Mac Mojo : Office 2008 User Experience

Object Palette

Bart Chellis — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:07:00 GMT

There is a new tool in town… the Object Palette. This new tool lives in the Toolbox and allows you to quickly find and insert images into your document. The OP, as it is nicknamed, is designed to provide quick access to the following commonly used objects:

Shapes
Clip Art
Symbols
Photos (from your iPhoto Library or a folder)

With modern documents more commonly using imagery to communicate ideas, we wanted to centralize the tools for inserting images and enable users to quickly create visually appealing documents.

The idea started with iLife integration, hence iPhoto libraries, and grew to include the most common object types for document creation. In the future, we aim to increase the capabilities of the OP and provide further iLife integration, but we think this is a good start.

All of the OP panes provide an image preview, categorization to aid in browsing a collection, and a zoom slider to customize your view. The Shapes and Photos palettes also offer search controls to help you find specific items.

Clip Art

Clip Art is a palette that displays all the clip art stored by the Clip Gallery without having to load a separate app. This is a great place to find and insert clip art. The Clip Gallery remains the tool for organizing and managing clip art. To add your own clips, you can add them to the Clip Gallery, or you can place your clips in a folder and put that folder in the Microsoft Office 2008/Office/Media/Clipart folder.

Also, as you can see in the screenshots, the Clip Art palette provides some great new high quality clips. One issue that we have heard a lot from customers is that our clip art is stale. To improve on this, we have added a new collection of photo objects to our clip art. These new clips are 300 dpi images of real-world objects, people and animals. They are alpha-clipped (have no background) so they will float on your page and text will flow around them. These new images will help in creating great looking, modern documents.

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The zoom slider allows you to customize your view to see more items so you can quickly find an item, or to see more image detail to determine if the item meets your needs.

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As an example of some of the hard decisions we have to make, I wanted to talk about Search in this pane. We had planned to provide search for Clip Art, but the Clip Gallery database that stores the clip art did not permit this functionality. We had to make a choice: either cut the palette or remove the search control. We felt that the ability to quickly browse the collection of clip art via this new tool was worth it. For quick clip art insertion you can use the OP. For more advanced keyword and title searches use the Clip Gallery. In the end, we think this the right trade-off.

Symbols

In 2004, we added the ability to access common symbols from the Formatting Palette. In 2008, we have moved this functionality to the OP in the Symbols palette and have added more common symbols in categories such as Currency, Fractions, Music, Accents, etc. These categories make it easy to quickly find commonly used symbols.

As with all OP panes, this is meant to be a lightweight solution providing access to common items and functionality. For access to the complete list of accessible symbols, you should use the OS Character Palette.

Shapes

The Shapes palette provides access to our newly updated OfficeArt shapes. As you can see, the new shapes have a nice blue, gradient default look to give your documents a more contemporary look without having to modify the shapes. In Excel and PowerPoint, these shapes will even insert into your document according to the current document theme to further simplify shape and document creation. And... our shapes and their new formatting are also fully compatible with Win Office 2007.

For more information on OfficeArt in 2008, see Derek's OfficeArt Unleashed blog post.

Photos

The Photos palette is the one I am personally the most excited about. I take lots of photos of my kids and family, and I often want to send them in email to the grandparents or put them into my documents. Now, I don’t have to leave Entourage or my other Office applications. Right inside my apps, I have quick access to my photos without ever having to switch to another app.

If you are an extensive user of iPhoto or have multiple libraries, you can even browse by album or select a different iPhoto library. Also, as mentioned before, you can select a folder with photos in it if you are not an iPhoto user.

A somewhat less obvious feature is that you can flip over to the Toolbox Settings and choose what size you want to insert your photos, which will prevent your email or PowerPoint presentation from getting too big.

I am very excited about the feature set in OP. Personally, I love being able to access my photos and other imagery quickly in the Toolbox. The OP makes it easier to access your images and create great looking documents. I can’t wait to hear how people like it.

The Smart in SmartArt

Derek Snook — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 06:42:00 GMT

I use Office every day to communicate – email, documents, presentations, spreadsheets. I like to use visual aids to improve my communication -- it’s invaluable to reinforce your ideas with graphics, and if it looks cool, even better. How do you take a textual concept and quickly show your meaning in a graphic that is memorable, relevant, and beautiful?

