It's indeed impressive and unexpected that microsoft would take such huge risk.

However, they have to. The reason why they're doing it is that the interface to Office is now commoditized, it is loosing value by the minute, as everyone is cloning it.

This is the one and only true reason why this is being done.

I've read everything Jensen wrote and as a UI designer and I am facinated by it, and especially the ribbon.

However, IMHO the true motivation of this project - whether it's known at the dev level or not - is simply to make an interface which is much harder to clone by a small team or lone programmer. Also, once learned it will be much harder for users to switch to another application.

It is NOT about creating a better user experience.

Right now, it's easy to write an Excel clone, and I think it took only one guy to do it for KDE or Gnome (I forget which), and it's easy to switch to OpenOffice because it can copy the Office UI easily.

Also true for the Vista UI, in general.

For menus, they're killing them simply because everyeone can make them now.

In total agreement with you. Just been using it a couple of days and already love it.

I think it's a huge leap forward too. BUT, OfficeUI is more than just changing menus for buttons like in IE7. That's the difference. I don't feel comfortable with the buttons on the right that IE has, because they just changed a name for a draw. It's simple, when you see a button, you associate an action. What Office improves is another way of working, that it's not as easy to scale to other apps as it may seem, and IE7 or WMP11 are good proofs.

I'm not sure it's so driven by the multiple clones as by the sheer number of usability people they now have, and the joy of i8n menu systems.

With multiple monitors, don't you find they work better rotated? Except for Visual Studio which seems to be designed for widescreen, I find many apps actually work better at 1024x1268. I have a portrait 17" next to a 20" (1600x1200 is soo much better than 1200x1000) and I'm aiming for a second 17" on the other side. But I also find myself rotating the 20" a lot of the time. The next step is multiple display support from virtual machines.

> So I'm inclined to think that windows themselves
> aren't all that useful as a GUI construct either,
> either. So what are we left with?

I'm sorry, but I disagree with this. Microsoft Windows' windows are a relatively unuseful construct, because they are so poorly designed. Good windowing systems exist that make windows a very useful construct. Among the characteristics of good windowing systems are minimal ornamentation, smart maximizing (occupying no more of the screen than needed for their content), and stable minimizing (windowshade). It's a mistake to generalize from a crappy windowing system that windowing systems are bad.

> Microsoft Windows' windows are a
> relatively unuseful construct, because they
> are so poorly designed

broad statements!

you must hate OS X too.. they removed the window shade.

Window Shade collapsing is really cool, our application does it for all of our palettes and similar floating window. It's available in CorelDraw and other apps as well.

It's also up to the application to define what its document size is to allow "smart resizing", this is all available on Windows. But it's innapropriate, or gives no benifit for most types of documents people use. On OS X maximize is mapped to that and in practice it is very frustrating because of the user wanting to work full screen, even if it means wasted space.

There are no absolutes in GUI such as not having a feature meaning poor design. Apple's products are example of missing features many power users can be used to from elsewhere.

> It's a mistake to generalize from a crappy windowing system that windowing systems are bad

I think most, if not all, Windowing systems *are* bad. Consider browser tabs, for instance.

Why do people love browser tabs so much? Why don't they love multiple browser windows? Because multiple windows are a giant pain in the ass to manage. Something's always obstructing something else, and you spend far too much time with pure excise: shuffling windows around instead of getting work done.

Tabs, in contrast, are blissfully simple.

Infragistics is already supporting the Office 2007 ribbon in its toolbar control and the Office 2007 styles in overall look and feel. Definitely play with it if you haven't already. The ribbon is amazingly fun to develop with. :)

Also, I think you are reading a bit too much into MDI being only a window based ideology. Infragistics also supports a control called UltraTabbedMDIManager which is essentially a component that you add to a form to auto-manipulate MDI children windows into a tab based structure, and its absolutely freaking fantastic! I don't know how I lived without it for so long (it also made it REALLY easy for me to convert my old apps over to newer and prettier interfaces). The only point I'm trying to make with this is don't attack MDI. It's not just for windows any more.

