Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : FAQ

Office 2010: New Product, New Blog

jensenh — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:50:00 GMT

Since we signed off on Office 2007 in October 2006, we've been hard at work on the next version, Office 2010. As successful has Office 2007 has been, it represented but a first step in our journey towards rethinking the user experience of Office. Office 2010 will be, in many ways, the culmination of the work we started back in August 2003.

Recently, as the Office 2010 Technical Preview was finalized, I moved to a different team within Microsoft, working in a similar role for Windows. As a result, I won't be personally blogging about the Office 2010 user interface.

Luckily, the Office team has created the Office 2010 Engineering Blog as a hub for members of the Office engineering team to write about Office 2010. Clay Satterfield, one of the architects of the Ribbon and the Backstage View added in Office 2010, kicked off the discussion of the user experience today by publishing the first part in a series of posts about this new UI. Future posts from the User Experience team will delve into Ribbon customization, Live Preview paste, and many other enhancements in Office 2010.

I encourage you to check out the new blog, and to give feedback on the Office 2010 Technical Preview if you have access to it. Early feedback is an important part of the process of how we improve the user experience of our products, so feel free to dig and and let them know what you think!

The Story of the Ribbon

jensenh — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:00:00 GMT

I was reading through commentary from people who attended last week's MIX conference in Las Vegas. Running across Miguel de Icaza's kind words reminded me that I hadn't posted a follow-up about my MIX talk yet.

Last week, I presented a session at MIX called "The Story of the Ribbon." I talked a bit about the general design process we used to come up with the Office 2007 user interface, to iterate on it, and to evaluate it. As part of the discussion, I showed for the first time some of the early prototypes we worked on (and abandoned or refined) along the way.

It's always fun to present substantially new content, and this was my first time giving large portions of this talk. The audience was great and, although you can't hear them on the video, they seemed to be into it and enjoying the presentation. It was a lot of fun!

Watch "The Story of the Ribbon"
(Video, audio, and slides)

Download "The Story of the Ribbon"
(Slides and audio only, Windows Media, 146 MB)

Alternate Formats:

Download for iPod
(.mp4, 121 MB)

Download the PowerPoint slides only
(.pptx, 20 MB)

Dowload the slides only as a PDF
(.pdf, 19 MB)

Although I showed a few prototypes, I truly only scratched the surface of what the team created during the design phase of Office 2007. I spent a weekend painstakingly going through thousands of pictures to choose a few representative samples to show. Because I only had 75 minutes, I knew clicking through 25,000 pictures probably wasn't going to work.

Here are photos of the beginning and the end of the talk courtesy of Long Zheng. (You'll have to watch the presentation to see what's in-between!)

Over the last few days, the screenshots of the evolution of Word from version 1.0 to 2003 have been lifted from this presentation and subsequently posted and reposted all over the web.

That's OK, but if you want to see the full, original screenshots along with the commentary and discussion, please read parts 2, 3, and 4 of the Why the UI? series of posts.

While at MIX, I also participated in a panel discussion called "What's the Secret Formula?" along with Mike Schroepfer from Mozilla, Dan Harrelson from Adaptive Path, and Daniel Makoski from the Surface team at Microsoft. This was an interesting discussion about some of the challenges inherent in delivering on great user experiences.

Watch "What's the Secret Formula?"

Thanks to everyone who came up and introduced themselves after the session and throughout MIX. I enjoyed talking to you and meeting so many of you face-to-face!

Licensing the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface

jensenh — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

For the last year or so, one of the questions I've been asked again and again has been: "Can I use the new Office user interface in my own product?"

On one hand, it's an immensely satisfying question to hear, because it means that others in the industry believe in the value of what we've built and see how the sound UI research we've done can benefit their own products. Creating the new user interface has been our team's passion for the last three years, and we love sharing the fruits of this hard work.

On the other hand, the new Office user interface was a huge investment by Microsoft and the resulting intellectual property belongs to Microsoft.

As a result, I've never been totally comfortable answering questions about whether people can use the new UI or not publicly because, honestly, I didn't really know the answer. You might have noticed I've been pretty quiet on the subject.

Internally, though, more than a year ago we started talking about how we could share the design work we've done more broadly in a way that also protects the value of Microsoft's investment in this research and development.

Well, I'm pleased to finally be able to definitively answer the question. Today, we're announcing a licensing program for the 2007 Microsoft Office system user interface which allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product, including the Ribbon, galleries, the Mini Toolbar, and the rest of the user interface.

Last week, I recorded a video along with Judy Jennison, the lawyer who has been spearheading the licensing effort, to chat about the UI license in detail. Take a look, or keep reading to learn more.

(If you ever wondered what my office looks like, here's your chance!)

Watch the Channel 9 video about the Office 2007 UI License

How does the license work?

It's pretty simple really. First, you visit the Office UI Licensing web site. On this page, you'll find some information about the licensing program, a downloadable copy of the license to peruse at your leisure, and further contact information.

If you choose to implement the Office UI, you sign up for the program by accepting the license terms and giving us a little bit of information about your product. There's no fee, you don't owe Microsoft any royalties, and the license is perpetual—meaning that the terms won't change.

This should give you the confidence you need to build a business or product on top of the Office UI platform, secure in the knowledge that you've licensed the technology and research you're using in your product.

You must follow the guidelines, though.

Included with the license you'll find the 2007 Microsoft Office System User Interface Guidelines. This 120+ page document includes all of the information you need to implement Office-style UI; think of it as the specification for how the UI needs to work in your product.

To stay within the terms of the license, you must follow these guidelines.

We want to ensure that when someone implements the Ribbon (for example) that they do so the right way… and in a way consistent with how it works in Office.

There's tremendous value in making sure that we all use these models in a consistent way, because it helps to ensure that people have predictable user experiences moving between Office-style user interfaces.

In the guidelines you'll find REQUIRED sections and OPTIONAL sections. The REQUIRED sections are exactly that—sections that you must implement in order to stay within the letter of the license.

