Neatly Tied Together with a Ribbon

My Microsoft roots are in Office. My first job here was supporting Word 6.0. In fact, I remember interviewing for that job the day that Windows 95 released. When the interviewer asked me if I was going to upgrade to Windows 95, I replied that I'd like to, but I couldn't afford to upgrade from 4MB to 8MB of memory because it would cost me $400.

Times sure have changed! Speaking of change, anyone who's looked at the new interface in Office 2007 knows what a radical UI change took place with the current release. (How'd you like that segue?) When I first saw the Office ribbon, my first thought was that we were nuts! I predicted that no one would like it and people would run from it in frustration after spending hours trying to find a simple feature that had been subverted to a big button somewhere on the Ribbon. I was completely wrong. The Ribbon is widely considered user-interface genius now (by many people outside of Microsoft) which clearly illustrates why Microsoft isn't stupid enough to put someone like me in charge of UI design.

I recently listened to the latest edition (as of this writing) of the Windows Weekly podcast.  It featured an interview with Jensen Harris and Jacob Jaffe of the Office 2007 team, and it offered remarkable insight into the development of this radical change in Office. In a particularly amusing passage, Jensen references the common belief that Microsoft screws everything up until version 3.0, and he points out that the Office team built 3 versions of the new user-interface into the development phase.

If you're an Office 2007 user and you are frustrated trying to find a particular feature, the interactive guides on the Office Web site will let you select a feature in the Office 2003 interface and it will then dynamically transition to the Office 2007 interface and show you where that feature or command is located in the new interface. Now that's really cool!

These days, I spend most of my time in Visual Studio and Expression Web. I think it would be very interesting to see how the Ribbon interface could be incorporated into those products to expose existing features and make the interface less cluttered. What do you think?

If you want to read more on the Office interface from the inside, read Jensen's blog.