I hate being the one to plug a company's products that already make more money than God, but they are on top of this stuff. I <3 Infragistics. Their web controls are utter crap, however... or maybe ASP.net just sucks? One or the other.

Check out Codejock's controls as well, I liked them quite a bit more than Infragistic's offering. No native .NET version yet though.

Not showing the menu by default reminds me of Word Perfect. I find it makes it that much more difficult to find the option (at least initially) since I never thought of hitting the alt key until I did it one day by mistake. Pressing the alt key is at least a little easier than typing about:config (i.e. Firefox) to get to the more advanced settings.

On the other hand, windows are very useful for certain kinds of things.

For instance, my computer is currently set up so that I have one monitor for maximized windows (and the Windows toolbar, so this amounts to essentially tabbed browsing between application windows), and one monitor with an IM window or two and at least two terminal windows. All of those are things that I tend to glance at for updates, and occasionally read the updates; I've got them set up so that I can see the majority of each window (and at least the first half of the bottom several lines, in particular), so that if something updates in one of the windows I'll notice it in my peripheral vision and can glance over and see what it is without losing focus on what I'm doing (and often without even losing the flow of typing, such as in the middle of this sentence). I couldn't do that without being able to have lots of little windows that can overlap -- or at least tile, but overlapping makes much better use of the space, since the amount of space I need to see changes and read the last few lines is much less than I want when I'm actually working in the window.

And, on a related note, I much prefer having lots of little "my computer" windows rather than a maximized Windows Explorer. It makes dragging things back and forth between windows much easier, which is especially valuable because in most cases I find the simplest way to open a file is to use the tab-browsing-equivalent part of the Windows toolbar to pull up an already-open "my computer" windows that's open to the directory I'm working in (or one near it) and drag the relevant file into the relevant application. They're sort of like lots of persistent "Open" dialog boxes, with a bit of spatial memory in the "tab bar" to make it fairly quick to pick the right one.

Without having the option for non-maximized windows, I'd lose all that, even though for most things I used maximized ones. I do use tabs a lot even for the non-maximized ones, though.

Oh, and that reminds me, speaking of browsers -- one thing that really annoys me in the latest Opera is that the "downloaded files" window now defaults to a maximized window like the rest of the browser windows, rather than to a separate non-maximized window.

That means that, when I'm downloading a lot of files by right-clicking, every time I download a file the "downloaded files" window replaces the one I'm working in, and I have to stop and switch back. Whereas, with the old way, I could just move it off to the side, and even though it got focus, the window I was working in was still visible and would get focus back the moment I right-clicked in it.

I think the key point here is that there are classes of windows, and only some ought to be maximized. For example, dialog boxes ARE programmatically windows, but having those maximize by default is (I think) an obvious bad idea. And there are some application windows that sort of act like persistent dialog boxes, or are sort of in the same class of things that are better not maximized.

(I should perhaps also note that I'm arguing for the exceptions because I consider your "application windows should be maximized and browsed with tabs" claim to be quite obviously and clearly true in the substantial majority of cases. These are just small exceptions to its universality.)

Brooks,

Opera's transfer tab can be dealt with however you prefer. It offers you the following options:

( ) Show transfers when starting download
( ) Show transfers in background when starting download
( ) Never show transfers when starting download

That's at least how it's done in Opera 8.54. Maybe 9.00 has it a bit different, but I'm not so sure about it.

I don't recall it ever being a separate window, it seems to always have been integrated into a separate tab.

Don't blame Opera, they've always had this one right.

Sad that everybody tries to do what Microsoft does, but good that Microsoft at least made it better with this version of Office. Maybe this time it will be more difficult to implement as a Web Application. :-). The Office UI has pretty much followed the same path for 10 years, and people have bought it every time thinking ?this is how office applications should be?. This is why competition is so good, because ?new features? seems like the only reason why people have bought new versions of Office through the years.