Within each section, you'll see things you MUST implement, things you SHOULD implement, and BEST PRACTICES. Just like it sounds, you must implement the UI as specified by the MUSTs in the document to comply with the terms of the license. We highly recommend implementing the SHOULD sections, and also adhering to the BEST PRACTICES wherever possible. Doing so will make you as consistent as possible with the way Office works.

The 120+ page guidelines document is confidential, so you'll need to visit the licensing site and agree to a short evaluation license before downloading it. But we created a little preview version of one of the sections to give you a flavor of what the guidelines are like.

The particular section we excerpted for the preview is Ribbon Resizing, which details the way in which the Ribbon must scale up and down to adjust to varying horizontal resolutions. The actual guidelines document contains similar information for the entire UI.

Download the 2007 Microsoft Office System UI Guidelines Preview (1.39 MB)

If your goal is to get as close to the Office UI as possible, you'll probably have no trouble complying with the guidelines. The guidelines are just there to help make that process easier and to give you a checklist for the parts of the UI you need to implement in order to comply with the license.

What's the catch?

For almost everyone, there's no catch at all. Just sign up for the license, and follow the guidelines. That's all there is to it.

You can use the UI in open source projects as long as the license terms are consistent with our license. You can use it on any platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. If you're an ISV, you can build and sell a set of controls based on the new Office UI.

There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.

Why this exclusion?

Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the research, design, and development of the new Office user interface.

We're allowing developers to license this intellectual property and take advantage of these advances in user interface design without any fee whatsoever.

But we want to preserve the innovation for Microsoft's productivity applications that are already using the new UI.

Summary

I am really excited to finally see this program launch. There's nothing our team wants more than to see the concepts and designs introduced in Office benefit others in the software industry. I believe in the new user interface, and I believe in its suitability to a large number of software applications.

I think the license strikes the right balance between allowing developers to use the new Office UI and protecting Microsoft's rights as the company who paid all of us to work on it.

For More Information

2007 Microsoft Office System User Interface Licensing web site
User Interface Guidelines Preview (A short excerpt of the actual guidelines)
Channel 9 video discussion with more about the UI and the UI license
Press release and Q & A about the licensing announcement
Frequently asked questions

The Office 2007 UI Bible

jensenh — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:00:00 GMT

I've published over 200 posts on this blog since I started it last September.

With all of those posts, it can be hard to remember what you've read and what you haven't… and it can be hard for new people to jump in and figure out where to start reading.

I've been meaning to sit down and create a kind of table of contents for all of the posts here—a starting point for people to read about the Office 2007 UI.

But then, I found out that someone already did the work for me. Patrick Schmid, a OneNote MVP and friend of the Office 2007 UI, put together what he called the Office UI Bible on his blog—a fully organized catalog of many of my posts.

And so with Patrick's kind permission I reprint here the catalog of Office 2007 UI posts (so far.)

I hope you find it useful—and thanks, Patrick!

Why a New UI for Office 2007?

Overview of the New UI

Ribbon UI Elements

The Size of the Ribbon, Screen Real-Estate, Ribbon Scaling, and Minimization

Migrating to Office 2007

UI Themes and Visuals

Keyboard Control of the Ribbon

New Fonts for Office 2007

Customizing Office 2007 (Add-ins, RibbonX)

Note that most examples shown in the following posts need to be updated for use with the RTM version.

From First Sketches to the Final Design

Design Tenets

Design Ponderings

An Inside Look Into UI Design, Usability, Development and Testing at Microsoft

Office Themes

New Features in Office 2007 Involving the New UI

Miscellaneous

The Office 2007 UI team

Office 2007 Released to Manufacturing

jensenh — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 17:00:00 GMT

I'm proud to announce that last Friday, November 3 at approximately 2:30 PM, we signed off on build 4518.1014 as the 2007 Microsoft Office system and released it to manufacturing.

This was followed by a ship party for everyone in Office including a few minutes of speeches, the traditional sounding of the RTM siren, and plenty of champagne (much of which I ended up wearing.) The rain even stopped for a few hours!

You can read the official press release here.

This release has been such a great pleasure to work on. It was more than three years ago when Julie walked into my office (I barely knew her at the time) and asked if I wanted to come over to the user experience team to help figure out if there was something better than menus and toolbars. I had no idea what an adventure I was about to embark on!

Three years later and we've shipped a product that I'm so proud of.

In the near future, we'll be sharing more of the research we've been doing on Beta 2 and B2TR deployments around the world. Just last week, we got back the most recent round of data from ~4000 people in long-term enterprise deployments of Beta 2 in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The results are positive beyond what I would have dared to dream.

To those of you who have been active in the beta program and here on the blog, and to everyone who sent feedback on the betas, thank you. Your feedback truly made the product better than it ever could have been without you.

To the app teams and partner teams around Office and at Microsoft who helped make this release possible, thank you. This couldn't have happened without your ideas and support.

And to those of you on the UEX team, whose ingenuity, consummate engineering, missed weekends, and tireless attention to detail made it all possible—thank you! We did it!

How to get it?

Office 2007 products will be available at retail early in 2007, so you'll be able to get your hands on them soon. Business customers will be able to get Office 2007 through the volume licensing program before the end of the year.

If you're running the Beta 2 Technical Refresh, the good news is that you can keep using that build for quite some time: the client build expires on March 31, 2007, and the server products expire on May 15, 2007.

What's Next?

Between now and retail availability, I'm going to do a series of posts documenting the creation of the Office 2007 user interface from the earliest prototypes all the way to the final product.

Beta 2 Technical Refresh Available Now

jensenh — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

This morning, the Beta 2 Technical Refresh of the 2007 Microsoft Office system became available for download.

You can download it now from the Microsoft Download Center.

(The download link above is the main download link. You also view the list of all available Beta 2 Technical Refresh updates for client and server by clicking the Beta 2 Technical Refresh link on this page.)

You must have Beta 2 installed in order to patch it to Beta 2 Technical Refresh, so don't uninstall Beta 2.

Why a patch instead of a full release? Primarily because we need to test the patching technology broadly, and this is a great chance to make sure it works well. Patching is the way we release updates to Office after it ships, so making sure it works well is an important part of the beta process.

Please also consider downloading the Send a Smile Feedback Tool to tell us what you think about Office 2007. If you already had it installed from Beta 2, you can continue to use it in B2TR.

