Tipping the Scale (Why the UI, Part 5)
More on the UI decisions behind Office 12 ...
"One of the misunderstandings I've seen repeated around the 'net a number of times is that our team set out to "destroy the menu-based paradigms introduced by Apple."
Because it's not that menus and toolbars are bad or that the people who created them weren't smart. The problem is that Office has outgrown them. There's a point beyond which menus and toolbars cease to scale well. A flat menu with 8 well-organized commands on it works just great; a three-level hierarchical menu containing 35 loosely-related commands can be a bit of a disaster.
In short, we're not trying to destroy anything. Our goal is to create a new standard user interface for full-featured productivity applications. The original team who built Word or Excel couldn't have imagined how much their products would be able to do today. I want us to step back, to think through the question: "what kind of interface would they have built knowing how Word turned out?"
Let's take a more visual look at the scale issues facing Office. Here are a few charts, demonstrating the number of top-level menu items, toolbars, and Task Panes included in the product, from Word 1.0 to Word 2003:" continued ... (Via Jensen Harris)
"One of the misunderstandings I've seen repeated around the 'net a number of times is that our team set out to "destroy the menu-based paradigms introduced by Apple."
Because it's not that menus and toolbars are bad or that the people who created them weren't smart. The problem is that Office has outgrown them. There's a point beyond which menus and toolbars cease to scale well. A flat menu with 8 well-organized commands on it works just great; a three-level hierarchical menu containing 35 loosely-related commands can be a bit of a disaster.
In short, we're not trying to destroy anything. Our goal is to create a new standard user interface for full-featured productivity applications. The original team who built Word or Excel couldn't have imagined how much their products would be able to do today. I want us to step back, to think through the question: "what kind of interface would they have built knowing how Word turned out?"
Let's take a more visual look at the scale issues facing Office. Here are a few charts, demonstrating the number of top-level menu items, toolbars, and Task Panes included in the product, from Word 1.0 to Word 2003:" continued ... (Via Jensen Harris)
Number of toolbars and Task Panes in Word, by release.
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