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With Office 2008 for Mac, I do it with SmartArt graphics: a new set of tools for creating attractive, effective visuals. With SmartArt, a list becomes a colorful sequence array, a roster becomes an organization chart, or a numbered list awakens as a simple, bold process diagram.

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Choose a layout in the Elements Gallery and enter your data in the SmartArt text pane (we added the genie effect when showing/hiding the text pane; not only is it a cool touch, but it highlights the relationship between the SmartArt object and the text content you're bringing to life in the diagram.) In PowerPoint, you can select a bulleted list already in your presentation and click on a SmartArt layout to convert the list into a graphic.

What’s so “smart” about SmartArt graphics? The graphics automatically update and adjust as you add data, creating new diagram parts, moving existing parts to fit, resizing the contextual elements that show relationships.

Wine making, for example, is a continuous process of growing and harvesting grapes, fermenting, storing and aging, and finally tasting and enjoying. Describing this in your latest newsletter or school project? There’s a Continuous Cycle layout in the SmartArt gallery. Click in the Gallery to add the graphic, type in your stages of wine production, and click a SmartArt style in the Formatting Palette to add a splash of color. Done, and it looks great!

There are over 80 layouts built-in to Office 2008, and you can flip between them, updating your graphic in the document as you click, until you find the one that best expresses your idea. Add or remove data at any time and the graphic will adjust.

SmartArt graphics you create in Office 2008 for Mac are compatible with Office 2007 and vice-versa; we use the same SmartArt engine underneath. SmartArt graphics are part of the OfficeArt family, and inherit the powerful formatting and document theme awareness of other OfficeArt graphics. Use the Formatting Palette to customize SmartArt graphics, including 3D effects, reflections, transparencies, glows, and shadows. Explore your options willy-nilly; the Reset button takes you back to the crisp default SmartArt Graphic that you started with. SmartArt graphics automatically match your document, spreadsheet, or presentation color scheme, though that too is customizable. Roger Baerwolf and I will talk more about document themes in an upcoming sneak peek blog post.

Welcome to Word Publishing Layout View

Han-yi Shaw — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:50:00 GMT

In my previous post, the focus of attention was our new Office 2008 User Experience. For this post, I will turn the focus to another area that I am deeply passionate about --- Microsoft Word 2008. At MacBU, many of us have the great fortune to work on multiple areas of interest. So when I’m not “pushing pixels” in our new Office UI, my other role is Lead Program Manager for Word for Mac. Together with my passionate and dedicated team, we’ve been hard at work on a feature that has been three years in the making. With this new post, I am pleased to talk about one of our latest labors of love --- the new Publishing Layout View.

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First, some background. For those using Word for Mac, you may already be familiar with Notebook Layout View from Word 2004. Notebook Layout View is a specialized notebook-like environment optimized for quick note-taking. By adopting the appearance of the familiar spiral paper-based notebook --- with notebook tabs and rule lines --- you can quickly capture thoughts and information as you would in an actual paper-based notebook. Notebook Layout View represented a new design philosophy in the development of Word for Mac. The premise of this new approach was to present a minimalist and “task-based” user interface in which 90% of Word’s typical UI is hidden and only exposing features relevant to the task at hand, in this case note-taking. Our customers have responded positively to this approach because the user interface is more approachable and less “bloated”, thereby making relevant features easier to find. I’m pleased to say that we’ve further streamlined and improved this popular feature in Word 2008, but that’s a subject for another blog post. :)

Now let’s fast-forward to Word 2008. For years we have known that Word is used to create a wide spectrum of documents that fall under two basic categories:

Text-centric documents --- these include manuscripts, reports, resumes, letters, etc.
Layout-rich documents --- these include newsletters, brochures, flyers, greeting cards, business cards, among others

Word has long provided a full complement of the features necessary for the creation of these two different categories of documents. However, given that all of such features were presented all at once with a single “one-size-fits-all” user interface, users found it difficult to find the right features for the right task.