In my post yesterday, I posted a list of the most substantive changes to the user interface in the new build. Consider this by no means a full list of changes in B2TR—just those in the UI.

I've also posted a list of Ribbon Control IDs for use with B2TR for RibbonX developers. These should also show up on MSDN sometime in the next few weeks. It's a 1.3 MB download (.zip file) if you need to grab it now.

Note: If you're having trouble installing the patch, try following the instructions in this article.

Note 2: Patrick Schmid is keeping a great log of solutions to issues people are encountering with B2TR.

Beta 2 Technical Refresh Available Tomorrow

jensenh — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:00:00 GMT

This morning, we announced that starting tomorrow (Thursday, Septemeber 14) you'll be able to download the Beta 2 Technical Refresh build of Office 2007 (build 4407.1005).

Note: There's a newer post now with the download link. You can keep reading, though, to see a list of what's new in the Technical Refresh user interface.

I'm travelling on the east coast this week (New York, Boston, D.C.) and I've been using this build extensively and can honestly say that it's been very stable for me. I'm used to running bleeding-edge builds at work, so it takes a trip like this to really notice how far along the quality is in this build vs. where it was in Beta 2 and earlier betas (or a random daily build.)

If you're running Windows Vista RC1, you'll be happy to know that B2TR works great on RC1 (unlike the much earlier Office Beta 2, which has some problems on Vista RC1.)

B2TR represents an iterative step forward for the UI design—a refinement and polishing of each component. The UI is now totally feature complete, and you will see only cosmetic differences between B2TR and the final version in most areas.

As I wrote in June, there are a number of changes in B2TR, ranging from minor tweaks to relatively significant improvements. In particular, we've made nearly 1000 individual improvements to the content in the Ribbon—everything from redesigning the Home tab of PowerPoint to subtle changes to scaling or labels to work better on small monitors. Most of these changes are, of course, very minor, but they add up to a new level of fit and finish in the overall user experience.

Some of the more significant improvements to the user interface in Beta 2 Technical Refresh:

Improved support for the minimized Ribbon
Visual redesign of the "Northwest" corner of the programs
Double-click the Office Button to close the window
Silver color scheme
Redesign of the PowerPoint Home tab
Improvements to default styles for all objects (pictures, tables, charts, SmartArt, headers, footers, etc.)
Quick Customize Menu
New product icons
Usability improvements to the Office menu
Send button in the form in Outlook
Over 1000 changes (most minor) to the content of the Ribbon

I hope you'll give the new build a try and tell us what you think. A full list of new features and improvements to the entire product (not just the user interface) will be available along with the download tomorrow.

Thanks so much for your feedback which made these changes possible.

Let's Talk About Customization

jensenh — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:00:00 GMT

One topic that has come up frequently in our private beta newsgroups as well as here in blog comments from time to time is the issue of customization.

As with every component of the Office 2007 user interface redesign, we put a lot of thought into how much customization to provide; today I'm going to try to walk you through our thought process.

Many of you have been passionate in conveying feedback that you wish the UI had absolute customizability. As in my article on the size of the Ribbon, I'm going to lay the facts out on the table and hopefully it will help you to at least understand the rationale behind the decisions we made (even if you wish we had made different ones.)

What is Customization?

There are many aspects to customization in a software user interface. The ability to change the visual appearance, to change preferences, and to turn pieces of the UI on or off are all aspects of customization.

Most frequently among power users, the term "customization" is used to represent the ability certain programs have to add, remove, and relocate commands within the UI.

The History of Customization in Office

Command Bars, introduced in Office 97, were kind of a nirvana of customization capabilities. With Command Bars, you could change virtually anything imaginable within the organization of the menus and toolbars: create new ones, move buttons from toolbars to menus and back, use a built-in icon editor to directly edit the pixels of the icons, etc.

Unfortunately, this flexibility came at a price in terms of the complexity of Command Bars and the kinds of layouts and controls it could support. One of the reasons that many of the prior attempts to simplify the UI were unsuccessful was that any feature had to work within this ultra-customizable framework where you could never predict where a control might live or how it might be presented to the user.

There were downsides for normal users as well. When we go on site visits to watch people use Office 97-2003 in their place of business, we often find that Office has been ravaged by the effects of accidental customization.

In fact, one of the most frequent questions we are asked by people during on-site usability research is: "How can I get the menus back to the top of the window?"

Because of the ultimate flexibility of Command Bars, you can make one small misplaced click and suddenly the menu bar is docked to the left side of the screen or floating in space. Of course, this could have been improved somewhat by some sensible measures such as locking the UI by default, but it does illustrate the different ways a power user and a more typical user think about the same feature.

How Many People Customize?

When we started designing the Office 2007 user interface, one of the first and frequent discussions we had was: "what is the right kind of customization to include in the UI?"

We started collecting research by talking to some of our expert users within large companies, who in several cases assured us that "everyone" customizes their UI to optimize it for the most efficient use possible and, furthermore, that any new UI needed to be at least as customizable as Command Bars (preferably even more.)

An interesting perspective, but it can be dangerous to base decisions on just a few opinions (especially when the first word in the opinion is "everyone.")

The next step was to see what was actually happening in the real world: were people customizing as much we assumed?

Given that we already had one of the most customizable user interfaces of all-time in Office 2003, looking through the real-world data could help us to confirm objectively how many people were customizing their UI and exactly how they were customizing it.

Looking across a hundred million or so people using Office 2003, here's what we found:

In fewer than 2% of sessions, the program was running with customized command bars.
Of the 2% of sessions with customizations present, 85% included customization of four or fewer commands.

Needless to say, we were surprised, but when we looked at the statistics in detail, this data matched that which had been collected from other sources and in historical research.

It breaks down like this: in ~1.9% of sessions, buttons have been added, removed, or moved between toolbars and menus. (Changing the docking position or location of an entire toolbar is not counted as a customization. Buttons added by add-ins or templates are also not counted.)

Of the customized sessions, around 85% of them had only what we'd call minor customizations: four or fewer buttons. Most of these are added toolbar buttons, either from the command well or from a toolbar people don't want to keep up all the time. And even within these 85% of 2% of sessions, there are patterns that emerge.