As flagship as Office is, it's in no way as risky to completely overhaul the UI than Vista. It's also a much more trivial task.
It's also interesting to consider that Windows is playing catchup, Office is playing "run an f-in mile ahead so *they* have to play catchup".

Well, I like the new Office UI, but it has (like all other windows apps) one major flaw - there's no dedicated "show/collapse toolbar" button. Apple had this button all along. I'm typing this in Firefox with toolbar collapsed using that very button.

Also, preferences dialog should have been given more love - it's absolutely a pain to navigate without realtime search.

Office 2007 is by far the most awkward and disorganised GUI yet seen. It looks ugly, takes up heaps of screen space and is confusing to all!
Having program unity ADDS to efficiency and getting staff to have to muddle through a confusing UI is definately not business smart.
Change for the sake of change is not always for the better!
We'll be sticking to 2003 or other alternatives for the for-seeable future.

The ribbon menu makes sense for document orientated apps that have a dizzying array of features that change a lot contextually. The ribbon is a great way to present options that would largely go unnoticed.
Outlook's main window doesn't use ribbons, because maybe there isn't a whole lot of changing contextual options? I'm not sure a ribbon UI could work well with something like VS.

I wish the spent some time on there options dialogs though... far too many nested modal windows.

"the web browser ... nothing but Icons and Pointing Devices."

Jeff,

there's actually more elements to the web UI model that make it work:

* ADDRESS bar - to get where you need quickly if you happen to know the exact address

* SEARCH - if you know what you want but don't know where exactly it is

* HOME page - ("portal") when you want to explore what else is there

* BACK button - so you never get totally lost

* BOOKMARKS - when you are that difficult kind of a person who must put the car keys into the same place each time or face nightmares

And yes, I consider Search a part of the web UI model, not just a service. People use it as a navigational device, just like I did few minutes ago when I couldn't remember what's the website of Daemon Tools. Not coincidently, search boxes are included into main windows of Firefox and IE7.

Why do you insist on taking everything to such extremes?

How about some pictures for the people that don't want to downlaod Office 2007 beta so we know what the discussion is about.

As for the menu paradigm, I'm not sure I udnerstand how you ever get away from that, in IE it's just icons and when clicked on they are menus, is this so different ?

Frankly I'm not sure (as a power user, I guess) I like the way things are developing with the dumbed down menus and then the search instead of a proper programs menu in vista.

And now theya re talking about a dock in "codename vienna", this won't be windows at all but mac or linux style.

I think Microsoft has hired way too many old Mac and Linux nerds, it's not Windows anymore, it's clone mac or copy firefox or copy linux.

You said:
Vista, in comparison, makes almost no changes to the core Windows GUI.

Excuse me no contrasting UI change in Vista when compared with Office? There was hardly any UI change from 2000 to XP, but XP to Vista? There are quite a lot of UI changes the fact they use WPF style controls for everything.

The number of little things that change add up. Like the small preview window on hover on task bar. The Start Menu has been completely changed. How File Exployer looks and operates. Its alot easier to talk about was hasn't changed. Its a much shorter list.

Over Generalazation Argument Flag thrown blogger Penalized 50 yards.

I do think that the Office team has made a quantum leap in the 2007 version. But the analogies to web applications are weak, and people really need to stop thinking that the popularity of the web is due to its crappy UI. I watch the same people who have only a little trouble with desktop apps struggle to find their way through massive web applications like eBay, and they flat-out refuse to even try to use online banking or billpay sites.

Sure, they can find their way around Google and most content sites, but those sites only do one thing. It's disingenuous to compare them to full-scale applications like Excel or Photoshop (and if you'll recall, people have tried to do that on the web and it's tanked).

The web is popular -despite- its interface. It's popular because (a) it's accessible from anywhere, (b) doesn't require any additional software to be installed, and (c) usually exists as an alternative to paperwork or commuting, not to a desktop app.

> The number of little things [in Vista] that changed add up. Like the small preview window on hover on task bar. The Start Menu has been completely changed. How File Exployer looks and operates. Its alot easier to talk about was hasn't changed. Its a much shorter list.