Our previous efforts with Notebook Layout View allowed us to gain valuable insight and experience in crafting specialized working environments. By leveraging what we’ve learned from Word 2004, we set out to create Publishing Layout View --- a streamlined workspace optimized for creating professional layout-rich documents. By stripping away all the unnecessary controls in this special environment, we are able to elevate our desktop publishing-caliber tools with a greater level of cohesion, all without adversely impacting how users work in the standard view of Word. In this specialized environment, it's no coincidence that there is only one single horizontal toolbar, the Standard Toolbar --- in this case, less is more. Also, the basic metaphor of entering text is also markedly different --- text is entered through floating Text Boxes that the user can feely position anywhere on the page (and even off the page). No longer will text “get stuck” or “jump around” due to the properties of “inline text” --- which like the term itself --- is a mystery to anyone but the most advanced Word user.

In designing Publishing Layout View, we’ve taken a methodical approach to rethink how existing features work, and how to present them. Again, let’s take the most basic element --- the Text Box --- as an example. While Text Boxes in Word have long offered users the ability to establish connecting “links” between individual Text Boxes, it was neither obvious how to create such links, nor was it easy to determine the relative order of a linked Text Box within a “chain”. In Publishing Layout View, users can create a new linked Text Box directly from another Text Box. Also, at the moment a link is created, all Text Boxes within the new “chain” will pulse just once with a subtle blue halo to denote that a link has been created across the affected Text Boxes. When a link is broken, all Text Boxes within the chain will pulse with a subtle red halo to denote the chain has now been broken.

As shown above, to help users quickly identify the sequential ordering of linked Text Boxes within a document, we’ve provided a number badge that reveals the relative order when the mouse hovers over each Text Box. Moreover, given that complex layout rich documents like newsletter and brochures can have multiple Text Box “chains” within a document, Text Boxes are given color coded outlines (upon hover over) to indicate which “chain” it belongs to. These are just a few of the many new innovations we’ve added to Publishing Layout View.

What has made the creation of Publishing Layout View particularly exciting is that despite being the creators of the product, we are also target audiences ourselves. My first encounter with the Mac was during my high school days and the Mac introduced me to the power of desktop publishing --- while this was many many moons ago, this encounter left a lasting imprint on me. At the time, I was an editor-in-chief of one of my school’s student publications and I soon realized the amazing possibilities of desktop publishing even though the tools were still primitive compared to today’s standards. Yet years later, while our customers have been aware of Word’s powerful capabilities, many have not been able to fully tap these features and other dedicated DTP applications remain too high-end or intimidating for the majority of users. With Publishing Layout View, we were afforded with the exciting opportunity to go back to the drawing board and rethink how we could offer this powerful functionality with a more discoverable and intuitive user experience.

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As noted earlier, by offering a specialized working environment, we can elevate our desktop publishing-caliber tools without affecting how Word looks and behaves in the standard view. In Publishing Layout View only, the single Standard Toolbar features a special toolset containing the most commonly used commands and elements used for layout-rich documents. Our popular Formatting Palette is also designed to expose advanced typographical features that have long lived in the depths of Word’s user interface, unknown to many users.

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A new feature now accessible directly from Publisher Layout View’s Formatting Palette is the ability to turn on ligatures, allowing users to further tap the richness of many beautiful fonts on the Mac. From the first time I was introduced to ligatures back when Macintosh Classics were all the rage to the world of Intel-based Macs today, in between there was an emotional moment when I saw the very first ligature display on the screen inside Word.

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In Publishing Layout View, the keyboard combination of “Command + or –” now zooms in and zooms out as you would expect. However, we’ve you’ll also notice a new “Zoom Loupe” Tool. This is a new tool that allows you to target a specific area on the document, and then seamlessly zoom in and out with a single mouse movement. As quickly zooming in and out is one of the most common actions performed when creating a layout rich document, the Zoom Loup is a small but useful innovation that I wish I had many years ago (besides wishing that I could also travel back in time).

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To capture the very essence of what is commonly referred to as “desktop publishing”, we also examined the concept of a “desktop” in the context of the overall workflow. In Word, the content of a document lives on a page --- and this page is set on a background surface much like a piece of paper is set on an actual desk. In Publishing Layout View, users can place layout elements such as text, pictures, and shapes on what we refer to as a “pasteboard” during the layout process. Given that we also know that one’s workspace is often highly customized to one’s own tastes, we provide 14 different customizable pasteboards --- all of which reflect our aesthetic vision through high fidelity and photo-illustrative examples of real world materials. These different pasteboards also ensure that there is sufficient visual distinction between “special-purpose” and “standard” Word views.

