R.I.P. WYSIWYG - Results-Oriented UI Coming
The Mac user interface vs. the new Office 12 innovations ...
"Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.
For the last twenty-five years, one user interface style has reigned supreme: the Macintosh-style graphical user interface. It's now reached its limits, however, and will be replaced by a style that partly reverses some of its most treasured interaction principles.
Compared with earlier interaction paradigms, the Mac-style GUI's features are far more usable: rather than typing in commands and parameters, users select commands from menus, freeing them from typing errors. Menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes operate on the screen's visual objects, which faithfully represent user goals. This is known as WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get. I refer to this style as "Mac-style," even though it originated at Xerox PARC and was first commercialized in the Xerox Star and Apple Lisa.
WYSIWYG was a great advance over earlier interactions, in which users specified their goals more abstractly and didn't see the results until far later. To make text bold in a WYSIWYG interface, for example, you highlight the text with the mouse and choose the "Bold" command from a formatting menu. Easy. And, even more important, as soon as you choose the formatting command, the document's screen appearance changes to reflect the new formatting. At any given time, what you see on the screen is what you've built and what you'll get if you print it." continued ... (Via Alertbox)
"Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.
For the last twenty-five years, one user interface style has reigned supreme: the Macintosh-style graphical user interface. It's now reached its limits, however, and will be replaced by a style that partly reverses some of its most treasured interaction principles.
Compared with earlier interaction paradigms, the Mac-style GUI's features are far more usable: rather than typing in commands and parameters, users select commands from menus, freeing them from typing errors. Menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes operate on the screen's visual objects, which faithfully represent user goals. This is known as WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get. I refer to this style as "Mac-style," even though it originated at Xerox PARC and was first commercialized in the Xerox Star and Apple Lisa.
WYSIWYG was a great advance over earlier interactions, in which users specified their goals more abstractly and didn't see the results until far later. To make text bold in a WYSIWYG interface, for example, you highlight the text with the mouse and choose the "Bold" command from a formatting menu. Easy. And, even more important, as soon as you choose the formatting command, the document's screen appearance changes to reflect the new formatting. At any given time, what you see on the screen is what you've built and what you'll get if you print it." continued ... (Via Alertbox)
Office 12 Interface.
8 Comments:
Macintosh is abbreviated "Mac." I assume you're comparing the Office 12 UI to one of the following MACs:
Machine-Aided Cognition
Ethernet MAC address
Mandatory Access Control
Also, your buddy Jakob is wrong:
It's as if you could point to a marble block and say, "I want it to be the David -- or maybe Venus de Milo," as you flip through a book of famous statues. Every time you mention a design, your marble block would morph accordingly, but with your content (say, the face or the size) in place of that original element.
I don't think you'll be able to tell Office 12 to write you a new Shakespeare play. He's either exaggerating way too much for effect, or he misunderstands what Microsoft is doing. Either way, he's belittling their work by misrepresenting it. I don't know if it's good or not, but I know that it ain't what he's describing.
This is some interesting and possibly useful stuff -- but hardly novel. This kind of UI design is present through Apple's iApps, and Keynote / Pages.
And "what you get is what you see" is hardly the "reverse" of "what you see is what you get" ... it's just more of it. That's why the "Bold" button features a bold "b".
The real problem in Office, and I hope this is addressed in Office 12 but fear it is not, is that the stupid, bad, high maintenance way of doing things is facilitated by the UI while the smart, good, low maintenance option is obscured and made harder.
E.g. it's easy to "bold" text, there's a button for it. But it's hard to apply a character style which does the same thing properly.
Indeed, in the latest version of Office the Style palette is hopelessly broken (both Mac and Windows), so it seems Microsoft is going further down the wrong path.
Thanks for catching the upper case Mac. We also have some problems with our buddy Jacob's article. The idea here was to reporduce a bit of what he wrote and identify the article. Reading the whole article does give some food for thought even if there is some disagreement.
I think Jacob gets paid too much from Microsoft.
From what I've seen in MSFT "code named" Office 12 it's a UI nightmare. I liken it to the "where can I take you today" scenario in Windows or the let a "wizard" show you the way when all you want is some assistance.
I'll wait for real user testing, but, would wager strongly on the bet that Office 12 makes no huge strides in productivity gains for the end user but simply re-packages a labrynthine route among horrid visually designed palettes.
The "Margins" dropdown appears to only let you choose from some common margin settings. Below those is an "Advanced option. So it seems that to customize the way you want things to look you still must return to a more traditional way of doing things. A user will still have to learn how to use it. At least that's my opinion.
Doesn't Keynote and Pages sort of do this now?
Looks more like style sheets meet M$ Bob.
The quoted article is a complete misunderstanding of WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the menu/window interface. Nothing. WYSIWYG means that 'what you see' on the screen is the same as 'what you get' on the printed page. Instead of bold codes like in the days of WordPerfect, when you boldface something it looks boldface on the screen, just as it will on the page. Columns look the same as they will on the page, etc.
People forget that it didn't used to be this way. But today, EVERYTHING is WYSIWYG (except, usually, HTML and web design). There is no alternative.
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