Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)

re: Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)

anon — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 19:45:00 GMT

I am not sure to completely agree on the chart template thing. It cannot be one click, unless it's a trivial one and the person does not care the overall look of the chart. If the person does not care, then I'm sorry but you can take Excel right now click on the chart button and then click Finish. Where is the click count improvement?

Secondly, because the chart engine is bound by the chart area, and the template will be applied into it, it will result in many cases in an ugly chart because there are too many labels on the axis, or of the title overlaps the plot area and/or the legend and so on. What Excel does then? prompt the user? Nope. What Excel does is shrink chart elements so that they fit together. While the solution could be to start resizing the chart area so that chart elements are given enough space to show.

Another comment is on the "desired result" thing. What prevents you from showing real previews rather than bitmaps? Isn't real preview what Excel does today in the chart wizard? I am pretty sure you kept the chart wizard, but if the new UI is meant to replace it then it's a loss.

re: Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)

Step — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 20:58:51 GMT

I'm going to second anon's comments, and add my own take. I've been thrilled by your posts so far, but this one didn't seem to answer much for me. For example, the picture/text thing. Doesn't Office already have this? Of course, I can't get it to work properly, or at all half the time. The new interface looks like it will be easier to get to, and hopefully make the feature work, but it seems that was already the promise which is now being fulfilled. Not that I'm complaining about that, mind you.

I guess what I don't understand is how all the "invisible" stuff is being addressed, if at all. One of the largest sources of frustration that I've seen over the last 5 years, is in dealing with things like tabs, spaces, indents, chart and picture placement. I'm talking specifically Word right now, b/c those are the clearest examples of what I mean.

So even though we can now pick a result that looks like what we want, roughly, how do we tweak it? Is it still a huge fight? B/c if it's close but we can't get it closer, then it's really not much better than before. I can already do that now (get it close but not perfect) with relatively little effort. It's the little invisible alignment type things that drive me, and the several people I've worked with in two different environments, nuts.

Does that make sense? I'm sure you must've seen the same issues in your usability testing. It's very similar to one of your first posts, talking about not automating and trying to guess what the user's doing. I've kind of mixed that in with having the "advanced" or "tweaking" adjustments needing to be easier to use / more apparent what effects they're causing.

re: Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)

jensenh — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:15:39 GMT

I probably wasn't clear enough in my writing. One of the key pieces is that you can get the last 10% easily. Once the picture is positioned close to where you want it, moving, aligning, cropping can be done freely because the underlying properties (such as text wrapping) have been set.

Tomorrow, I will talk againg about the relationship between a gallery-based approach and an advanced, command-based approach. Both are valid ways to work in Office 12, and I try to explain the relationship tomorrow.

I suspect I'm not doing a totally clear job of explaining a very rich UI in a few paragraphs of text and a couple of screenshots. I'll keep working on it.

Thanks for the comments.

re: Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)

zz — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:24:27 GMT

Jensen,

Perhaps you can do a screencast ala http://channel9.msdn.com/showforum.aspx?forumid=38 ?

Sometimes these static pictures do not convey the power of what trying to demostrate. I know there is already Channel 9 demo, but to it was not very in-depth. Perhaps you can do better.

re: Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)

jensenh — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:51:49 GMT

A webcast would probably be helpful and, I bet as we get further down the line that's something we can do.

For those who do want more information, the PDC DVD set has every breakout session from PDC (including my in-depth overview and also Savraj Dhanjal's session on the extensibility of the new UI). It's expensive at $499 but, if money's no object or you can get your company to buy it for you (or you know someone in your company who went to PDC and thus is getting the DVD for free that you can borrow), that might be one way to go.

You can buy the DVD set at: http://shop.ecompanystore.com/mseventdvd/MSD_productdetail.asp?EventID=5&TYPE=PDC05

re: Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)

Leanne Owen-Keenan — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:51:33 GMT

Hi Jensen

Fascintating stuff so far - got to your blog via Chris Pratley. Nice to be able to feel that it's not just usability sessions that might have input to stuff software houses are doing, so well done there!!

So far I like the concept and apparent implementation of the ribbon. As an ex-trainer of MS Office products I can see it will be easier to get newbies/novices up to more than the usual 80/20 rule (80% of users only use 20% of the features).

Having said that, could somebody over there please, please, please recognise that it's more than the American market that want to use the in-built templates and galleries and so on but they are just not suitable for "our" market. I'm a Kiwi living in Britain so I've seen how two white western-based cultures use their office software. As yet I haven't come across one company that can, e.g., use the standard layout for legal numbering. Obviously we can all set up our own but couldn't the usability labs take input from other countries' users too and at least have some built in templates/galleries suitable for them?

Sorry, not really intended as a moan but it seemed a good place to make a comment, especially with all the good stuff that looks like it's on its way with this new version.

Charting I – Professional charts, made easy

Microsoft Excel 2007 (nee Excel 12) — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:59:06 GMT

A few posts ago when I described the work we did in the area of “great looking documents”, I mentioned...

The Office 2007 UI Bible | MS Tech News

The Office 2007 UI Bible | MS Tech News — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:07:51 GMT

PingBack from http://mstechnews.info/2008/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible/

Jensen Harris An Office User Interface Blog Results Oriented Design | Paid Surveys

Fri, 29 May 2009 02:24:55 GMT

PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=jensen-harris-an-office-user-interface-blog-results-oriented-design

Jensen Harris An Office User Interface Blog Results Oriented Design | debt solutions

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:46:59 GMT

PingBack from http://debtsolutionsnow.info/story.php?id=1289