While there are a long list of noteworthy features, I would like to shift focus to the actual Publishing Layout View designer templates. I believe that the output capabilities of a product can be better demonstrated by a collection of professionally created designer templates than a long bulleted feature list.

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The planning and creating of designer templates started as early as product development started. I have always maintained that instead of having the application drive template designs, it should be the other way around. That is to say, let’s not develop the product first and then come up with a collection of templates as an afterthought. Instead, we should start with a strong vision, understanding, and appreciation of what great output looks like, and then build the product and features that enable that vision. If a feature is just added for the sake of adding features, but cannot be used in a meaningful or integrated manner during document creation, then it is of little value to the overall product, and most importantly, to our customers. Also, with Office 2008, you will not find a “bajllion” new templates --- instead, our focus favors quality over quantity and our bar is higher than ever.

Two decades ago, the world saw the debut of the revolutionary product known as the Macintosh. One of the hallmarks of the Macintosh was that it introduced us to a new world of “desktop publishing” which forever changed the typesetting and personal computer industries. One of the overall pillars for Office 2008 is “great looking documents made easy” and Word 2008’s Publishing Layout View is a cornerstone of this effort. I have found Word 2008 to be my new application of choice for layout-rich documents and it is my hope that you will find Publishing Layout View to be your new freeform canvas for your boundless creativity.

Toolbox and Window Management

Bart Chellis — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 04:08:00 GMT

The Toolbox is a useful new collection of tools that was introduced in Office 2004. The primary concept was to prevent the possibility of many palettes being opened at once causing a window management problem for users. In general, it worked fairly well, however, it often collides with the Formatting Palette. In such instances, users have mentioned that they have to manage these two windows and that they take up a lot of valuable screen real estate. I personally find it annoying, especially when I am working on my laptop.

To address this primary problem of the Formatting Palette and the Toolbox windows taking up valuable screen real estate, we decided to integrate the Formatting Palette into the Toolbox as another client. Whew! Much nicer! In 2008, there is only one tool palette window... the Toolbox. Now, the first tool in the Toolbox is the Formatting Palette.

I think this brings all our palette-based tools together in a synergistic way. All tools are available in one location. Plus, now there is one less window that you have to manage and move around. For 2008, one of our goals was to streamline the user interface and this helps by reclaiming some of that valuable screen real estate.

Some customers have said they are distracted by the Fade feature, which turns the Formatting Palette partially transparent upon inactivity. The effect is cool and some people really like it. For me, I find it a bit distracting as I keep my desktop very cluttered and I end up turning it off. For 2008, we have added a new Collapse feature to the Toolbox. Users can click the Zoom/Resize button (the green button near the red Close button in the Title Bar) to collapse the Toolbox window to just the Title Bar and the Navigation Bar using a nice window-shade style roll-up effect. Clicking the button again will expand, or roll down, the Toolbox to full size. It is a relatively simple feature, but it allows you to get the Toolbox out of your way without completely closing it and, again helping to maximize screen real estate.

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To make it even easier, we have added an automatic collapse mechanism as well. By clicking the arrow button in the top right of the palette title bar, the Toolbox flips over to display the Toolbox Settings where you can set the Toolbox to Collapse after N seconds. The assumption is that if you haven’t used the Toolbox in a while, we can help by freeing up real estate.

Once the Toolbox has collapsed, you can click on any button in the Navigation Bar or the Zoom/Resize button to expand it back to full size. You can also double-click the Title Bar to collapse or expand the window, just like the ever-popular OS 9 WindowShade control panel feature. This automatic collapse feature will hopefully help prevent distraction and desktop clutter, while still providing a clearly visible Toolbox for the user to re-expand.

I know it may not sound like a lot, but we are really trying to think about how to improve the work environment. I am excited that we have been able to work on small details like this that help in refining the experience. Moving the Formatting Palette into the Toolbox and adding window-shade style collapsing has made a big difference for me and many customers testing the product. I find it easier to get to my tools now that they are located in the same place. Hopefully this will improve the experience for you.

