Jakob Nielson likes the "WYGIWYS" UI of Office "12"
To me, Jakob is the leading guru of software usability, and I’ve been following his writings for many, many years now. So, it warms my heart that he’s quite positive about the new UI in Office “12.” Here are some choice excerpts from his recent post:
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 and Apple Lisa.
Unfortunately, we've now reached the limits of the current GUI paradigm. Displaying commands in menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes works with a limited number of elements. But Microsoft Word 2003 has 1,500 commands, and users typically have no clue where to find most of them.
Another WYSIWYG downside is that it forces too much manual labor on users and requires a stretch of imagination to envision results in advance. Yes, you can gradually massage your work into the shape you desire, one modification at a time, and visually confirm progress as you go. But you have to make each modification yourself, at the cost of many a mouse click.
Even worse, you begin with a blank screen and must build up to your goal one step at a time. Although Michelangelo might readily see a statue hidden within an uncarved marble block, such a feat is considerably more taxing for the average person.
Next Generation: Results-Oriented UI
The next version of Microsoft Office (code-named "Office 12") will be based on a new interaction paradigm called the results-oriented user interface. As the demos show, the most obvious departure from the past is that menus and toolbars are all but wiped out. The focus is now on letting users specify the results they want, rather than focusing on the primitive operations required to reach their goals.
The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target -- say an org chart or an entire document -- and watch it change shape as you mouse over the alternatives in the gallery. The interaction paradigm has been reversed; it's now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.
It's as if you could point to a marble block and say, "I want it to be the David -- or maybe Venus de Milo," as you flip through a book of famous statues. Every time you mention a design, your marble block would morph accordingly, but with your content (say, the face or the size) in place of that original element.
It'll take a Star-Trek-style holodeck to make a results-oriented UI for actual sculpting, but it should be possible to build one today for a 3D drawing program or other creativity software. For now, we can explore how the results-oriented UI works for productivity software like Microsoft Office. Although I'll reserve final judgment until I've worked with the software for an extended period, the new design does seem to resolve many of the problems with recent user interfaces.
If anybody else introduced a new user interface paradigm, it would probably remain a curiosity for years, but Microsoft Office has a special status as the world's most-used interaction design. We know from user testing that users often demand that other user interfaces work like Office. When you're used to one style most of the day, you want it in other applications and screens as well.
If the new interaction style works as well as early predictions indicate, users will quickly expect many other user experiences to provide the power of a results-oriented design. People don't like messing with commands and preference settings on the Web, which is why most customization features fail. It'll therefore be interesting to see how these new ideas translate into environments far beyond Office-like productivity applications.
For a demonstration of the new Office “12” UI, take a look at this video on MSDN’s Channel9.
