog might not be the right place to get an answer to that, but I'd love to read a future article about the new Office APIs, or a pointer to an appropriate blog.

Keep up the great posts. We've all got a great thirst for Office "12" information. (And you really must get a better codename than that. :)

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

jensenh — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 04:40:29 GMT

Regarding Task Panes... the programmable Task Pane (Document Actions) has gotten even better in Office 12. You can have multiple, independent programmable Task Panes.

I'll definitely be posting about developer opportunities in the new UI... stay patient, there's a lot to cover. :)

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

Stephen Bullen — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:22:18 GMT

<i>You can have multiple, independent programmable Task Panes.</i>
Is that exposed to VBA? How much of the new UI is exposed to VBA through the object model(s)?

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

Avner Kashtan — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:45:32 GMT

"Is that exposed to VBA? How much of the new UI is exposed to VBA through the object model(s)? "

Which of course begs the questions we've all been dying to ask:
Will Office "12", at long last, have a native managed API, or will we still be reduced to painful COM Interop from .NET apps?

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

PatriotB — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:45:17 GMT

"So what does the final skin look like? Not telling, but I think it looks great and it certainly won't be confused with Mac OS X."

Such widely- and frequently-used programs as Office shouldn't be "skinned." They should follow the OS's UI guidelines as much as possible.

When Office 95 came out, it was a perfect model citizen in Windows 95. Ever since that, however, Office has done more and more of its "own thing." Seeing the current screenshots of Office 12 and comparing them to both Windows XP and Vista--it doesn't look right on either OS.

I understand that the Ribbon UI is new and I think it'll be great, from a functional perspective. But please, try to make the overall product fit in great with the OS.

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

Mario Goebbels — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:10:18 GMT

Not to rain on your parade, but the Office Techbeta 1 user interface looked almost exactly the same as in the final product. The thing that changed were the icons.

And I actually like the current WIP style. If there'll be an improved UI, I hope you'll be keeping these glowy/glassy buttons, and make the window frame transparent when running on Vista.

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

Andre — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:07:25 GMT

Also, does every Office user have the Comments toolbar turned on? Yes, the Office 12 toolbar is indeed larger.

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

Mario Goebbels — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:10:15 GMT

I forgot to specify the version. I was talking about Office 2003.

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

Dewi Morgan — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 22:15:03 GMT

Is % screen area what's important? I don't feel it is. I get a larger, higher res screen so that I can window more efficiently, fitting more stuff on the screen at once, shrinking the size of the windows and the fonts while still having them legible. I don't get a higher res screen just so that you can gobble up more of it.

Word 2.0 (640x480): 15.6% = 47,923pixels
Word 97 (800x600): 13.6% = 65,280pixels
Word 2000 Omitted - why?
Word 2003 (Task Pane on, 1024x768): 26.4% = 207,618pixels
Word 2003 (Task Pane off, 1024x768): 10.2% = 80,216pixels
Word "12" (1024x768): 13.6% = 106,954pixels
Word "12" (1280x1024): 10.1% = 132,382pixels

You've satisfactorily demonstrated that it takes up a large amount more than previous configurations, other than the office 2003 "Task pane", which sounds like a definite "first thing everyone turns off" nonfeature to me.

In widescreen format it'll be an even bigger spacegobbler.

Also, if you're going to mention changing resolutions, then you also got to mention changing screen sizes. You've forgotten that back in the days of 640x480, people had 14-15 inch CRT screens (visible diagonal 12-13 inches). Now we have LCDs with 21 inch visible diagonals. 15% of a 12 inch diagonal is considerably less "huge" than 10% of a 21 inch diagonal.

So, that myth remains doubly unbusted.

===

If the "ribbon" is not customisable to show the tools that I personally use regularly, then it is trying to nanny me, and so will be turned off. Assuming I *can* turn it off, that is.

One big test of the new office will be: "how many clicks does it take to turn off the default nannying?" In the current version, turning off all the annoying autotype/autohint/autoformat/blah nannying work-interference takes a large number of clicks. If it's more than three clicks to turn the whole lot off, then my needs obviously weren't "anticipated" very well.

I normally have to add some buttons that I use a lot to the default word layout: I *like* the fact that I can do this. And I *like* the fact that I can delete those buttons that I don't ever click, like "open", "save", etc.

My main fear for this "ribbon" is that it will not be easy to customise to suit the way I work. Looking at the marketing spiel, it looks like I'd need to specify what situations I wanted each added button to show up in... assuming I can add buttons.

Until it's more clearly stated that that's not the case, then the myth of it trying to "anticipate my needs" (rather than responding to my desires) remains unbusted.

===

As for look & feel being stolen from OSX... what? Other than lawyers, who cares, if it works?

re: Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI

A Designer — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 22:04:27 GMT

"to call it "huge" or "oversized" based on the history of Office seems unjustified."

Using previous versions of Office as your baseline presumes that said previous versions are reasonable uses of screen real estate. I'm not sure that is the case.

But at any rate, I think that the analyis of % is overly simplistic, since I believe vertical real estate is much more valuable than horizontal, especially for document-centric apps like Word, Excel, and PPT. So I wonder why you chose to put commands horizontally above the doc rather than vertically next to the doc like many other apps do with palettes including MacOffice?

(I do think this is heading in the right direction, though. Replacing both menus and toolbars with a single UI mechnanism is great)

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