The Chart is the Message

stuartde — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:17:00 GMT

Did you know that someone once wrote a book entitled How to Lie With Charts? It’s true; check it out. The book was a tongue-in-cheek welcome gift when I took over Excel program management. Truth be told, I haven’t read it. It could be quite good; the reviews on Amazon.com would suggest that it is. Maybe after we’ve shipped Office 2008 I’ll find time to give it a once over. Then again, a small mountain of books piled up over the last few years. Reading about charts may not be that high on my list after Macworld!

The reason I write about it today is that the book (which occupies a prominent spot on my shelf) subversively illuminates an Office pillar: communication. I think we take charts for granted; pies and columns and bars have woven themselves into our pop culture fabric. We see them in newspapers, magazines, and television. Charts help us make important decisions, they can make us laugh, and they inspire us to think about things differently. Like any medium, charts can be used to misinform or illuminate. People choose the message; charts are but one way to express a point.

I’m a designer by experience, so I “get” charts. A line going up versus down speaks volumes to me. I must have created thousands of charts over the twenty years I’ve used Mac Excel (but who really tracks exact numbers for that kind of thing; not me, I suppose). I fancied myself something of an expert when it came to chart creation. I knew how to manipulate Office to create what I then thought to be great looking results. Heck, for years the only way you could create a chart with transparent fills was to use Mac Excel! I didn’t think we had room to improve, at least not in any significant way.

In 2004, when I read that Windows Office 2007 was revamping their charting engine, the skeptic in me snickered. They’d catch up with us at best, I thought. Maybe they’d finally be able to do transparency! Then I saw a few chart examples from our friends across the way. Photoshop mockups, I muttered to myself, nothing more. But they kept at it and darned if I wasn’t a fool for making silly assumptions. The fact is, the new charts in Office 2007 look great.

Fast forward to the present day. Over the last few years we’ve rebuilt our charting engine from the ground up. Every dialog, button, and pixel has been reborn. Charts looked great in Mac Office 2004. In Mac Office 2008 they look spectacular! Check it out – here’s a chart from Excel 2004:

I spent a lot of time getting that chart to look a certain way, and I wasn’t born with that skill. Now, the same chart in Excel 2008:

To be fair, the angle is slightly different, but you get the effect (and the above shot is from a recent build of Excel 2008). I think the difference is incredible – and humbling. The Windows Office team did great work, and our top-notch engineering team brought it to the Mac (and, soon, to you).

Of course, this wasn’t a simple job of porting code. Sure, we share some things in common with our Windows Office counterparts. That’s important, because you want your chart layout to look the same on Mac and Windows. But Mac Office leverages Apple’s Quartz APIs to render breathtaking results – as you can plainly see, above.

Better still, we’re still using the Mac Office user interface Mac users are familiar with. For starters, putting a chart in any Office file is a whole lot easier. You can pick from a variety of charts in the Elements Gallery, which is available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel:

Once you do that, all the major formatting controls are a mouse-click away in the Formatting Palette. If you prefer, deeper control is available through formatting dialogs. And, with Office 2008, all formatting can be done directly inside Word or PowerPoint in addition to Excel. This will let you format the chart in the file you’re working on, as opposed to switching back and forth from app to app. Really, all you need Excel for is to change the data itself. I’m pretty happy with it, and I suspect many of you will be, too.

Of course, we’re still not done. It’s been a long road to get to the point we’re at now. I guess it’s not surprising that rebuilding a major component of Office would be rather hard. Even so, we’ve got an incredible team of smart people working hard every day. I know, because I get questions from them all the time! Charts are full of twists, turns, and special cases. Working on this has been a lot of fun, despite some really (really) long days.

I walked into this challenge naively assuming I knew most everything about charting. Over time I've come to see that no communication tool is simple, especially one that conveys numerical data visually in so many different ways. Maybe that’s obvious to some, but it was a lesson in humility for me. A chart isn’t a picture it’s a language. That’s why a book can teach people how to lie with them. The grammar of charts is what allows comedians to be funny and thinkers to make decisions. In the end, I understand that charts are a phenomenally powerful medium. I can’t wait to see your ideas!

OfficeArt Unleashed

Derek Snook — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:20:00 GMT

You’ve been reading about our goal to make great looking documents easier in Office 2008, and this includes the document graphics you use to express ideas and emotions. The Art of Office is a reminder that picture formatting and drawing tools are well-established in the Office suite, but Office 2008 takes this to a new level. First, let’s take a look back.

