MSDN has a great set of articles on the 2007 Office Suite. I have never been an ‘office’ developer – but, I thought that being a UI designer – a good place to get ideas on UI design – would certainly be the office team.

This article -Developer Overview of the User Interface for the 2007 Microsoft Office System got me into this series of articles (Office 12 Technical Articles) …

Read these articles – they are great. In essence, they are good reference for principals and practices regarding User Interface design. I snipped the following bit here for your reading pleasure. These key points can take you a long way. I believe that the ‘art’ of user interface design needs to be pursued. SO many business applications are developed with little interaction design expertise that it is amazing. Broken metaphors, awkward operations, confusing dialogs etc are the NORM unfortunately. So – I believe this MUST change. Leave it to the folks @ MS to spend LOTS of $ on RnD/ Focus Groups to sort out the ways that users like to interact with software. This very spending is valuable to all of us software developers.

UI Design Philosophy

• Focus. The user’s attention should be on the content, not on the UI. The results-oriented approach allows the user to perform sophisticated formatting and advanced tasks without diverting their attention from the document or content on which they are working.
• Context. The contextualization of as many commands and properties as possible is crucial. Increase the user’s sense of mastery by reducing the number of choices presented at any given time. Reduce the command space by eliminating redundant or seldom-used features.
• Efficiency. Focus on efficiency rather than scope. Users must be able to find the most powerful features for the task quickly and easily. A small gain in the scope of features used is not worth a significant loss in the efficient use of the features.
• Consistency. A results-oriented user experience is best accomplished by clearly providing intuitive ways to solve different problems. When applying tools to tasks, flexible consistency is desirable; homogeneity is not.
• Permanence. Clearly defined access to tools ensures better usability. Ambiguity is reduced by establishing permanent homes for groups of features. A consistent-location UI is favored over a “smart” UI.
• Predictability. The Microsoft Office applications offer a long and rich legacy of acceptance, upon which you can build successful UI innovation. Straight-forward design ensures continued user comfort and maximized results. Favor the predictable over the novel.

A big thing for the new office suite is the whole ‘ribbons’ thing. Bye bye file, edit, view menus. Bye bye toolbars with commands repeated from the sub menus etc. Enter – ribbons…

Results-Oriented Design

These ribbons are there to work according to the above ‘UI design Philosophy’. I am just now installing the new office beta for myself – simply for the ’study’ of their UI principals in practice. Hopefully – I will add to my practices and knowledge of REALLY designing UIs for people to accomplish things. This is key – a core tenant of their latest UI Design philosophy is “results oriented design” – building applications for people to get things done.  May they accomplish this – may we all!

Enough blabber -I am off….

Chris

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