I Am Your Density

A comment we've heard again and again about the Office 12 interface after people
use it or see it demoed live is: "wow, it's so much better than I imagined just by seeing
the screenshots."  Several people made that comment to me once again after my talk at PARC Tuesday night, and I wanted to write down some thoughts on the subject.

Fundamentally, there's a kind of UI that is built with great screenshots in
mind.  Generally including big, shiny buttons with copious whitespace on
all sides, these interfaces look extremely simple and easy-to-use in
"back-of-the-box" marketing screenshots.  The screenshot-optimized interface is
generally low-density, with only a few controls on the screen at once.

We've
definitely thought about this in designing boxshots for marketing materials in
past releases of Office.  The
picture we show on the back of the box is what the product looks like the first
time you run it.  But one of the problems with the current Office user
interface is that it tends to degrade over time--toolbars pop up over your
document and never go away, things get accidentally moved, Task Panes pop up
automatically, etc.  When we do site visits, we often see Office screens
that look more like the picture below than the one on the back of the box.

Back of the box vs. Real world screenshots

This is not deceptive advertising in any way, it's just the reality that today's
system of menus and toolbars and Task Panes tends to present more and more
complexity over time.  It's true for today's Office, and it's equally true
with dozens of other full-featured software packages.

That's because to build efficient productivity software that wears well over
time, the interface needs to be relatively high-density.  Having only five
shiny buttons on
the screen is very simple-looking, but it means that using any functionality
beyond those buttons requires at least one extra mouse click.  (Probably
more.)

Based on just
a screenshot, the Ribbon appears fairly involved.  This is because the
density of controls, especially on the first tab which tends to be shown in
screenshots, is fairly high.  Yet, when people use the new UI or see
in action--actually interacting with the software and not just staring at it--it
doesn't feel cluttered.  The first tab is high-density because it's
designed for high efficiency, and you wouldn't want most of those features an
extra click away.  Bold and Italic and Center have small, unlabeled icons
because they tend to be among the handful of features people can use without
text labels.

One of the design tenets we've embraced from the very beginning was that the Ribbon was going to be a
flat tax on screen real-estate.  Yes, it takes up a few more pixels vertically than
the two toolbars
from the back of the Office 2003 box, but it won't degrade over time.  We
won't pop up extra UI over top of the document, or from the side, to advertise
features.  Our goal is that when you boot Word 12 five years from now, it
looks as clean as it did the first day you brought it home.

We don't worry about the screenshots; we worry about getting the product right
for everyday use.  We worry about the long-term ramifications of our
current design decisions, not how they'll look on the back of the box.  And
if that means that some people don't react as positively as we'd like to static
screenshots, then we need to redouble our efforts to get people to watch, read
about, and use the UI in action.

A friendly, high-density productivity interface that demonstrates respect for
your screen real-estate is one that will wear well with time.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  Have your usability tests for Office 12 focused on portrait-oriented monitors? I have a dual display set up at work; my main one is portrait and my second one is landscape. I find that in most cases it works great, with the exception being working with a landscape document on a portrait display.
  
  The ribbon seems well-suited to a portrait display, because the extra vertical cost is offset by the orientation of the monitor. Any thoughts on a vertically-oriented Office 12?

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  Er, that last comment was supposed to be labeled "Friendly comment:" (as opposed to the hostile one).
  
  Okay, I think I've used up my quota of comments today. ;-)

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  It's easier to make a usable interface attractive, than to make an attractive interface usable.
  
  And anyone who quotes Back to the Future in a blog post title gets a few points from me.

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  Dan, et al.:
  
  As I've mentioned a number of times, the current visual skin is just temporary and the final product won't look much like it.
  
  The connection between the tab and the lower Ribbon is something that is very present in the real visual design. So, you're right in criticizing the current design... but the fix will come with the real visual design. :)

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  Someone just saw Back to the Future, eh? ;)

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  Mike:
  
  Was hoping someone out there would catch the reference. Back to the Future is one of those movies that's burned into my brain for some reason...
  
  "Tab? I can't give you a tab unless you order something!" Would anyone even understand this joke today?