A long, long time ago (before Office 97-98), Word, Excel, and PowerPoint each had their own individual drawing engines for creating graphics. Actually, if you go too far back you end up with just PowerPoint’s drawing engine, which was richer in many ways than what Word and Excel first derived, and ultimately became the model for the shared drawing engine in Office 97-98, code-named “Escher”.

Escher brought a detailed array of shapes, lines, WordArt, and formatting choices to the Office suite. It was powerful if you could master it, but it was also relentlessly easy to create boring presentations and diagrams. Default objects tended to be bland, and it could take several minutes of formatting objects to awaken the inner beauty of Escher. For Mac Office, our recent releases have made strides toward better document graphics with soft shadows and improved transparency, but the opportunity still remained for dramatic improvement: smarter defaults, richer formatting options, and a more powerful rendering engine.

Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac, like its sibling Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows, introduces the new OfficeArt engine, called “Escher 2.0” internally. OfficeArt is a complete refresh of the Office drawing engine with the goal of making it easier and quicker to create modern, vibrant document graphics across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It was important to use the same underlying engine as Office 2007 to provide compatibility for document objects and formatting options, though under the hood we employ Quartz and other Mac OS X technologies for rendering and some enhanced features.

The “Quick Styles and Effects” panel in the Formatting Palette provides a hub of one-click formatting presets to style the OfficeArt graphics in your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Here you'll find one-stop shopping for soft shadows, glows, reflections, 3-D effects, and text transformations. Choose a Quick Style that applies a designer set of formatting choices together. Above, in a single click on a picture Quick Style, I have applied a white border, shadow, and 3-D rotation to a photo of my son for a nifty layout on a cover page.

You can tweak additional detail in the Format dialog, with your changes updating graphics in the document as you make them, without leaving the dialog. 3-D rotation and formatting has been updated to provide true 3-D renderings, with optional bevels and contours. Text on OfficeArt objects has its own Format dialog with the same kind of power - add a gradient fill, reflection, or shadow to the text directly.

The OfficeArt formatting that you can put on shapes is also available for pictures, charts, and SmartArt. Your graphics can also adopt the document theme you’re working with, including fonts and color scheme, providing a unified look and feel. You’ll learn more about SmartArt and themes in Office 2008 in this blog as we continue the Sneak Peek.

With a few clicks, you'll add polished graphics to your document, or explore a little more and unleash your inner artist. OfficeArt is an amazing toolbox for communicating your ideas, and it’s a pretty good sandbox for playing with your ideas, too.

Welcome to the New Office 2008 User Experience

Han-yi Shaw — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 05:12:00 GMT

With each release of Office we are offered the opportunity to introduce feature improvements and exciting new innovations. One area that I am really excited about is our next generation Office 2008 User Experience. For those already familiar with existing Office for Mac, you will find yourself at home --- you will still find the familiar toolbars and drop-down menus, only that they’ve been further evolved to reflect the latest UI trends on the Mac platform. At the same time, you will also discover entirely new suite-wide user interface elements that again, have been designed from the ground up to reflect the visual and behavioral qualities unique to the Mac.

As the User Experience Lead Program Manager, I am excited about many aspects of the new Office 2008 UI and look forward to sharing our design philosophy, goals, and processes. For those familiar with many excellent blogs from elsewhere in the company, my role is similar to Jensen Harris on the Office for Windows team – and I look forward to discussing our UI in a similar level of breath and depth through future blog posts. Also, I will be providing screenshots of the product --- so when you see a link, click away!

There is much to talk about but today I will start with our most noticeable new addition to Office 2008 --- the Elements Gallery. In this post, I will also touch upon other new user interface feature improvements, many of which are “coming attractions” that I will discuss in greater detail in future posts. So stay tuned! (An earlier post from our very own UX Researcher Nadyne is also an excellent read --- so take a look!)

So, what is this new Elements Gallery? Well, it’s a visually rich gallery that allows you to quickly find commonly used, but often times hard-to-create elements. For example, many users know that you can create beautiful tables, charts and diagrams in Office, but not everyone knows where to find or create them. The Elements Gallery is intended to unlock the power of Office by making our rich functionality more discoverable and accessible. No longer do you need to search through hierarchical menus and tunnel through dialogs only to find another sea of commands. With the Elements Gallery, you can focus your time on exploring and perusing the collection of professional and attractive designer content. “Great looking Office documents made easy” is an important pillar of Office 2008 and the Elements Gallery is a cornerstone to this effort.

