Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office

An Office 12 interface presenatation given at BayCHI and available for downloading ...

"Farewell, menus and toolbars. More than 20 years after the introduction of the Macintosh, software has outgrown the basic building blocks of today's standard user interface. The upcoming version of Microsoft Office does away with the top-level menus and toolbars in favor of a new task-oriented, contextual user interface.

This talk will provide a historical perspective on the evolution of the Office user interface and the battle against the mounting complexity of the product. You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at the different design iterations, and an in-depth look at the new Office UI constructs, including the Ribbon, galleries, contextual tabs, and the MiniBar. You'll also learn the ideas behind "results-oriented design," which Jakob Nielsen wrote, "might well be the way to empower users in the future."

With 400 million Office users potentially making this transition, would embracing these concepts solve problems in your own products? A question and answer session will follow the talk."   continued ...   (Via BayCHI)

History of Microsoft Office.