The most popular single customization? Removing the "Read" button from the Standard toolbar in Word.

The PowerPoint team helped by collecting hundreds of screenshots of heavily-customized versions of PowerPoint from professional slide designers. It turns out that many of the same customizations are widespread among these users, such as adding Send to Back as a top-level command so that it's not buried four-levels deep in the Drawing toolbar.

Finding so many patterns in the customizations was a heartening revelation, because it implied that if we got enough of the details of the command organization right based on these common customizations, many fewer customizations might be necessary.

Furthermore, because Office 2003 is still relatively new, it is deployed disproportionately among power users--the very people who most likely to customize. In all of our analyses, we try to be aware that the raw statistical data skews slightly towards early-adopting power users. This is probably much less true today than it was more than two years ago when we first compiled customization statistics.

(One metric that causes us to believe that the Office 2003 data slightly skews towards power users even today: Every month, the average screen resolution of people using Office 2003 decreases as more of the core installed base adopts it.)

Using the Data to Drive the Design

Even though Microsoft is a big company, we don't have unlimited design or development resources. Given how ambitious our plans were for reinventing the Office user interface, we had to be realistic and optimize for the most common scenarios first.

So, we took a pragmatic approach and decided to focus on the 99.7% case: people who don't take advantage of customization or only use it to customize four or fewer commands. Out of this goal was born the Quick Access Toolbar.

The Quick Access Toolbar is designed to make it easy to add controls, galleries, and groups from anywhere in the Ribbon: just right-click the thing you want to add and choose "Add to Quick Access Toolbar" from the context menu. We designed the customization model to be efficient but with the goal of "zero customization complexity"; it would be unacceptable for customization to cause the user interface to degrade as it did so often with Command Bars.

Adding controls to a persistent toolbar allows people to have one-click access to the features they choose from anywhere in the product, and can help eliminate problematic command loops as well.

We also paid close attention to common customizations in Office 2003, making sure that commands are organized together for maximum efficiency. This helps to further reduce the need for customization.

Command Location Customization in Office 2007

What command location customizations are supported in Office 2007?

Here's a list of the major capabilities:

Add any control in the Ribbon to the Quick Access Toolbar
Add an entire Ribbon group to the Quick Access Toolbar as a single icon
Add a gallery to the Quick Access Toolbar
Add individual menu items to the Quick Access Toolbar
Add any command from the command well to the Quick Access Toolbar
Add macros to the Quick Access Toolbar and choose an icon and label for them
Add separators to help organize the Quick Access Toolbar
Reorder controls within the Quick Access Toolbar
Full-width Quick Access Toolbar mode below the Ribbon
Auto-assigned keyboard shortcuts given to customized Quick Access Toolbar commands
Customize the content of many galleries (especially in Word)
Customization based on use of many galleries (Recent Documents, Margins, Shapes, Themes, etc.)
Complete customization of status bar
Customize the Ribbon via XML in document template
Use RibbonX XML to customize Ribbon content through a COM Add-in

As you can see, there's quite a lot of customization available in the Office 2007 UI. The laser focus on the Quick Access Toolbar is evident as a result of mapping the design of the product to real-world use.

That said, the last two items on the list will be of interest for expert users who are craving more control over customizing Ribbon content. RibbonX, which has been written about in this space many times, provides an XML interface for describing Ribbon content, including repurposing built-in controls and groups.

You can build custom tabs and groups in RibbonX already; it's just a matter of loading the XML into the program you're using. There are a few ways to do this, including saving the XML into your default document template.

Undoubtedly, people will write tools to help take the XML coding out of using RibbonX to customize Ribbon content. Patrick Schmid has illustrated many of the techniques necessary to make this work on his blog. We've added some additional capabilities to the object model post-Beta 2 that will help these tools along, such as the ability to query for the icon of a command or to execute it directly from code.

Beta Feedback

Nevertheless, throughout the beta cycle we've received requests for additional customization capabilities. There have been discussions about the desire for it in private beta newsgroups, and people have posted comments on the topic here as well. One reader in particular has graced me with at least five personal flame-mails, complete with speculation about my ancestry and theories about the difficulty I will have finding future employment once I've been fired.

If we really optimized for the 99.7% case (98% + (85% of 2%)), why are we hearing so much about this issue?

Because 0.3% of the 450 million paid Office customers still represents 1.35 million people.

And given the strong correlation between expert users and customization, one would expect that these 0.3% are precisely those who download early betas, participate in private beta programs, visit enthusiast web sites, read technical blogs, and generally are interested in and participate in the software development process.

On the other hand, in our long-term broad deployments of Office 2007 Beta 1, Beta 1 Technical Refresh, and now Beta 2 at customer sites, customization has not been a particularly hot issue--nor has it been in Send a Smile feedback.

I have definitely heard those of you who spend the time and effort necessary to build totally custom menus and toolbars in Office 2003, and I hope that a combination of the Quick Access Toolbar and RibbonX-based customization will provide you with a similar level of flexibility in Office 2007, albeit using different technologies.

Addressing Feedback

In a way, all of this attention around customization is a bit like a TV show getting canceled.

Even the least successful network shows attract a lot of viewers in absolute terms--just not relative to the opportunity cost of keeping them on the air. Financially, it doesn't make sense for a network like NBC to keep around an underwatched sitcom like "Joey," but if you're one of the people who like "Joey" it doesn't sting any less when it's canceled. The fact that you're in a small minority doesn't console you.

In other words, the decisions we made around customization in Office 2007 weren't based on absolutes ("no one should be allowed to customize the Ribbon") but instead based on pragmatic use of resources ("let's start by getting the core aspects of the design right for everyone's benefit.")

Is additional customization against the design philosophy of the Ribbon? No, provided that we could add it in such a way that it added no additional complexity for the vast majority of people who aren't interested in it.

Within our resource and schedule constraints, we've acted on the expert user feedback by continuing to add additional customization throughout the beta cycle.