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  Jensen,
  
  Yeah, I gathered that much. My point was that interest is kind of already unavoidable. I know I've worked in many offices, organizations and the military, and all have had Office there waiting for me.. so the interest is built in.
  
  To be honest, I have no interest in the features that are being added to Office. The same versions have all done exactly what I've needed to for a long time. I'm ONLY interested in this round because for once there is appears to be a serious interest in usability and how the accessible the existing features.
  
  I say that knowing previous versions all had usability considered in one facet or another, but in my opinion they have fallen short. Office 12 may as well, but that is the only interest I have in it, and I'm looking forward to trying it.. and I hope it's half of what the impression I get from this blog is.
  
  
  

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  "Our goal is that when you boot Word 12 five years from now, it looks as clean as it did the first day you brought it home."
  
  Oh, but we won't be booting up Word 12 five years from now -- we'll be booting up Word 14.
  
  (Except for those stuck-in-a-rut corporations that will still be booting up Office 97...)

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2005
  You talk about “shiny” buttons. Will there be any way to make them not shiny? You know, like Windows XP Classic theme. Flat, gray, quadratisch, praktisch, gut.
  
  I have a story to tell. In 2000, when I was just starting my career in software development, we had a large application suite project for a German company. The customers very strongly insisted on a unified UI theming with silver gradient buttons, light blue gradient toolbars, and saturated pink gradient message boxes.
  
  And then I saw Office 2003.

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2005
  Thanks, McFly!

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2005
  Centaur -- hear, hear.
  
  I'm all for the ribbon, functionally. But I strongly dislike the visual look of Office 12 right now. Yes, Jensen has said it's "not the final skin," but that's beside the point. Office shouldn't be skinned; it should use the operating system-provided look and feel. Including the OS-provided title bars--the way Office 12 is now, it won't even get Aero Glass effects automatically!

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2005
  PatriotB:
  
  I think you'll find the final look to be very complementary to the OS (both XP and Vista.)

• Anonymous
  December 17, 2005
  UI changes look great - but now I'll have to forget all the intricate ways to get things done that took so long to master... Appears to be worth the price.
  
  TaB (the diet doft drink) was introduced in May 1963 and was sold through Coca-Cola's subsidiary Fanta Beverage Company.

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2005
  It's good to see you aiming for a clean and productive user interface but I have a couple of question about the command tabs.
  
  1) Will they be individually moveable (i.e. draggable along the ribbon)? As a specific example, will the Font tab in Word and Excel be moveable in this way? In its currnet position it seems likely that in many circumstances it would hide the very text you're trying to alter.
  
  2) Will unwanted tabs be hideable?
  
  3) Will users be able to edit and create their own tabs to suit their own way of working? The Quick Access Toolbart goes some way to providing this functionality but it's not quite the same as being able to edit one's own tabs.

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 21, 2005
  An additional question about the Quick Access Toolbar and toolbars in general:-
  
  A lot of people have very carefully edited their toolbars so that they work exactly as necessary. It seems a shame to force them to throw this away.
  
  At present the Quick Access Toolbar can either be 'small' or 'large', there is only one of them, and its exact position cannot be chosen by the user. Surely it would be better to allow multiple toolbars and for them to be fully customisable (in terms of content, position, docking, etc.)? That way, users could continue to use their familiar toolbar layouts, or they could use the command tabs and ribbons, or they could use a customised combintion of the two as they require.
  
  The ribbons are a great idea but it makes no sense to force them on people who are used to working with well customised toolbars.

• Anonymous
  December 24, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 03, 2006
  Speaking of denseness... whose fine idea was it to "nerf" custom toolbars?
  
  Putting them on the add-ins tab means that alternating between my toolbar and, say, Write means clicking on Tab constantly.
  
  And why not "stack" buttons? Having one very long toolbar with what looks like two rows of space between them is very wasteful, especially when my toolbar can toggle two more toolbars when needed (which would go nicely underneath, although they used to go at bottom).
  
  I realize that I can turn it all into a .dotm and add my own custom UI, but that means different versions for Word 12 versus 9-11 (2000-2003) users. That's probably what I've got to do, but it's a bad option, from a testing stance -- everything will have to be tested independently.
  
  A "fallback" or "compatibility" mode would be nice, if it's not too late.

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