PressPass: What were the design goals of the new UI?
Larson-Green: We had four major design goals. The number one design goal was to make it easier for people to find and use the product features needed to get the results they wanted. As such, we set about rethinking the UI from the user’s perspective, which is “results-oriented,” rather than from the developer’s perspective, which tends to be “feature-oriented” or “command-oriented” – thereby enabling people to focus on what they want to do rather than on how they do it. We put those results in “galleries,” so for instance, instead of having to learn how to make something shadowed, or what the aspect ratio is or the percent gray, you just say, "Oh, I like that one," and you pick it, you click it and get it in your document. It’s more visual.
The second design principle was to streamline the UI to maximize the user’s workspace. That means having the UI generally be much less intrusive –without popping things up over the top of where you’re trying to work, without toolbars appearing because you inserted a picture, and without task panes coming up automatically. In addition to having the document be the most important thing on the screen, we wanted to make the user experience more predictable, with less guessing and auto features. In general, we wanted too make the UI more user-driven.
Another design principle was driven by the desire to make it easier for people to discover the capabilities that achieve a desired result. To accomplish this, we contextualized the new UI by taking all the things that were not about authoring documents and moving them out of the authoring space, and contextualizing all the things about authoring documents into tasks to create documents. In PowerPoint today, all the commands are available to you at all times at the same level. While there are advantages to that, when you have a couple of thousand commands, you have too many things on the screen at once, and the user experience is not really directed to what you’re trying to get done. By making it context-driven, only the more relevant features are visible, which also makes it easier for the user to understand what the product’s capabilities are.
A final design principle focused on designing for the full document life cycle. We’re starting to add more of these processes in Office that aren’t just about authoring documents, which are features supporting collaboration and work flow and document management processes for your corporation. Currently, there isn’t a good place in the UI to put that kind of functionality, so we are creating a place to put it.
