Saddle Up to the MiniBar
A UI delemma and how it was approached in Office 12 ...
"Yesterday, I talked about "command loops," in which commands not available at the same time in a modal user interface can cause frustration or reduced efficiency due the mode switch required to access both of them.
When we looked closely at the command loops people were experiencing in our early Office 12 prototypes, almost all of them were related to text formatting. Someone would be creating a caption or a footnote or a comment and they wanted a simple way to access the Bold button with the mouse. (If you use the keyboard to access bold, there is no command loop because keyboard shortcuts are inherently modeless.)
Out of the search for a solution to this problem was born the MiniBar. (If you've heard the term "Floatie" before, the MiniBar is the same thing. "Floatie" was our internal name for what we're now calling the "MiniBar." Aren't names fun?)
At Microsoft, we've been using a UI mechanism we call "on-object UI" for a couple of years. For instance, when Word AutoCorrects your capitalization or spelling in Office 2003, a little tag shows up around the word that was corrected. If you click on it, a menu pops down inviting you to undo the correction or to turn off AutoCorrection altogether." continued ... (Via Jensen Harris)
"Yesterday, I talked about "command loops," in which commands not available at the same time in a modal user interface can cause frustration or reduced efficiency due the mode switch required to access both of them.
When we looked closely at the command loops people were experiencing in our early Office 12 prototypes, almost all of them were related to text formatting. Someone would be creating a caption or a footnote or a comment and they wanted a simple way to access the Bold button with the mouse. (If you use the keyboard to access bold, there is no command loop because keyboard shortcuts are inherently modeless.)
Out of the search for a solution to this problem was born the MiniBar. (If you've heard the term "Floatie" before, the MiniBar is the same thing. "Floatie" was our internal name for what we're now calling the "MiniBar." Aren't names fun?)
At Microsoft, we've been using a UI mechanism we call "on-object UI" for a couple of years. For instance, when Word AutoCorrects your capitalization or spelling in Office 2003, a little tag shows up around the word that was corrected. If you click on it, a menu pops down inviting you to undo the correction or to turn off AutoCorrection altogether." continued ... (Via Jensen Harris)
A form of on-object UI in Word 2003.
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