Conversation

Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
Replying to
@stevesi
6/
@jensenharris
also started blogging. These were “external blogs” and uncommon b/c in bigCo blogging wasn’t yet a “thing”. Jensen’s blog “An Office User Interface Blog” was a prototype for talking about products under dev. 💯. He explained that the ribbon wasn’t a big toolbar.
Image
1
5
Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
7/ Many across MS wanted to know who was running our blog? What was the team and vendor did we use? It was crazy. It was all organic—no process, no approvals, just people blogging. I even had a blog I (shudder) typed myself (blogs.mind.com/TechTalk). So we wrote instructions:
Blogging @ Microsoft Office: A Case Study "blogging explosion" has left many managers and executives in a quandary. On the one hand, blogs allow organizations to connect with customers, talk in-depth about products or strategies, and tell their story. On the other hand, executives are concerned about how best to manage the risks blogging brings into their organizations. Blog readers demand certain concessions from bloggers in exchange for their attention. Specifically, bloggers must have a personality; must be honest and transparent; and must be willing to invite (and take) criticism in a public venue. These qualities are not often found in formal, scripted, carefully-managed corporate communications. THE GENESIS OF THE OFFICE "12" BLOGS "We've come to recognize that focusing our communication on formal "marketing" is no longer how our customers think. Any technical major in graduating from college is almost certainly going to have a blog ... - Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, M
1
5
Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
9/ So we planned an announcement of feature no one knew about. After
@jensenharris
did a whole presentation on the Office12 UI I snuck up on stage to tell them about a new feature. A secret feature. Yes, we were adding PDF to Office12!!!
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 01, 2005 Office 12 will support PDF Exciting news - Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft Office, just announced to Office MVPs at MVP Summit, that Office 12 will support PDF. For example In Access you can open a report, choose publish, select PDF format and that is. oft posted by Alex Dybenko
2
5
Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
10/ Wait, you’re thinking that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Who cares? Everyone does PDF. Not in 2005. With all the regulators and competitors thinking everything we did was evil, it turns out this could easily look like monopoly behavior or leverage. TONS of lawyer work.
Embedded video
GIF
1
6
Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
11/ See the post for many more details and all the work to launch a feature at the height of regulatory scrutiny and people thinking evil thoughts. A brain dead feature! But the deep thoughts on Office12 were quite good. Here’s “RIP WYSIWYG” from non other than
@jakobnielsen
.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 10, 2005: R.I.P. WYSIWYG Summary: Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future. For the last twenty-five years, one user interface style has reigned supreme: the Macintosh-style graphical user interface. It's now reached its limits, however, and will be replaced by a style that partly reverses some of its most treasured interaction principles. Compared with earlier interaction paradigms, the Mac-style GUI's features are far more usable: rather than typing in commands and parameters, users select commands from menus, freeing them from typing errors. Menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes operate on the screen's visual objects, which faithfully represent user goals. This is known as WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get. I refer to this style as "Mac-style," even though it originated at Xerox PARC and was first commercialized in the Xerox Star an
2
6
Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
12/ BUT the MVPs who now had the code were the hard core techie users of the world. And they had some *feedback*. On our private newsgroups (NNTP) one write how Excel12 would fail unless we had “sub-second keyboard access”. WTF? Who types that fast? I hate threats like that.
Advanced users have ***got*** to have convenient -- that is, sub-second > keyboard access to all dialog boxes and many common commands. Without that > capability, Excel 11 never will be uninstalled, because using it will be so > much more efficient than using Excel 12. > > One possibility would be to introduce a Quick Accelerator key combination > feature, which we could switch to in a File Options tab. If we could start > fresh with a whole new set of Accelerator keys, we could have: > > 26 one-letter commands+ > 676 two-letter commands+ > 17,576 three-letter commands >= 18,278 total commands > > That certainly would handle us for several generations. > You could assign obvious combinations to certain keys. But for most of them, > you could assign the keys virtually at random. If Window Arrange All turns > out to be Alt, X, Y, Z, that's certainly easier to memorize than its current > combination of Alt, D, 2, V, N, Enter, A. >
2
6
Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
13/ Not all the MVPs and others agreed. We got a ton of amazingly positive feedback. One of my favorite themes was people asking if we could go help out the Vista team (by this time Longhorn had become Vista but was still a ways out).
Three positive messages about Office12 UI
1
4
Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
14/ We were able to navigate the “sub second keyboard access” by talking about a feature that was not in the release but had been planned called the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT). A place to customize to your heart’s content and stuff any features at all.
Image
1
3
Steven Sinofsky
@stevesi
15/ This was the tough crowd—the core techie users. They tend to want to retain their knowledge and not be “disrupted” (we saw this previously in Office 97). So a good lesson. Lots more in the post. Also AUDIO is available. Please enjoy me reading!!
hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com
[LISTEN] 081. First Feedback and a Surprise
Listen now | As the demos show, the most obvious departure from the past is that menus and toolbars are all but wiped out. —Jakob Nielsen (Nielsen-Norman Group)
1
3