So, what can you find in the Elements Gallery? Well, it depends on which application you’re in, as shown here. In addition to the previously mentioned tables, charts, and diagrams, all of which are available across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you can find features that are unique and specific to the respective applications. For example, in Word you can insert a Cover Page, a Table of Contents, or even a Bibliography with a single click. Also, when working in the new Word 2008 Publishing Layout View, you will find a collection of professionally designed templates, including newsletters, flyers, menus, brochures, among others. In Excel, you can insert a “Ledger Sheet” that contains all the necessary formulas that help you manage your personal finances. Last but not least, in PowerPoint, you can easily apply one of the many newly designed slide themes, layouts, or transitions. While the Elements Gallery takes on different functionality depending on the application, you can be sure to see it working consistently across all the applications. The Elements Gallery was designed as a platform with UI consistency in mind --- much like the Formatting Palette, if you’ve learned how to use it in one of our applications, then you’ve learned how to use across Office for Mac.

Now going back to how we designed the Elements Gallery. One of the fundamental design tenets of Office for Mac has always been delivering inviting and engaging Mac-like user experiences. This means capturing both the static and dynamic aspects of Mac OS X and complimenting them with visual qualities unique to Office for Mac. You will be able to see this not only with the Elements Gallery, but also throughout our new UI, which I will discuss in greater detail in future posts. From the moment the Elements Gallery opens, you’ll see that we’ve employed subtle transitions and effects for a fluid and intuitive user experience that is the hallmark of the Mac OS. As revealed in our early PR screenshots and booth demo at MacWorld Expo this year, Elements Gallery also reflects the visual qualities of glass which works beautifully with the visual language of Mac OS X (and has recently become the trend, in Apple’s new wave of hardware products).

Another important design goal is also provide a great level of customizability, and more importantly, do so by adhering to the familiar and established conventions on the Mac. For example, users can customize the ordering of not only sub-categories by simply dragging around the sub-category “pills”, but also the actual thumbnails themselves. Users can also change the color of the Elements Gallery from the application color to Graphite. Transparency and hover-over magnification of thumbnails can also be turned on/off or further adjusted to individual tastes from the Elements Gallery Preferences. Last but not least, the Elements Gallery can be collapsed when not in use --- and when collapsed, the Elements Gallery becomes color-less and quietly awaits until you summon it again.

While not directly related, already we have been asked why didn’t Office 2008 adopt the “Ribbon UI” from Office 2007 for Windows. The answer is actually a simple one: we’ve designed our UI for the Mac. Mac users (that’s us too!) are very passionate about the very qualities that have drawn us to the Mac and expect no less from Office for Mac. Simply, Office for Mac is to look and behave like a great OS X application. Menus, Toolbars, and Palettes still play an important role in defining the Mac experience so we’ve continued to evolve in these respective areas, while complimenting the core Mac-like UI with innovations like the Elements Gallery. In Office 2008, Toolbars are now nicely docked within the application window (per Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines) and sport the new unified toolbar appearance. The Formatting Palette, which broke new ground with the idea of contextual sensitive formatting, has now been merged with the Toolbox to form one single unified palette. And drop-down menus --- they’re still there. Our goal is to allow users feel the sense of new possibilities while feeling at home with the new and improved tools.

In upcoming posts, you’ll learn more about the Elements Gallery and how it’s used in the context of application-specific features and user workflows. With new UI innovations like the Elements Gallery, we hope that you will also discover a new yet familiar Office for Mac --- and be more productive than ever!

evolution at work

nadyne — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:32:00 GMT

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines evolution as 'a process of change in a certain direction'. Software evolves, too. You can see some of the evolution of software when you compare one release of software to the next. The software that you see in the wild is the product of a series of evolutionary steps that are usually only seen in the lab. Let's pull back the curtain and explore some of those evolutionary steps in the lab.

One of our 'certain directions' for Office 2008 was to make it easier for our users to make great-looking documents. There are two facets of this decision: better tools for doing so, and easier access to the existing tools and the new tools. You'll see a lot of posts here in Mac Mojo that talk about the better tools. I want to talk about easier access to them. One of our major changes for Office 2008 is that we have made some significant user interface changes to meet the goal of easier access.