In Beta 1, we added the ability to move the Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon to allow many more controls to be added to it. In Beta 1 Technical Refresh, we introduced the ability to add whole groups to the QAT, the ability to add galleries to the QAT, separators, and new command well functionality. In Beta 2, we added the ability to assign custom keyboard shortcuts by adding controls to the QAT.

Are there other customization features we'd like to add eventually? Of course. One example is the ability to customize the contents of the Mini Toolbar--this was an affordance we included in the original spec, but ultimately didn't get done for Office 2007. In future versions, could I imagine adding built-in facilities for customizing Ribbon content? Yes, I could imagine it.

At the same time, I honestly believe that Office 2007 as it stands will be a great user experience for people of all skill levels. If you're a power user (as I am), there's a lot we designed just for you, and even more coming post-Beta 2.

The fundamental principles and constructs of the new UI--galleries, Ribbon layout and command organization, Live Preview, Contextual Tabs, the Mini Toolbar, and all the rest--have been designed to benefit everyone who uses Office, power users and novices alike.

Other Aspects of Customization

A different kind of customization people ask about occasionally is the ability to relocate certain parts of the user interface. The two biggest feature requests in this area are for a vertical version of the Ribbon (to take advantage of widescreen monitors especially in Word) and the ability to "float" and drag around certain parts of the UI.

Some day in the not-too-distant future, I plan to write a post about why we built a horizontal version of the Ribbon instead of a vertical one. There are several compelling reasons, but needless to say we looked at prototypes of both aspect ratios in great detail before making a decision.

Could I imagine a hypothetical version of the Ribbon designed to dock to the side of the screen instead of the top? Of course. Will we build it in a future version? Nothing's for sure, but if it's the right thing for the UI platform moving forward, we'll definitely consider it.

The story with floating UI is similar. Floating toolbars in Office 97-2003 caused a lot of problems, primarily because they were forced on people as the primary means of accessing many features. As a result, toolbars were always popping up over top of what people were working on, needing to be dragged out of the way, or mistakenly docking to the side of the screen.

Our design mantra for Office 2007 was that default feature access wouldn't rely on floating things popping up on top of the document; the UI would be in a single, consolidated, consistent place.

But there are a few repetitive action scenarios in which it would be useful to be able to float UI just to make it closer to the area of the document you're working in. While the data shows that the vast majority of people don't take advantage of this functionality in current versions of Office, we've definitely prototyped a more expert mode in which you could "tear off" groups from the Ribbon or the Quick Access Toolbar, or even a whole tab of the Ribbon to move to a secondary monitor.

Again, were we to build such a feature in a future version, it would be in a way that had no possibility of accidental misuse, and in a way that added minimal complexity to mainline cases.

Last but not least, there's always a lively discussion to be had around choosing a visual appearance for any piece of software.

Unlike in past versions of Office, we allow you to choose your color scheme directly in Office 2007. You can change between the three schemes from the first page of the Options dialog box. People always want more color choices, but I hope with the addition of the third scheme in the final product that most everyone will be able to find a look for the product they're happy with.

Summary

As with everything in the Office 2007 user interface redesign, we informed the design both by analyzing the usage data and then by adding a sprinkling of anecdotal feedback. We focused first on the most common scenarios which benefit the broadest set of customers. Then we've used the feedback from the beta process to drive iterative improvements to the design to help satisfy more of the specialized uses of the product.

In the next version of Office, we will undoubtedly look at all of the feedback we get on the completed product (which, as more people use it, will be more fully representative of the entire user base) and decide how to continue to move the UI platform forward.

One goal won't change however: to empower people to do great work in Office as easily as possible.

Where Did That Feature Go?

jensenh — Tue, 30 May 2006 17:00:00 GMT

No matter how good of a job we did organizing features in the new UI, there's always the chance that you might run into a feature you're having trouble finding for the first time in the new UI.

To help with exactly this scenario, we created a few security blankets. One of the coolest ones is a tool we're calling the "Interactive Command Reference Guide."

This tool is an interactive mockup of the UI for Word 2003, Excel 2003, and PowerPoint 2003 that runs in your web browser. You can click on the location of any feature in the Office 2003 menus or default toolbars and the tool will show you exactly how to get to it in Office 2007. You can also hover over the commands to see the Office 2007 location in a tooltip.

The below links will only work if you have already installed Office 2007 Beta 2, and there are still a few bugs in the tool... but try it out and tell us what you think!

Word 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

Excel 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

PowerPoint 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

Some of the Best Beta 2 Resources

jensenh — Wed, 24 May 2006 17:00:00 GMT

So you started downloading Office 2007 Beta 2 yesterday but it hasn’t finished yet. Or you had an error during the download or installing the build. Or maybe you’re not quite ready to take the leap and install beta software yet.

No problem! There are a lot of new resources available to give you a sense of what’s possible with the new user interface. Most of these are useful whether you’re installing the beta or not.

Here are six of my favorite Beta 2 resources:

Office User Interface Video Tour: This is a live action movie in which Julie Larson-Green and I give you a quick tour of the UI and some of the thinking that went into it. The build we were using for the video is a lot older than Beta 2, so you might notice some rough spots. Nonetheless, a number of people have said that they found it worthwhile.

Office User Interface Live Demo: This brand new Flash-based demo walks you through the UI and gives you a chance to play with it (including clicking through tabs, giving Live Preview a whirl, etc.) This is probably the best way to get a sense of exactly what the Beta 2 UI looks like and how it works.

Office Compatibility Pack Beta 2: Here’s where you can download the compatibility pack to allow Office XP and 2003 to read and write the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) Of course, you can also save documents in the 97/2000/XP/2003 file formats directly from Office 2007 as well.

Office 2007 Learning Portal: Here you can see some of the many resources available to get you up-to-speed on Office 2007. There are free e-learning online courses you can take (including Introduction to the New Office User Interface.) You can also access free book content and sign up for classroom learning near you.

MSDN Office Developer Center: All of the information to learn about the new developer opportunities built on top of Office 2007 are brought together in this great portal.

MSDN Ribbon Developer Portal: This is an entire developer portal devoted to customizing and extending the new user interface through RibbonX. I’m so excited that this one finally exists!

