Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office: Jensen Harris, BayCHI Program
Channel: BayCHI, San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI
Date: 2023-03-30

December 13, 2005
https://baychi.org/calendar/20051213

Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office
Jensen Harris, Microsoft
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Audio of Jensen Harris's presentation, preceded by some BayCHI business. (84.5MB, 02:03:02)
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Slides from Jensen Harris's presentation. (2.8MB)
Video of Jensen Harris's presentation, preceded by some BayCHI business. (468.4MB, 02:02:31)

Meeting Report by Alison Andrews

Introduction
Long before the launch of the new Office product, the BayCHI community was eager to understand the new "Ribbon" user interface (UI). Members convinced BayCHI program chair Rashmi Singha to bring in Jensen Harris, the lead UI designer for the Office UI suite. It is atypical of Microsoft's culture to allow someone to discuss a product before launch. But, alongside the serious risk of completely redoing a core product, and giving all the design control to a team of user experience designers, Microsoft is opening the black box and explaining it to the public far before launch. Jensen's blog also details the design strategy far at: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh.

Microsoft Office has 400 million paid users and is the most complex system of productivity software with five core applications. The next version is called Office 12, and Jensen reviewed Beta 1. The conventional wisdom about Office is that people only use 5% of it, or that they believe that "everything I need was in Office 95, 97, 2000." When actually asked, users admit that they don't know how to do certain things in Office even though they know "there must be a better way." The user research exposed many workarounds, especially doing a lot of manual work when a function exists to do that for them. The new Office suite seeks to resolve those kinds of fundamental user experience (UE) problems by making it easier for users to find functionality that can help them and create great looking documents.