Hands up everyone who likes Office 2007’s user interface?

What went wrong with the UI and other strange tales.

Hands up everyone who likes Office 2007’s user interface? Apparently everybody does, including the billions of people who tested during the long decades of its genesis, or so said Microsoft on launch day.

It might be the biggest re-hash of the Ui, but it’s by no means the first one. Every version of Office since its inception – and beyond into the days when they shipped as standalone apps – has featured a strange form of tectonics. Menus moved here, features buried there, sometimes inspired, other times just annoying, change from the Rain Men who spend their lives worrying about usability.

Now, after a hundred good reviews from journalists, the ordinary users are having their say, and the verdict isn’t five stars. So much for reviews.

At the heart of the 2007 version of Office is the Fluent interface , and within that the ‘ribbon’, which clumps menus into a number of conceptual groups. This, Microsoft says, makes it easier for Office programs to present a large number of features. It’s a sort of visual hierarchy for the things people do with programs such as word processors and spreadsheets.

I’ve always wondered why so many journalists raved about this innovation. Accepted, word processing encompasses a huge number of relatively complex tasks that keep some office managers up at night, but the average user probably still uses a tiny fraction of what Office has on its menus.

By reinventing the Office UI, Microsoft forced these users to hunt once again for their favourite handful of features, understanding them through the ribbons.

The issue is as it has always been. It is the vendors that have the strongest interest in changing UIs because that’s one of the ways that desktop app are marketed nowadays. Office 2007 is better than the previous version because it has a nice new interface that cuts down on clutter, etc and so on.

What the user really wants, by contrast, is something that does more or less what the last version did but which costs less and perhaps has a few features added that they can’t avoid having to use (the move from the .Doc format to .DocX XML for instance). What they actually get reminds me of supermarkets that insist on changing product aisles every now and again just to force customers to meet with unexpected ‘purchasing opportunities’ they wouldn’t normally bother with.

So having spent the best part of a year or two getting people used to Office 2007, Microsoft will no doubt change the UI again in some new way, forcing a learning curve down the software U-bend that is the average Office buyer. As long as it flushes money, that’s fine.

Now take a look at a new generation of simple office applications, built on web technologies, such as the Buzzword word processor , now part of the Adobe stable. You wouldn’t propose it as an answer to every word processing problem, but Buzzword and its ilk do raise some interesting questions. Could most people – even most businesses - make do with a simple suite of applications built out of portable web components? Using it raises no usability issues whatsoever. In fact, if anything, it reminds you of Word as it was in the early days of the GUI.

In the meantime, let’s be pleased that at least the accursed Word paper clip and puppy dog have gone for good. Just as I was starting to like them.


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McGuiver | Published: 12:15 GMT, 24 August 2009

Though most gripes with a new user interface can be put down to fear of change, I really think that Microsoft has fluffed up with the Office ribbon. I agree it looks pretty and the grouping of tasks might seem logical, however it's unnessecarily clunky and trying to get your head round where Microsoft have grouped the functions is a nightmare! It's certainly slowed me down and I've been using Office for longer than I can remember. Please give us the menus back that made Windows great!

Lucy | Published: 10:23 GMT, 23 June 2009

I hate the new format with a passion. I used to be my office's computer 'whizz'. Now I have trouble even making a chart! They've crippled essential features in the interests of making it 'user-friendly' but have only succeeded in dumbing down to the point where no one can do anything. It is sheer vandalism, pure and simple. I have ripped it off my computer and gone back to Office 2000.

desiree | Published: 23:12 GMT, 14 August 2008

Personally, I hate the new UI. I was very annoyed having to spend all afternoon to create something in Powerpoint I new would have taken me 15 minutes in the previous version. I've invested too many damn years of learning where commands were, their titles, how they worked. Now all that effort is shot to hell. Professionally, (I'm a UI designer) I know to expect that any change, good or bad, is not received well by users. What I don't understand is why, with all their freaking money and resources, MS couldn't design the UI so transitional users could gradually ease into this new mess. Dismissing millions of users and all their efforts perpetuates dislike or hatred. Could MS now be as well "liked" as Bush? On the good side, having crap shoved down our throats also fosters some to stir from our complacency to seek alternative products to use (or to build) better products, which Office 2007's case, it shouldn't be too hard now.

NO! NO! | Published: 17:36 GMT, 01 May 2008

I think the new interface is great. Get used to change!

martin jasny | Published: 19:07 GMT, 24 March 2008

The new interface is worse than the old one. Sometimes you wonder what the new icons mean. Worst of all: it's completely different. You have to learn everything from scratch. What makes it even worse is that it is completely different in each application: Word, Outlook, Internet Explorer etc. There is no common denominator!

martin jasny | Published: 19:04 GMT, 24 March 2008

The new interface is worse than the old one. Sometimes you wonder what the new icons mean. Worst of all: it's completely different. You have to learn everything from scratch.

Roger Mabry | Published: 15:33 GMT, 09 March 2008

Obiously created and tested by idiots. This desire to remove commonly used icons from the toolbar is not user friendly. I have added my commonly used items under the ribbon in plain sight.

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