Office 12 Screenshots

suryad · Power User Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 50

Everyone I know who is actually a beta tester for Office 12 think that it is the best Office release yet. Kudos to MS for a job well done. I personally cant wait till I am invited as a tester so I can check it out first hand. Looks like a nice piece of work and interesting ideas.

comomolo · General User Joined: 15 Jun 2004 Posts: 45

There's a lot of work and thought behind what can be seen in the video. Those saying this is "eye-candy" are clueless about user interaction design. This is not about eye candy but about hiding the complexity of a very sophisticated piece of software from the user, which is the goal of any UI design.

Even for the biggest software corporation ever, Office 12 UI design is a bold move and it looks like the right move to me.

This is a lesson for the OS community. It's essential for the survival of the OS initiatives to be bolder and more creative in terms of user satisfaction. It's not about better coded software or even better standards anymore. Those are of course needed and are a great achievement of the OS community, but it's regular people who's going to use the software in the end and every piece of software out there today is far too hard to use for non-techies. MS has understood that. It's about time we rethink our strategy in the OS world too.

9point9 · Moderator Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 3875 Location: UK

Yes, it may be about improving the user interface but that is not something that should be done within single peices of software, it needs to be orchestrated by the desktop environment and programs should then integrate in to that to use the same widgets. If you want some idea of this have a look at the KDE4 development brainstorm:
http://kdelook.org/index.php?xsortmode=high&page=0

This approach also helps diversity as any program would be able to blend in to any desktop environment.
_________________
Arch Linux
OOo 3.2.0

OOoSVN, change control for OOo documents:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooosvn/

comomolo · General User Joined: 15 Jun 2004 Posts: 45

You keep mistaking "look" (or even "user interface") for "user interaction design". It's not just cooler words, it's a whole different issue.

Also, it's not about putting some nicer user interface on top of an existing paradigm. UI (user interaction) can't be designed after the thing. In fact, it should be the first step, coding being the last one.

Many have said that before (Alex Cooper, Donald Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Bruno Tognazzini, Jef Raskin, etc.). The developers in the OS community either don't read on the subject or just think they know better...