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MIX08 Microsoft Office 2007: The Story of the Ribbon (1 of 10)

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  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Jensen Harris, Office 2007 design team
  • Made by the vendor. The company whose product it covers made or sponsored it.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

32K views17 years ago1 recommendation

Software designHistory and cultureSimplicity and complexityDesign patterns

Jensen Harris of the Microsoft Office design team shares the behind-the-scenes story, prototypes, and UX principles behind the Office Ribbon.

Jensen Harris from the Office 2007 design team gave a very rare presentation at Microsoft's MIX08. Farewell, menus and toolbars! Come hear the behind-the-scenes story of how the 2007 Office Ribbon user interface was imagined, designed, and validated. See never-before-shown early prototypes, hear about mistakes we learned from during the design process, and find out the principles of user experience design we used each step of the way in creating the first totally new user interface for Office. Portal: babybluebox.com creativecrew.org williamchang.org

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent case study in user experience design and empirical UX methodology.

brudgerson Hacker News • Recommends

On “User Research Gone Astray: The Case of Windows 8 Explorer”

> "It seems that essentially, every single command that customers have used or requested has been moved into a ribbon or wedged into some corner of the chrome. And many are rightfully lambasting it." Being surprised by Microsoft employing the ribbon and persistent UI elements in a redesign of any software product is nothing short utter cluelessness. The story of the ribbon: [video ]
View on Hacker News

brudgerson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ubuntu desktop moving application menus back into application windows”

I have a third theory: The theory behind Unity was a theory and not based on empirical data collected from actual users. I am not comparing the design process to focus groups etc. but to the UX design methodology described in The Story of the Ribbon. link to this video
View on Hacker News

richevon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful”

I actually really liked it when Office 2007 introduced the ribbon, in particular when I understood the rationale behind it (which was covered at MIX080). link to this video
View on Hacker News

ghaffon Hacker News • Mentions

On “LibreOffice: The Next Five Years”

I never loved the ribbon and I suspect that Microsoft underestimated how disruptive the change was for a lot of people. However, I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft. ADDED: Ah, this is probably it: link to this video (That said, MS Office in general had been loaded with so many functions that 1% of users used but that were absolutely essential to some 1% that it's something of a mess anyway. It's one reason I prefer the relative simplicity of GSuite these days.)
View on Hacker News