Getting the 2007 Office System Beta

If you didn’t catch my post yesterday, the news is this: Beta 2 of the 2007 Office system is available for free and immediate download from the Office Preview site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx. I hope you’ll give it a try!

My apologies to everyone who had download trouble yesterday. The team was surprised and overwhelmed by the interest in downloading Office and they’re hard at work increasing capacity. (I know they doubled it just between yesterday morning and yesterday evening.)

This is the first time we’ve offered a beta of Office for download outside of the private beta test, and so I think none of us knew precisely how much interest to expect. If your download didn’t complete, please try again today or in a few days.

Once you’ve got the build installed, you can start discussing it in the Office Discussion Groups.

Get Your Office 2007 Beta 2 Today!

jensenh — Tue, 23 May 2006 19:00:00 GMT

Today’s the big day--I'm so pleased to announce that as of right now, you can download Office 2007 Beta 2 from the Office preview site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/.

Click the button marked “Try it!” and enter a few pieces of information, and you’re on your way. I tried it out and was downloading in about 3 minutes from the time I clicked the button. (Whoops, I hope I didn’t take someone’s spot…)

The best way to experience the new user interface is simply to try it. No matter what you think of the screenshots you’ve seen or what I’ve written here, consider giving it a test drive for a few weeks. I hope you won’t want to go back to your current version of Office.

Beta 2 isn’t perfect, but it’s proven a great platform for my day-to-day work over the last month. In fact, last weekend I upgraded my home computer to Windows Vista Beta 2 + Office 2007 Beta 2, and I’m writing this post right now using both of them.

Go get it--and spread the word.

The Deluge

jensenh — Tue, 09 May 2006 17:00:00 GMT

Wow! So I take a few days off and open up the suggestion box and boy was I surprised to find over 400 comments!

Suffice it to say that it's going to take me a long time to get through all of these. And thanks to everyone who took a minute to drop a kind word or two in as well--I do really appreciate that!

A lot of the same questions got asked again and again, so I want to take a few minutes today to answer three of the questions which were asked the most.

1) How can I get on the Office 2007 beta?

The best thing for you to do at this point is to visit the 2007 Office system preview site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview and click the button marked "Register Now." This will make sure that when Beta 2 is available later this month you will be notified and will have the ability to sign up to receive a copy. Keep checking this web site; I've been told that later this month it will be updated with even newer content and more detailed information.

(While you're there, why not give the UI video a look at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ui/demo.mspx.)

2) What are the system requirements for Office 2007?

The final system requirements haven't been determined yet; generally that gets solidified a bit closer to the product's release date. You can find system guidelines for installing the beta of Office 2007 here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/sysreq.mspx.

Basically, a 500MHz computer with at least 256 MB of RAM is probably sufficient to run one program at a time. Running several programs simultaneously requires more memory, and I think virtually anyone would be happier running Office and the rest of their software suite with at least 512 MB of RAM. But that's just my opinion.

Office 2007 will require Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista. It will not run on Windows 2000 or earlier operating systems.

3) I have a question or problem with a current version of Office, can you help?

Unfortunately, I'm probably not the best person to do technical support for you--most of the questions you asked were far beyond my area of expertise.

If you are having trouble using Office, you may be able to resolve your problem by visiting the Solution Center for your version of Office located at http://support.microsoft.com/select/.

If this doesn't work, visit http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx to start the process of getting personalized technical support.

Thanks again for so much interest in the Office 2007 user interface and for giving me so many ideas for articles! Many of you will see your ideas turn into posts in the time ahead...

The Size Of Things

jensenh — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:00:00 GMT

One of the most discussed aspects of the new Office 2007 UI has been: "Does it take up too much room?"

It isn't a straightforward question to answer, above all because to answer it requires a subjective opinion. What seems just right to one person might seem to another person to be too much.

So today, I'm going to try to take an objective look at the size of the new UI just by presenting the facts--and then you can form your own opinion. I'll also discuss some of the background about why we made the design decisions we did.

One of the tricky things about measuring the size of the Office user interface is figuring out what to measure. The size of the Office 97-2003 user interface, in particular, is greatly affected by the number of toolbars and Task Panes brought up to use the features in the product.

To sidestep that problem for the time being, I'm going to compare the out-of-box experiences of Office 97 and Office 2007. Why these two versions? First of all, Office 97 was the first version of Office with command bars, and it's the version often cited as representing a cleaner, smaller brand of UI. It's also before the introduction of Task Panes, so we don't have to take that into account. Also, it was (and is) an extremely successful version of Office which many people have installed, so it seems like a good comparison.

Why measure the out-of-the-box experience? Given that fewer than 2% of Office 2003 users customize their UI according to the data reported through the Customer Experience Improvement Program, the out-of-the-box experience is the one most users will see.

Furthermore, the out-of-box-experience is the mainstream experience which paints the old UI in the most positive light, primarily because it includes only the default toolbars--not all of the other ones which regularly appear as part of using the product.

Nonetheless, this comparison at least gives us some basic numbers to work with. All screenshots were taken in Windows XP at 1024x768 screen resolution with the Office window maximized.

Word 97 vs. Word 2007: Out of the box

Here are comparison pictures of Word 97 and Word 2007. The same document is loaded in both, and you can see that the text in each line as well as the line spacing match up exactly.

Word 97 - Click to enlarge

Word 2007 - Click to enlarge

Word 2007 document area: 1007 x 573 pixels
Word 97 document area: 979 x 573 pixels

Horizontally, you gain 28 pixels of space in Word 2007 out-of-the-box. On a web layout or landscape-oriented document, this advantage would be most useful.

Results: Arial 10 pt., Page Layout View

Word 97: 26 lines of text
Word 2007: 26 lines of text

So there it is. You can fit the same number of lines on the screen, out-of-box, in Word 97 and Word 2007.

We achieved this relative parity in terms of the size of the document workspace by cleaning up some other parts of the UI. We changed the horizontal scroll bar to only appear when necessary, and moved the view switcher buttons into the status bar. We also designed the rulers (which data indicate most people never use) to AutoHide, and added a quick toggle button to turn it on or off at the top of the vertical scroll bar.