There are changes in Vista, but nothing nearly as radical as dropping the "M" from WIMP. Office 2007 proposes we change the way GUI apps have been built for the last 20 years-- no more main menu.

> there's actually more elements to the web UI model that make it work

Sure, but *in terms of WIMP specifically*, the web has no concept of menus or windows (excluding popups, which are universally reviled, and frames, which have been abandoned). It's a simple, flat, one window model where everything is visible and clickable.

> But the analogies to web applications are weak, and people really need to stop thinking that the popularity of the web is due to its crappy UI.

A big part of the popularity of the web is absolutely due to its "crappy UI" (see the comment by alexander s, above). It's simple by default. However, it is getting more complex over time with AJAX and so forth.

> How about some pictures for the people that don't want to downlaod Office 2007 beta so we know what the discussion is about.

I linked a bunch of Office 2007 sites in the post itself, but here's another:

<a href="https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679411033.aspx">https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679411033.aspx</a>;

You guys are missing the greatest ever UI update for windows: BlackBox. I use bblean, so I have an extremely small taskbar on the top of my desktop, and BB reduces the size of the title bar and side anchors to almost nil. BB also allows windowshading, and the right click menu lets you quickly mouse through a directory structure with no clicking. Also, the menu and colors are completely customizable with simple text files. I can't live without it.

https://www.bb4win.org
https://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/

Wow, this is great, I'm not an Office user (and I still use Windows 2000!) so I have yet to try it.

Overlapping windows (except when specifically requested for a specific use) and linearly stacked multilevel menus were the 2 worst thing to happen to UIs since the QWERTY keyboard layout.

Reed

I literally never maximize windows, because I find it much easier to switch tasks with near-full-size windows.

I'm convinced it's the way to go. Doesn't maximizing any window miss out on the benefits proposed in Jeff's post on Fitt's Law?

https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000642.html

Jeff talks about Mac menus being of infinite height because they're at the border of the screen. I've always arranged my windows so that certain key tasks can be rapidly switched to by using the infinite-sized screen edges. It's much easier to switch to these tasks with an imprecise mouse lunge, and any maximized task prevents this convenience.

When you have maximized a window, how do you switch tasks? Do you alt-tab through a list of 10, or even 30 tasks? Do you move your mouse up to two monitors away to get to the task bar and click on that box, ending up with your mouse in the one location guarateed NOT to be pointing at your application?

I use those painful methods if I'm forced to, but with non-maximized tasks, I generally have a much faster way.

When windows are near full size, they can have cascaded corners that allow for easy task-switching to their neighbors.

The other key is heavy use of the Alt-Esc keyboard shortcut, which sends current task to the back of the window stack.

This "get this out of here" hotkey is especially nice for quick sub-tasks: switch from main task to a subtask by clicking on some screen border or cascaded corner. When done, instead of minimizing the window, just hit Alt-Esc. Now you're back to the main task, and you still have the corner of the sub-task when you need it again.

Of course, once I have all my windows set up, I don't want to reboot for about a month, which can be problematic. The fact that there's no easy way to tell windows to save such a layout of applications and open documents is an indication that not many people use windows this way.

But like tabbed browsing (which just makes every page two clicks away instead of one) I don't understand the benefit of maximizing a task.

I get more use out of the 5% edge of the screen that I didn't maximize into than I do out of the taskbar and alt-tab combined.

Personally, I'm disgusted with Office 2007 and have no plans to upgrade. All the shortcuts that I have spent years using, such as ALT+I, S (Insert|Symbol to get the symbol dialog to insert something like the "cent" symbol, degree symbol, etc.) and ALT+E, S, U (Edit|Paste Special|Unformatted to paste text from the clipboard without bringing along its original formatting), are gone. I now have to use the mouse to navigate through the )@*&$)@ "ribbon bar" to find this stuff.

By removing my shortcuts and sticking me with this ribbon bar--with no way to turn it off that I have been able to find--Microsoft has made my work slower and harder. They have forced ME to adapt to the product, rather than making the product adapt to me.