Those of you who are in mixed environments probably know that the Windows Office team has done a complete overhall of their user interface in Office 2007 for Windows. We have a great relationship with the Windows Office team. In Office 2008, as with all of our other releases, we closely followed their work so that we could leverage the appropriate pieces of it for our Mac users. One of their major goals for Office 12 was a laudable one: they wanted to improve the discoverability of features so that you could find the features that were already in there. A feature can be the coolest feature in the world, but its usefulness is degraded if no-one can find it. To solve this problem, they threw out everything in their existing UI and started from scratch. But even revolution has an evolutionary aspect to it, at least in software development. As they were doing early usability testing on what eventually evolved into the Ribbon, one of the most compelling results was that their users liked seeing graphical representations of actions because it helped them visualise what they were about to do.

We looked at their solution, and we were very interested in the user feedback about the graphical representation of actions. However, we decided that we couldn't simply throw out our interface right now. Our UI has evolved down a different path than that of the Windows Office UI, even before the Ribbon came about. One major difference is our Formatting Palette. For many users, it is both well-liked and well-understood. Losing that would have a huge impact to users who are already comfortable and productive with it.

Aside from the Formatting Palette, we had another reason that we couldn't throw out our interface wholesale. Mac users have strong expectations about their user interface. We're often told by our users that they definitely want us to look Mac-like. The Mac UI one of the strengths of the platform: once you learn how to do something in one application, you can be reasonably assured that this lesson will apply to other applications too. Mac users expect a menu bar at the top of their screen with an Apple menu, an app menu, then File and all the rest of them, finishing up with the Help menu. We could have just left the Apple and app menu in place, and ignored the rest of it. Not only is this a waste of screen real estate, it breaks the user's mental model. But the Ribbon does some great things, and we want to capitalise on their innovation while still ensuring that we keep a Mac-like experience.

We decided to evolve our UI for Office 2008, while keeping in mind the revolution found in the Ribbon. We came up with what we now call the Elements Gallery. It and the toolbars are embedded into the application window. The decision to not try to replicate the Ribbon made some other decisions quickly fall into place for us. One major decision that came about almost immediately was that, unlike the Ribbon in Windows Office, we would not try to put every feature into our Elements Gallery.

In our first design, we only included some of Word's Document Parts (headers, footers, cover letters, bibliographies, etc). Early usability testing showed that users really liked the idea, and asked whether it would be in the other applications as well. In response to this feedback, our design evolved into something which would be more broadly applicable across our suite. Since we didn't put all of our functionality in the Elements Gallery, users requested that we have a minimised mode so that they could hide it when they weren’t using it. Our design evolved again.

Throughout the evolution of our design, usability tests were essential to the changes. Last September, there was an interview in APC Magazine that happened in the middle of one of those usability tests. In that interview, APC quoted one of our product managers, who said:

We had what we thought was going to be this perfect UI solution, and the first time we put it in the labs, no-one understood it! It was so different they were completely confused! We just finished up another round of usability testing on the new UI yesterday, and the program manager said the difference is like night and day.

That's software evolution at work. In the previous test that she was talking about, we had missed the mark. In that usability test, none of our usability test participants could complete all of the tasks successfully. In my analysis of those results, I thought that we could fix all of the problems pretty easily. We quickly made some minor tweaks to our UI. My team went back into the usability lab, and presto! it worked! As that product manager said, the difference was like night and day, and all because our design evolved a little bit. We were pleased to find that our basic idea was solid, we just needed to make a few small changes to improve it.

I've talked a lot about the Elements Gallery, but, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So let me show you an example of the Elements Gallery at work. I'm putting the final touches on a presentation in PowerPoint right now. Here’s the Elements Gallery showing me slide transitions:

Right now, we're putting the finishing touches on the Elements Gallery, as well as the rest of Office 2008. It's almost time to let our software out into the wild. You can see the Elements Gallery and other new Office 2008 features in action on our Office 2008 sneak peek website.

(Edited to fix the picture. Sorry, I linked to the wrong version of it! This is the 600-pixel wide version. Click on the picture to see the full 1000-pixel version. I didn't want to include the really wide one here so that I wouldn't make you scroll left-to-right in your web browser window.)