Another way to visualize the comparison is by laying the document areas side by side. Because the Ribbon consolidates the UI into one space, it pushes the document down in the window a bit--giving the illusion of there being less space than there really is.

Here are the document areas of the 1024x768 maximized windows laid side by side. Notice that the lines of text line up exactly vertically, although the words don't line up due to the more precise positioning of letters in Word 2007's ClearType.

Comparison of document space - Click to enlarge

Excel 97 vs. Excel 2007: Out of the box

The Excel numbers paint a similar story to the one we just saw in Word.

Excel 97 - Click to enlarge

Excel 2007 - Click to enlarge

Excel 97 document area: 1004 x 581 pixels
Excel 2007 document area: 1008 x 534 pixels

Horizontally, there's more space in the new version by default, vertically there's a little less. As with all of these comparisons, this assumes that the Office 97 user isn't showing any toolbars except for Standard and Formatting.

In terms of rows and columns, the amount of data on the screen ends up being similar.

Results: Arial 10pt., Normal View

Excel 97: 31 rows, 15 columns
Excel 2007: 30 rows, 15 columns

The default cells in Excel 2007 are a single pixel less tall--not really perceptible when looking with the naked eye, but it's enough to bring the amount of data on the screen to within one row.

What this shows me is that, more than the UI or anything else, if you're interested in getting more data on the screen in Excel, optimizing the font choice and cell size is by far your most important lever. Even minuscule changes have a large effect over many rows or columns.

PowerPoint 97 vs. PowerPoint 2007: Out of the box

PowerPoint's usable canvas can be measured best based on the size of the slide that fits in the window. Because of its unique slide scaling behavior, PowerPoint is the most directly impacted equally by both horizontal and vertical dimensions.

PowerPoint 97 - Click to enlarge

PowerPoint 2007 - Click to enlarge

PowerPoint 97 document area: 1008 x 575 pixels
PowerPoint 2007 document area: 1024 x 573 pixels

A similar story to Word and Excel: more horizontal space, a tad less vertical room. The impact on the size of the slide itself is minimal. In fact, the default AutoFit zoom level within the available space is exactly the same between the versions.

Results: Normal View

PowerPoint 97: 76% zoom
PowerPoint 2007: 76% zoom

PowerPoint was the only program to ship with three toolbars turned on in Office 97, so it is not surprising that the size comparison is a dead heat.

As with Word, because the slide is positioned further down in the window in PowerPoint 2007, it gives the illusion of a smaller workspace than actually exists.

The Design Process

That ends the simple, factual, out-of-the-box comparisons. The numbers are on the table.

For the vast majority of people who use the product without spending tons of time tweaking every setting, the new UI will give them about the same amount of workspace as they would have had in Office 97 on the same computer.

Of course, today, we're designing for much larger screens than would have been common back in 1996. The most common screen resolutions for Office 97 were 640x480 and 800x600. The most common screen resolutions for Office 2007 will be 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (with a fairly sizable percentage running even higher resolutions).

As a percentage of average available screen size, the Office 2007 UI takes far less space than the Office 97 UI would have on a 640x480 monitor. As you've seen, even when you equalize the screen size, the work areas are similar. The result is that far more of your bigger screen is used to show your document, as it should be.

But also keep in mind--we think about the Ribbon as a kind of flat tax. Unlike the toolbars model, where new UI was constantly coming up and taking extra space on the screen, the Ribbon never gets any larger.

What if you need the Reviewing and Drawing tools in Word 97? Suddenly, you can only see 23 lines of text instead of 26 lines of text. What if you ever inserted a Picture? Now you've got the Picture toolbar covering up your document--or dock it and lose another 2 lines of text. Or maybe you need the Table toolbar? There goes another 2 lines of text.

This build-up of "extra" stuff is one of the most common complaints about the menus and toolbars-based UI. Once a toolbar comes open, people don't want to close it because they fear losing it. Experts, of course, know how to manage all of the UI widgets on the screen, but more often than not when we do site visits to watch people use Office in their place of business, their screen looks like this:

Stuff everywhere taking up room in Office 2003 - Click to enlarge

I wrote about how the Ribbon doesn't degrade over time in March, but this same aspect of the UI has a profound impact on size. As more and more clutter is added to the mix, the Ribbon's advantage in screen real-estate usage becomes pronounced.

With the addition of even one additional toolbar in any of the programs, the Ribbon already comes out ahead (even measuring at the exact same resolution!)

But What About... Task Panes?

As you may remember, Office XP and Office 2003 boot up with the Task Pane turned on. Because most of the command Task Pane usage scenarios have been absorbed into the new UI, we no longer boot with it on in the new UI programs of Office 2007.

Getting Started Task Pane in Office 2003 - Click to enlarge

If we pedantically wanted to look at true "out-of-the-box" for Office 2003 vs. Office 2007, we'd have to consider the space taken up by the Task Pane.

In default Office 2003, for instance, the Task Pane is 200 pixels wide, greatly decreasing the amount of space you get in each program. You only need to watch the candidates on The Apprentice use Office 2003 with the unused Getting Started Task Pane open all of the time to realize that most people don't spend the time to get these pixels back. (We see this frequently in site visits as well.)

Any sort of UI space comparison between Office 2007 and Office 2002/2003 with the Task Pane on comes out with the new UI far in front. I went through some of those numbers last September.

But What About... Rafted Toolbars?

Starting in Office 2000, the ability to "raft" toolbars on to a single line was introduced. The out-of-box retail experience included this feature turned on in some cases.

Turning this option on saves you 25 vertical pixels because the Standard and Formatting toolbars share a single line. On the other hand, this design proved to be confusing because the presence and position of toolbar buttons is constantly changing, trying to optimize themselves based on your use.

The vast majority of business customers, therefore, turn this feature off as part of deploying the product. Many computer manufacturers also turn it off because of the support calls it generates. So, while this design might have made for a great screenshot, not many people use this product in this mode and therefore I'm not going to spend a lot more time discussing it as a common scenario.

Suffice it to say, "rafting" is one way a person could have taken back 25 vertical pixels in the old UI.

If you're struggling with this feature in Office 2000/XP/2003, you can turn it off easily. Click Customize on the Tools menu, and then on the Options tab, check the box next to Show Standard and Formatting toolbars on two rows.