I'll stick with Office '03, thank you very much.

It's days like these that I wish a truly viable competitor to Microsoft would exist.

> removing my shortcuts

The KEYBOARD shortcuts are still available, but they may be different. In fact, as you press the ALT key, the ribbon "lights up" with the keyboard accelerator shortcuts next to each item. It's very slick.

Dar, here's screenshots of the way keyboard shortcuts work with the ribbon:

https://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/13/480568.aspx

It's far better than 2003 ever was.

The office ribbon is fine until you need to find some of the advanced options. Then the hunt and peck fun begins.

Menus may be 'quaint' in your view, but it's much easier to organize content with them and find it.

In addition, I really dislike the fact that the ribbon takes up so much of my freaking screen real estate. It's positively huge - taking up triple the space the toolbar and menus in Office 2003 did...

> It's positively huge - taking up triple the space the toolbar and menus in Office 2003 did...

I use Office 2007 and don't think that the ribbon takes up all that much space. You ought to read Jensen Harris' post on this issue: https://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx

I agree with Carl. Get a monitor that supports 4000x3000 pixel resolution and you'll find that windows are quite useful.

Either that or get a windowing system where each windows isn't filled with so much chrome that it needs a minimum 1024x768 pixels.

The menu serves no purpose on a window that isn't active. All it does is increase the minimum size of the window and cause confusion when it's not in focus. That's why Mac OS's menu at the top of the screen makes so much sense.

> That's why Mac OS's menu at the top of the screen makes so much sense.

Er, yeah, until you have more than one monitor, then it makes zero sense at all. So the menu for the app on monitor #2 will be on the extreme left side of monitor #1. Awesome. And it'd be TOTALLY awesome for my three monitor systems at work and home.

The problem isn't the positioning (although putting stuff on the top of the monitor is generally a good idea due to fitts' law), but the fact that it's a main menu.

A user scans a menu by reading the text of the menu entries.

A user scans the "Ribbon" by doing what? Hovering over the cute icons until a tooltip appears?

Patrick, you need something like MultiMon to help manage your taskbar and windows. You might have a "system" now, everyone does eventually, but windows' support for multi-monitors is so underwhelming that the added value and convenience of MultiMon is worth the download. The per-screen taskbar is so useful you'll wonder how you got by without it. And it's free!

If you like the taste, you might look into something like UltraMon. (I've heard both kind and disparaging things about powerstrip as well, but never used it.) For $40 the extra value over Multimon might not be there, but it's actively developed and supported.

> Er, yeah, until you have more than one monitor, then it makes zero sense at all.

That's because you're using three small monitors to emulate one huge one. If cost wasn't a factor, I'd rather have one huge monitor.

> The problem isn't the positioning (although putting stuff on the top of the monitor is generally a good idea due to fitts' law), but the fact that it's a main menu.

I like the ribbon and I could possibly live without the M, at least as the primary method of accessing any given function. But I won't stand for the loss of W.

Patrick

> A user scans the "Ribbon" by doing what? Hovering over the cute icons until a tooltip appears?

The Ribbon packs in much more (and richer) information than the current menu/toolbar/icon paradigm.

> That's because you're using three small monitors to emulate one huge one. If cost wasn't a factor, I'd rather have one huge monitor.

Or I could use three huge monitors.. you assume this is a zero-sum game, that one can have a single monitor that's "enough" desktop. The only practical limit is how far you have to turn your head.

Even if you did have a single GINORMOUS widescreen, the single main menu at the top of the screen totally breaks down. What about apps that are positioned on the right hand side of your giant desktop? You have to mouse all the way over to the extreme left top to get to the application's menu. It's silly. So even for single monitors, as they get larger, the Apple menu paradigm gets worse and worse, too.

> They have forced ME to adapt to the product, rather than making the product adapt to me.

Yeah, but you're in that 1% of users that think that way. The other 99% don't want to sit there configuring the product, they want ease-of-use out of the box.

