Speaking in Palo Alto Tonight

Tonight I'll be in Palo Alto, CA, speaking at the
monthly meeting of BayCHI
in PARC's George
E. Pake Auditorium
. I'll be discussing the ideas behind the redesign of
Office and showing demos of Office 12 Beta 1. The full description of the talk
is reproduced at the bottom of this post. It's exciting for me to be talking
about the Office 12 UI in the very location where
so many
of the fundamentals of today's human interface were developed
.

The event starts at 7:30 and will last about two hours. There will be a significant
amount of time
allotted for questions.

If you're in the Bay Area, please stop by and say hi or ask some questions. 
Admission is totally free. I hope to meet many of you!

You can find out all the information about the event on the
BayCHI web site.

Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office

Farewell, menus and toolbars. More than 20 years after the introduction of the
Macintosh, software has outgrown the basic building blocks of today's standard
user interface. The upcoming version of Microsoft Office does away with the
top-level menus and toolbars in favor of a new task-oriented, contextual user
interface.

This talk will provide a historical perspective on the evolution of the Office
user interface and the battle against the mounting complexity of the product.
You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at the different design iterations, and an
in-depth look at the new Office UI constructs, including the Ribbon, galleries,
contextual tabs, and the MiniBar. You'll also learn the ideas behind
"results-oriented design," which Jakob Nielsen wrote, "might well be the way to
empower users in the future."

More information
about the event
- How to get
there