Office gets a new look

The old menu structure of Microsoft's flagship Office programmes was replaced because it was too cumbersome for the suite's swelling feature set, according one of the leaders of the interface design team.

The new 'results oriented' structure stem of ribbon bars and galleries should make lesser-known features more accessible to users, said Jensen Harris, lead program manager of Microsoft's user experience team.

Some users may be alarmed by just how different the new look is – the file menu, for instance, has been replaced by an anonymous icon - and there is no 'classic look' option. But Harris insisted: ‘In our experience people get used to the new interface in a few minutes and prefer it.’

And he said it was myth that people only wanted to use five percent of the features. ‘In the enterprise you are far likely to meet someone saying “there must be a way I can get this done but I don’t know how to do it,” ' Harris told a press briefing in New York.

He pointed out that old menu structure was designed for a programme with 50 features, not 1500 like the latest versions of Word. Word 1.0 in 1989 boasted only top-level menus; but the menu structure in Word 2.0, launched in 1991, was essentially the same as that in Word 2003.

‘So all the features that have gone into the product in the 20 years and more since then have had to be fitted into a structure that we designed in the late 80s,’ Jensen said.

Toolbars and task panes were introduced in an attempt to get round the problem but there were still complaints about ‘bloatware’. By 2003, Word had no less than 31 toolbars and 19 task panes.

Harris said that at one point designers put all the Office options on cards, with the intention of laying them out on the floor in a bid to find a more usable arrangement. ‘Then we realised that there was nowhere big enough in [the Microsoft campus at] Redmond to lay them out.’

The team analysed billions of user-Office interactions looking for answers. ‘We looked in particular at the kind of features that were used together and cross-referenced that with other data.’

This led to the idea of ‘harnessing the power of context’ – presenting people with the tools they need to do the task in hand and, just as importantly, not confusing them with options they do not need at the time.

The new icon ribbons and galleries present people with their options, with previews of the results, rather than expecting them to go searching through menus to find what they need.

All features are accessible with hotkeys for the benefit of power users and an online utility that maps the old interface to the new will be available for people who cannot find features they knew how to access in old versions.

If Microsoft is right and the average person does find the new interface easier, it could be that power users will be most irritated by the change because they are already using more of the features and therefore will have more new things to learn.

Harris admitted that the interface has one major drawback: the ribbon bars leave very little working room on small Origami ultra-mobile screens. ‘We have been thinking about that,’ he said.

‘One solution might be to have the bar [vertically] down one side of the screen rather than across the top.’

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