In a sense, this reminds me of myself - sometimes I think how cool it would be if my car would allow me to reprogram the automatic transmission - then I remember that 99.9% of my fellow car owners would have absolutely no use for that feature and the manufacturer should probably focus that engineering time on making the stereo easier to operate.

>All the shortcuts that I have spent years using [...] are gone

No, they are there. There is a keyboard interface to Office Vista, it's visible once you press ALT. Read the vista UI blog

Microsofts main aim at the moment with Office and Vista is not so much to offer greater technology and improvements to workflow etc, but to make it look preety, have little animations, and transparency and little bouncy icons that glow etc etc.
If you like the chrome grease nipples, fluffy dice and foxtails then its great for you.
If you are more interested in performance, ease of use and getting the job done, then M$ has lost the plot!
Office 2007 is a joke! From GUI to File system.
The company I work for has spent a lot of resources looking at Vista, and Office and is ademant that neither will be incorporated in the foreseeable futures upgrade plans! The incompatabilities, expense of retraining etc can not be justified with the minimal, if any, benefits.
Linux, and Apple are creeping in to the corporate office!
Thanks Microsoft:)

Dazza,
Funny you say that when it seems like it is the influence from Mac and Linux that caused these horrible UI choices in Office 2007 and Vista.

Like I said previously they have hired way too many old mac and linux nerds and they are moving away from what has traditionally been associated with Windows which is a huge risk.

MS claims they have made extensive research in the area, is this the same kind of research that lead Apple to the menu bar ? It's not the novice user they should listen to when making UI choices, it is the power users.

As soon as a novice user learns how to do soemthing he will too apreciate the power choices, if you make a dumbed down UI everyone is annoyed except the novice user (which soon becomes a power user).

Annoying UI choices should not be made because you think people cannot learn things. This has been Mac OS and Apples problem from day one, they think giving the user a single way of doing things is user friendly while in fact it quickly becomes annoying for everyone.

I get so tired of watching change for it's own sake. We've trained millions of users the menu system, which isn't bad (the prolification of toolbars is), and now we say "nevermind". Most UI books I've read state that consistency is one of the most important aspects of UI design. (How 'bout them personalized menu's, everybody loves them so). Now we are told to embrace dancing ribbons... I don't buy it, it's just one more way of Microsoft branding their stuff, there is no need for this type of UI

Fr*king hide the ribbon if it takes up space. Those who are complaining about the switch from menus to ribbon are basically the ones who complained "oooh, we don't need to stinking GUI, we will do with teletype". Fogeys

Apple menu system is the most lame-ass system I have ever seen.

I found the hotkey for hiding/showing the ribbon: Ctrl-F1.

It's nice minimized, since the tabs are still visible and you get a cleaner interface, but you can still take advantage of the ribbon features. I like the ribbon myself, since I have to do a lot of image placement, and Word puts quick buttons to options like altering the text wrapping in easy reach instead of having to repeatedly right-click -> Format Picture -> Layout tab -> Advanced. I just wish the ribbon was customizable without having to figure out how to deal with its XML or going off to find a 3rd party ribbon creator/editor.

Office 2007 might very well be the most ridiculous sack I've experienced yet. This is beyond atrocious. Innovation my rear. I hope to god you're kidding around with us.
-chirsten

Obviously with Office 2007 and Vista with it's bulky explorer windows and sidebars and all that, they assume everyone has at least a 20" widescreen tft today.

Office 07 should have included a backward compatible UI. Users like myself (15 years) are at a disadvantage if we convert. Any preacher can tell you, You don't make converts but closing the doors.

Well office 2007 has just cost me another ?200 to buy the user a 'better' office application and install office 2003.

Having now seen the app my comments are this - If I wanted to change my complete understanding of my office suite I'd have installed Open office, Ability Office or Thinkfree office. 2007's blury user interface is overly complicated and a waste of space. Now we'll have every app using a different gui and no common structure. Na if anything it's moved me away from Office to better written code like Thinkfree and Open Office.