But What About... Customization?

Once you get beyond out-of-box experience, you're in the realm of the few who spend time customizing their Office workspace to optimize the use of space.

As I've mentioned before, the data indicates that fewer than 1 in 50 people have customized their Office UI, which is one of the reasons I've spent up until now discussing the mainstream out-of-box experience.

But it is true that both Office 97-2003 and Office 2007 provide affordances for those who wish to spend time customizing in order to get more space for their document.

Getting Space Back in Office 97-2003

If you have a big enough monitor, you might be able to move certain toolbars onto a single line, depending on their size.
You could turn off all of the built-in toolbars and create a custom toolbar with the set of buttons you want.
You could turn off the toolbars and use menu accelerators and keyboard shortcuts to perform all tasks. Because not all features are in the menu system, you would have to move buttons from toolbars or the command well into the menu system in order to use them via the keyboard.

Getting Space Back in Office 2007

You can collapse the Ribbon, either by double-clicking the selected tab or by pressing CTRL+F1 on the keyboard. The entire bottom part disappears, leaving only a single row of tabs across the top.

Collapsing the Ribbon in Office 2007 - Click to enlarge

You can use the keyboard system to use all features in the Ribbon while it's collapsed. Because all features have efficient keyboard access, you don't need to mess around in the command well, adding features to menus to get keyboard access to work. (Note: in Beta 2, the Ribbon expands when using KeyTips... we're hoping to have this solved for RTM.)
You can add controls from the Ribbon to your customizable Quick Access Toolbar. You can even add groups of features as a single icon to save space. Of course, you could collapse the Ribbon and use only your custom Quick Access Toolbar, giving you tons of space back. Note that because the Quick Access Toolbar receives automatic KeyTips, you also have hyper-efficient keyboard access to these features or groups of controls.
You could use RibbonX, the XML-based extensibility model for the new UI, to replace the entire Ribbon (or a tab of the Ribbon) with a custom user interface designed by you.
One last note about Office 2007: Because additional UI elements never come up without you requesting them (toolbars, Task Panes, etc.), you can rely on the space considerations remaining static over time.

Summary

Whew, this has been a long post--but it's an important topic so I wanted to make sure to give it the space it deserved.

In short, the majority of people who use Office 2007 will have about as much space for their document content as they would have running Office 97 on the same computer. Someone who used several toolbars or the Task Pane will likely get more space for their document content in Office 2007.

Given today's average screen resolution, the Office 2007 UI will take up a historically small percentage of the average window size.

And, if you are one of the few willing to customize to make more space, there are many options available, both in the old UI and the new UI.

Is the Ribbon larger than a toolbar? Of course. Is it bigger than all of the UI it replaces? In most cases, no.

We really have attempted to preserve as much space as possible for the document canvas while ensuring that the Ribbon has enough room to host all of the UI of the product in one location--a key usability goal.

In common, long-term usage of the product, I believe that most people will end up with more usable document space in Office 2007 applications than in any previous version of Office.

Video Killed the Screenshot Star

jensenh — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:00:00 GMT

This morning, new information was published on the Office 2007 Preview web site, including a new video of the UI in action and updated links to sign up to receive information about Beta 2.

The build used in the video is a little old (it was shot in early January), but it still looks more or less like Beta 1 Technical Refresh.

Check the site out.

And no mean comments about my acting ability, please! :)

Picture This: A New Look For Office

jensenh — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:00:00 GMT

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 a mini-gallery of full-size screenshots from a recent build of the product below.

I've also posted a guest article written by my colleague Brad Weed, head of the Office Design Group. He's penned an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the new visuals from his perspective as a designer.

Screenshots of the Office 2007 User Interface

First, here are some basic screenshots of the Office 2007 programs.

There are so many changes from the Beta 1 visuals that it would be hard to make a complete list, but a couple of the things you might notice right off the bat: the Quick Access Toolbar in the title bar, group titles on the bottom of groups, and the Office Button (more on that below.)

Click each thumbnail to open a full-size version of the picture.

Word 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

Excel 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

PowerPoint 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

Outlook 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

Access 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

Close-up Screenshots of the Ribbon

If you don't have the bandwidth to download the full-window pictures above and you just want to see the Ribbon, these pictures are for you.

Word 2007 Ribbon - Click to enlarge picture

Excel 2007 Ribbon - Click to enlarge picture

PowerPoint 2007 Ribbon - Click to enlarge picture

Contextual Tabs

As I've written several times here on the blog, Contextual Tabs are at the heart of the new user interface. When designing the visuals, we wanted the Contextual Tabs to feel special and part of a group--but in the end, they also need to feel like real tabs. This is one of many places in which usability results informed our visual design decisions.

Table Tools in Office 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

Diagram Tools in Office 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

The Office Button

The Office Button provides access to all of the document and system-level functionality in the program. This is where you go to start doing things with your document in Office--from simply opening a file to saving as a PDF to starting a workflow or publishing the document on a server. This is where you start a document, and this is where you finish a document.

There's so much more to write about this in the future, but here's the simple screenshot of what you get when you first click the Office Button.

Office Button - Click to enlarge picture

Adjust To Taste

In Office 2007, we've done something else that we've never done before: given you a choice of skins for the user interface. If you don't like the default blue skin and would prefer something more neutral, we've got you covered with the striking new black skin.

Going Dark in Office 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

On Windows Vista, of course, we fully support glass in both skins. I'll get you some screenshots of that in the not-too-distant future.

Coming Attractions

The team is beyond excited to finally be able to show you what we've been up to recently. There's so much to write about now that we can start showing in more detail the changes we've made since Beta 1 and how the parts fit together.

In the coming weeks, I'll detail more of the thought process and analysis that went into these designs, along with additional perspective from a few guest writers.

The Beta 1 Technical Refresh, from which these screens were taken, will soon be in the hands of our private beta testers. Meanwhile, we remain hard at work on Beta 2.

It's not too late to sign up to receive Beta 2 of Office 2007 when it's ready later in the year. I hope you'll consider giving it a try and letting us know what you think.