[IxDA Discuss] Microsoft's Ribbon?

Tue Sep 18 07:46:55 PDT 2007

I did a talk on all this stuff back in January that folks can watch here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/f/f/1fff960f-51a2-44b1-b033-bf25a3c7c7ab/BRE001.wmv

Those of you familiar with Jensen's blog will find much of the content familiar. I've provided some context on Office below for folks that are interested.

It will tell you exactly how a company with 'unlimited' resources and money goes about redesigning an interface. And of course statements like this are silly as NO company, not even Microsoft can approach projects from this perspective. But it will give you insights into the design decisions a company makes, and how they can make them, when it's a product that involves hundreds of millions of users (350 million to 500 million depending on who is counting).

I'll summarize by saying the Office 2007 is far from perfect (The Orb and it's hidden goodness perhaps being its signature failing). But all in all when you look at the customer scenarios that Office has to fulfill I would call our redesign a stunning success. It makes it far easier for existing users to create more polished documents quickly and it's a much easier interface for new users to pick up (and our benchmark and longitudnal testing bear this out anecdotes aside). In fact I'd be hard pressed to name one single example of where a company is taking a bigger chance on user experience than with Office. SAP is trying and we'll start seeing the fruits of their labor soon and I would submit that going from OS9 to OSX was a huge change for many. We must all still know a few of those holdouts banging things out in Quark on OS9. :)

The problem with Office 2007 is the same problem a lot of big applications and productivity suites have, be they Adobe Creative Suite, PeopleSoft, SAP, Sharepoint, etc. in that they are designed to do everything well and often do most of it poorly or require a very advanced learning curve (Imagine sitting down in front of Photoshop or InDesign for the first time. These are complex applications but I've been using them for 18 years so I don't even notice anymore).

The Ribbon got Office steered in the right direction but it is of course a journey. But it's also an opportunity and it's why we see the success of niche products like Basecamp or even Apple's collection of Pages, Keynote and Numbers that are fantastically useful for many folks.

I'd be curious to hear from folks that want to learn more about Office. Watch my talk and tell me what you would have done differently from a design process. Share it here.

Chris Bernard
Microsoft
User Experience Evangelist
chris.bernard at microsoft.com
630.530.4208 Office
312.925.4095 Mobile

Blog: www.designthinkingdigest.com
Design: www.microsoft.com/design
Tools: www.microsoft.com/expression
Community: http://www.visitmix.com

"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." William Gibson

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Stevenson
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 8:58 AM
To: Lisa deBettencourt
Cc: IxDA Discuss
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Microsoft's Ribbon?

I can attest to at least one instance of what Will described. I used to work
for a small software company that is all but married to Microsoft, and they
decided to redesign their software with a Ribbon interface. This was not,
unfortunately, a decision born out of their desire for a better UI, but a
decision born out of a desire to be like Microsoft.

The fortunate result was that I got to spend a lot of time reading Jenson
Harrison's blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/default.aspx) and reverse
engineering the usability principles behind the ribbon. In theory, I think
the ribbon is a very clever and well thought out interface. But in reality,
convention trumps clever ideas. So I'm certain that most long-time Office
users are more frustrated with the changes than they are pleased with the
new innovations.

It would be very interesting to do some usability comparisons of Office 2007
and Office 2003 on brand new Office users (if any exist out there). Maybe
the UI would seem better if users were not already used to something else?

Someone else mentioned that it seems like the ribbon takes up a lot of
vertical screen real estate. I agree this certainly seems true, but Jenson
addressed this in an interesting blog post:
<http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx>

Also, you can always minimize the ribbon if you want more space for your
documents.

After spending a lot of time studying the theory behind the ribbon UI, I
expected that users would react to the UI negatively at first but eventually
come around to liking it. So I'm a little surprised that the general
perception is still negative. I wonder what Microsoft could have done
differently to increase user acceptance.

Jeff

On 9/17/07, Will Parker <wparker at channelingdesign.com> wrote:

> I think a lot of solidly Windows-oriented software companies will
> play follow the leader. The usual suspects will treat ribbons as a
> spray-on skin, whether it's a good fit or not.
>
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