Bye Bye Microsoft and hello Apple it's so more appealing on the other side if the industry.

Nightmare on my block

well you little bastards think that this vista is so grand and office 07 is sweet.... well how sweet will it be for novice endusers who loved 98SE!!

These changing of the menus and all should not be for look but functionality. I support 350 novice users on a server with active directory they tell me everyday "just want to send email" nothing fancy... seems as the software gurus are moving at a different pace than the world.. sorta like bush and the war....

bob

Opera (Show transfers in background when starting download)

Do this:

CTRL+ALT+T &#8594; View &#8594; Show transfers in background when starting download

WIMP really stands for Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pulldown menus.

sorry folks, but the UI of Office 2007 is just plain awful.
-non-intuitive
-poorly organized
-painfully slow

yes it is amazing that M$ would risk their flagship product to this mess.

I've been trying out Office 2007 on a test server for work.

Hate it! Normal tasks that take only a second or two in Office 2000 or 2003 are now painful... if I can even find them. I still have not located the Heading 2 style, which used to be right there in front of me. Worst thing that ever happened to a GUI is this new [ef]Fluent Ribbon.

Access 2007? The nice application toolbars I have meticulously created for the users to make things easy for them have been banished to the "Add-Ins" tab! I can't seem to get them back out into a place that is actually going to be useful.

What the !@#$ is with this "Home" tab? Stupid name. Doesn't tell me anything about what it contains. Microsoft keeps telling us the ribbon makes features "Discoverable"... I like my features to be "Discovered Already So I Don't Have To Go On A Hunting Expedition". The classic menus and toolbars were very easy to find.

Micro$oft have dumbed down the interface to the lowest common denominator, and as a non-novice, I actually feel insulted that the way I work efficiently has been deemed not only obsolete by Microsoft, but that I should be made to do it their way (which, I might add, has proven to be completely awkward for me).

They claim the new UI makes me more efficient and productive. Hmmmm... I've been trying to format a particular paragraph for two weeks to the way I need it but haven't so far found all the commands I am looking for. I did the same document up in Word 2000 and again in OpenOffice.org Writer (which I have installed but not yet had occasion to use before this test) as a comparison. Both of those allowed me to get things done in a couple of minutes. Office 2007 has taken two weeks and is still not done.

I think I will stay with what works until/unless MS releases a service pack that lets me choose to work with menus (key term is "work"). Otherwise, Microsoft will not be selling me any future versions of Office.

My $0.02 worth.

Office Fluent Ribbon is great for soccer moms and CEOs emailing porno and jokes to each other.

For those of us who like to customize the applications that we work with, the Ribbon is a huge step backward. (Somewhere above, we were mentioned as the 1%, but I believe that number is higher.)

Microsoft should offer a backward compatible add-in so I can use my old-fashioned WIMP paradigm with Office 2007 or it will be see you later Microsoft!

Perhaps Office 14's Project Team could think about this?

The Office 2007 interface is the worst UI in terms of usability that I had to use in a long time. I can only conclude that the designers are incompetent fools. Main reasons:

1. Random rearrangements of UI elements. Computers are stupid and using one can be infuriating. However, they have one redeeming feature: when programmed bug-free, they can be very consistent, hence predictable, hence "usable". Any UI "feature" that takes away their single strength is a very bad idea. This explains the failure of such past "innovations" as menus that automatically hide away less used items.

The ribbon interface rearranges size and presentation of buttons and their labels (apparently based on the window size). As a result, I need to internalize the position and appearance of many times more buttons than there are actual operations before I can use them "without thinking".

2. Loss of control. People dislike situations that cause them to have less control over their environment. It literally increases stress levels. Another example of the "control effect" can be seen in people's assessment of relative riskiness of driving vs. flying. They feel cars are less risky because they are in the driver's seat whereas the planes are controlled by an unseen, unknown, unpredictable "captain". (Incidentally, that's why the pilot's make a small speech at the start of the flight, and why they are called "captain", a title of ancient authority, instead of just pilot.)

