The End of Personalized Menus

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Andrew Eberhard — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:09:35 GMT

I don't want to offend the person or people that worked on this feature but I can't find a way to say it any other way: good riddance.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

SteveA — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:15:21 GMT

Well I will be glad to see the back of them. The number of people I have helped at their pc with some problem, and the first thing I do is turn it off for them, much to their delight. And I stress that I am not an IT support person, just someone who is a bit more savvy.
Good blog by the way

re: The End of Personalized Menus

anon — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:34:35 GMT

In all fairness, I think you guys should republish the marketing brochures and PR when Office 2003 shipped and everyone at Microsoft was so proud of the personalized menus telling how more productive people would be thanks to it.

Office 12 is a fixed version of Office 2003.

And it adds its own clutter. I hate it. Only my opinion though.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Matt Breckon — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 20:25:21 GMT

Woohoo!! This was the one feature of Office that I thought Microsoft had got really wrong. I'll be really glad to see it go.

At least we now all know not to do that again.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Brandon Bloom — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 20:40:37 GMT

It is about time!

I know you have a lot of stats from the customer experience improvement program, so I am curious: what percentage of users dissabled personalized menus?

(And since everyone else is saying it: I love this blog)

re: The End of Personalized Menus

James Schend — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 20:49:05 GMT

Brandon, that's not very helpful because the vast majority of Office users don't know you *can* turn off Personalized Menus.

The most common complaint about older versions of Office was the paperclip help assistant. People would constantly gripe at me how it interrupted their work, was distracting, etc. I always replied, "well, why don't you just turn it off?" The usually response was a surprised, "you can turn it off!?"

One of my personal rules of UI design is that 90% of people never change their preferences, and 80% of people don't even know they *can* change their preferences. So if you're ever adding a feature which might be confusing, make sure the default is "off."

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Dave Solimini — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:02:01 GMT

You mentioned in this post that publisher did not have the new UI.....

... WHY? It seems like it would be perfect for publisher.. complicated, document-oriented interface with way too many buttons an bars.....

-dave

re: The End of Personalized Menus

jensenh — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:40:16 GMT

Dave,

I agree Publisher will make a great Ribbon app. You can read the "why" of which apps we did here http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/09/30/475687.aspx.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

jensenh — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:44:55 GMT

anon,

Sorry you feel that way. Just a correction that Personalized Menus were a feature of Office 2000, not 2003, so you won't find any Office 2003 brouchures trumpeting Personalized Menus.

If you are actually interested in understanding why they were added and why we're making the changes we are in Office 12, you could read http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/category/11720.aspx.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Brian Shih — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 01:51:44 GMT

Hurray, those were the first thing I turned off whenever using a new copy of Office.

I like your reasoning as to why the menus ended up being a bad idea, and personally I feel like the worst part is when you haven't customized it by using certain features over and over again, that it basically turns your one click menu into a 2 level (at least) menu. I can't remember where I read it (I actually think it was a Microsoft UI study) that people prefer fewer levels of hierarchy with more options per level over deeper trees.

All in all, thank you for turning it off by default. Out of curiosity, why were they implemented by default in the first place? What was the reasoning, or did user tests just happen to show that people preferred it?

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Ross — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 01:58:10 GMT

About time, too!

I don't know anyone who actually uses them. I think it's another one of those features that looked good 'on paper' but when it came to actually testing the thing, no-one had the guts to say it didn't work.

Awesome blog by the way, Jensen.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

John Waller — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 09:01:43 GMT

>>A small but significant victory for humankind.

Not to mention the end of headaches for tech support.

"It's the 7th item from the top of the menu."

"I only have 6 items in that menu..."

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Citizenchan — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 16:07:59 GMT

Aw, and I was just getting used to it.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Bil Simser — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 05:11:01 GMT

Thank the maker! It's probably the most single annoying "feature" that has always bugged me and the first thing I do when I setup a new system.

Now if only the rest of the planet got with the program and stopped trying to emulate this as I've seen in countless programs.

At least when I boot up O12 final, It'll be one less thing to worry about.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Sendell — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:08:40 GMT

Can you already tell us how to turn off 'Personalised Ribbon'? :)

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Jason J. Thomas — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 17:56:03 GMT

"And there was much rejoicing."

I, for one, will not miss this feature.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Michael — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:12:48 GMT

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Ken Cox [MVP] — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 20:52:21 GMT

This is great news.

I'm not sure what the reasoning was for the theory that "If you haven't used it yet, you don't need to see it, so we'll hide it for you."

Now I don't have to go in to change it every time I build a new machine.

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Future Ribbon Hater — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 06:02:55 GMT

Excellent!! Now we can all get ready to focus on the ribbons instead.

I can see it now, in Office 14, 6 years from now... "In the next version of Office, we're introducing heirarchical text-based menuing systems. Our usability studies have told us that ribbons, while pretty, just dont work."

re: The End of Personalized Menus

John Greenan — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:56:06 GMT

I echo the sentiments of many others. The "personalised menus" was an idea that simply was not tested properly in the real world.

One other thing - what proportion of beta 12 testers are not US based. I've worked for a number of software firms and usually one can see US only testing results in finished products. Now, before anyone gets on the high horse and rants at me for bashing the USA, I am not doing that. Many times I have seen statements like "To show a dollar amount click on the 'Show Currency' button". But if you are working in Euros that's not very helpful. So, this is not anti-US, just anti poor testing...

PS I count myself as a non-US based office 12 beta tester - I must get round to sending some feedback - but so far so good.

The Expert Mode Misadventure

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 18:00:39 GMT

It may seem based on my writing that the ideas behind the Office 12 user
interface kind of popped out...

re: The End of Personalized Menus

Ilanguak Olsen — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 18:47:52 GMT

Thank you - oh Lords of Office (& MS!)
Take it away, and my mother will find the menu items again - because she will be able to see them!
(Randomly) hidding options was funny once, like the "Click-me & win a million" button who was afraid of the mouse pointer!

Good design.

Ilanguak Olsen
http://www.simplefailover.com

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