MIX08 Microsoft Office 2007: The Story of the Ribbon (1 of 10)

Jensen Harris from the Office 2007 design team gave a very rare presentation at Microsoft's MIX08.

Farewell, menus and toolbars! Come hear the behind-the-scenes story of how the 2007 Office Ribbon user interface was imagined, designed, and validated. See never-before-shown early prototypes, hear about mistakes we learned from during the design process, and find out the principles of user experience design we used each step of the way in creating the first totally new user interface for Office.

Portal:
http://www.babybluebox.com
http://www.creativecrew.org
http://www.williamchang.org

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• MIX08
• Microsoft
• Office
• 2007
• Story
• Ribbon
• Creating
• Prototyping
• Designing
• Usability
• Accessibility
• User Experience

[kozmic0]

Hehe, even Microsoft diss the Clippy, that's funny :)

[barophobia]

Yes, it was annoying and frustrating to learn where things were but I like it much better. It was definitely an improvement.

[garygnu01]

How does the Ribbon solve the "real people question" that is mentioned: I'm sure there's a way to do this but I can't figure out how. With the Ribbon now you'll never know how to figure it out :)

[garygnu01]

I've used Office for 20+ years and the ribbon for over a year. Verdict = ribbon sucks.

[BenDoverPls]

Bloat was not a problem of the toolbars and menues and features. The bloat that most people were complaining about was the size of the installation on the hard drive. Give us the features, but optimize the code to be as efficient and small as possible. We were being required to buy larger hard drives, more RAM, and faster processors.

[aarkerio]

All suites are lame, Latex is the way!!

[Tome4kkkk]

I was so much pro-OpenOffice. Until I tried to write something in it with a single landscape page and some tables. Over time I learned that OOo is 10 years behind MSO and even more behind the MSO 2007 or 2010. The cumbersomeness of OOo (not only UI, rather workflow in general) is just epic! People ask a trivial question on the OOo forums and topic goes 3 pages or more!

[packoftwenty]

Notice how the DOUCHEBAG Jensen Harris tries to make a joke out of Microsoft's other major cock-up - 'Intellimenus'... "we could hide some of it from you"... Assholes. And this crap was allowed to get through to the actual released program! What idiots!

People remember SPATIALLY where menu items are.

He's talking about this massive MISTAKE as if it's no big deal that a multi-billion dollar company screwed up so badly.

[packoftwenty]

So Jensen Harris is the DOUCHEBAG who came up with the pile of shite that is 'the Ribbon'...

"How and why did it happen?"

It happened because a bunch of DOUCHEBAGS whose JOBS depended on coming up with something NEW decided to ruin the user interface. Assholes.

[Rymac91]

If you guys hate the ribbon so much because you can't customize it or you want the old style back, then get the RibbonCustomizer add-on.