When you take away any chance of customization from an UI, you take away control from your users. It is like taking away the steering wheel, the escape hatch, or the emergency brake. They feel trapped, controlled and the stress levels shoot up. I have seen long-time users of Office beg their IT support people to deinstall 2007 version in favor of the old one. Please note that users can get negatively impacted even if they are not heavy users of customization. Just the idea of losing any means of "escape" is enough to cause stress.

Finally, claiming that customization cannot be justified on a cost/benefit basis is just rich coming from a corporation that has been raking in monopoly profits for decades. It is adding insult to injury.

"2. Loss of control. People dislike situations that cause them to have less control over their environment."

Don't mistake options/features for control. People also feel trapped and stressed when given more control than they can handle. If you put a person in a cockpit of a plane and gave them 5 minutes training, they'd have more control, but I don't think their stress levels would decrease. Also, people's perception of driving and flying is also due to relative exposure to the medium. I drive a heck of a lot more than I fly.

"I have seen long-time users of Office beg their IT support people to deinstall 2007 version in favor of the old one."
Key word here, long-time. My grandmother prefers her old car to her new one. Not because it's better (couldn't pass MOT, zero clutch control, produced more lead&carbon than a power plant) but because it's *what she's used to*. Personal preference is not the *only* usability statistic.

"People also feel trapped and stressed when given more control than they can handle." That is not very relevant, because it only applies should they end up with "more than they can handle". For Office 2007, that is certainly not the case. Marshalling a few buttons on an application is not exactly string theory.

You are right, the key-word is "long-time", but not for the reason you imply. It is because they are aware that having no customization options at all is a regression and users do not have to put up with that BS.

I am not sure what "usability statistic" you have in mind, but I presume it is some sort of measurable proxy for the (not-directly- measurable) personal preference. In that sense, personal preference is the "real thing", as far as the user is concerned, and no usability statistic can trump it.

BTW, in your example, the old car does have more usability for your mother, but fails on other, non-usability related criteria, such as environmental stuff. Cars are a good comparison point when thinking about software interfaces:

--Cars are (for economic and technological reasons) not easily customizable. Yet there is a whole industry, and a multitude of popular TV shows dedicated to customization. On the other hand, SW vendors can ship their products with easily cutomizable UIs, but some choose to take away any possibility of customization. Lesson for SW?

--All (automatic) cars have the same basic UI with an accelerator, brake and steering wheel. Despite huge competitive pressure for novelty, manufacturers don't fool with the most important parts of the UI because their users are familiar with it. Lesson for SW?

Actually, it is not a coincidence that the major overhaul of the Office UI happens at a time when there is almost no competitive pressure on Office. I doubt MS would risk alienating their customer base if they still had Lotus or other commercial suites as viable competitors. An opening for the OpenOffice?

Sorry Jeff

You are way off line on this one. This is a backward step for Microsoft - all it is doing is pushing users to other alternatives. I support many small bsuienss users and they are horrified by the interface and the performance of this abysmal software. Microsoft has spent countless millions on developing a "new" version of Office that is not better and has very few improved features - it's just different. This is a case of $$$ driving development, pure and simple. Make something different and charge for it. Users want good reasons to upgrade and this release provides no compelling new features.

Some of my client are buying licenses with downgrade rights. Others want me to install OpenOffice - they say if we have to learn something new, lets get something we don't pay a fortune for.

The one thing that stops me reading a blog - and Jensen's suffers from this - is "once you're in the archives, there's no way to go to the next post without hitting Back and selecting the next post from a list." Ugh.

The Office 2007 UI is a violation of reasonable UI design guidelines. The user cannot see available options without clicking on each top level button first. This is an even worse design than javascript rollover navigation in web pages because the user must rollover and click to uncover functionality. The UI also takes much more room to show less options, so some options that were on the old menus are not even available without going through the hassle of adding them to the UI.

This sounds similar to vb.net vs vb6. Some people (like me) like the new way it is set out but others find they are more productive with the old version. Like with vb.net you do have to say it looks alot nicer.