Skilled Control of Software Interfaces
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:26PM Jacob Neilsen describes Microsoft Office 2007 as “a totally rearchitected user experience.” He categorically concludes, “the new design is superior.”
I beg to differ—on two dimensions.
Firstly, the user experience is not totally rearchitected. The major innovation1 is the replacement of most of the menu system with the ribbon. Once you get past the ribbon itself, you're back into the old, familiar dialogs. The biggest thing that's changed is the mechanism for accessing the dialogs.
Secondly, the user experience has become worse for certain types of skilled users. People like me.
I'm a highly verbal guy. When I know a piece of software really well, I much prefer to key off verbal items than visual ones. On my personal Mac, I've completely hidden the dock—I don't need it at all. App switching is handled by Command+Tab, and launching new applications by QuickSilver (Alt+Space then typing a few keystrokes).
In fact, I long for applications that will let me cut through the UI clutter. Apps that will allow me to issue commands. Apps that will allow me to script. (Apps like Tinderbox.)
And Microsoft's ribbon UI is running completely counter to that. For me, navigating the menu was close to issuing a command. Now the menu wasn't ideal: issuing the commands into a QuickSilver-style predictive command-line would've been better. But right now, I'm left fumbling around trying remember which tab on the ribbon, and then having to scan and scan to pick up the visual placement so I can click.
I've been using the Microsoft Office 2007 UI for 5 months now. And I'm clearly less impressed by it than Dr Neilsen. It's running in the opposite direction than (the probably small subset of) highly skilled, verbally-oriented users like me.
1 To be fair, there is a range of significantly enhanced functionality available directly from the ribbon.
Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Word, UX in Design
Reader Comments (2)
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