Earlier this year, I was writing an e-mail message using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and clicked on the button for adding one of my signature blocks.
Presto! Most of my message disappeared!
Investigation and testing showed that the behavior was unpredictable; sometimes, only the existing default signature was replaced by the new signature but occasionally the program became confused and wiped out portions of the text as well.
I tried in vain to find a problem report on the Microsoft site about this peculiar behavior. Using my status as a Network World columnist, I was able to get through to a press relations officer representing Microsoft Office products, and had a pleasant conversation about what turned out to be a usability issue.
During that conversation, I pointed out that the observed normal behavior — replacing the previous signature block — was new to Outlook 2007 and represented what I felt to be a presumption about both the limitations of users (obviously incompetent to delete a redundant signature block) and mental rigidity by the designers, who were tricked by the name of the feature into believing that signature blocks should be used only for signatures.
On the contrary, I said, I had long used the signature block feature as a macro facility, storing dozens of predefined texts in the signature list and selecting them at will. In addition, why would it seem reasonable to designers to assume that a signature block would necessarily be replaced instead of added to? Why would they make the choice for the user never to have components of signature blocks stored separately, to be combined at will?
I admitted that macro facilities in Office 2007 were far better than in previous versions of the software suite. We can now easily create and manage blocks of text, favorite headers and footers, and even text boxes and other objects for storage and retrieval.
Our conversation then turned to another irritating aspect of Office 2007: the absence of a backward-compatible user interface. As most readers know, the Office 2007 suite has a radically different user interface, called the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface (UI), in which
* Familiar functions are grouped in new ways.
* Some functions have disappeared entirely.
* The limited user-definable toolbar is restricted to a single roll of symbols.
* Icons in the user definable toolbar cannot be customized.
* There is no way to revert to the more familiar Office 2003 (or older) interface.
I said that it seemed to me that these limitations of user control were the result of arrogance: the unspoken assumption that users cannot be trusted to make rational choices about new versions of software. In contrast, I ranted, in my systems engineering and programming courses I teach students to listen carefully to user needs and to remember that all of our production should serve as aids to users, not as unwanted controls.
The PR representative was admirably diplomatic and helpfully relayed my questions and comments to the product managers of Office 2007. Mark Alexieff, senior product manager for Microsoft Office, responded in detail – and with his permission, I will quote him verbatim.
MK: Why did Microsoft’s engineers decide to preclude having the old UI as an option for customers running the 2007 release?
Alexieff: The new Microsoft Office Fluent user interface (UI) is focused on making it easier for people to get the results they want when using the Office applications. While the Office applications have increased tremendously in power and added functionality, the core UI has remained substantially unchanged for nearly 20 years. From talking to our customers, it became clear that the menus and toolbars approach to UI no longer did a good job of making application capabilities easily accessible to users.
A key principle of the new design was to deliver a “results” oriented interface that maps to what people want to accomplish. An example is that we put 80% of the most frequently used commands within one click of the ribbon. We also wanted to surface some of capabilities that contained within the applications in a more intuitive way. Our customer research showed that much of what customers expressed interest in seeing in future versions of the product was in fact already available, but was not intuitive or easy to find based on the menu and tools bar construction.
Customer feedback also indicated that rather than including a classic mode that people could revert to, they wanted us to help them move forward, so that is one reason that it was not included. In addition to redesigning the UI, we’ve added a lot more functionality in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Faced with the same challenge of making all this new functionality available in the old UI, it made more sense, and would be better for our customers, to focus our resources on doing a great job with the new interface, rather than dilute that effort by implementing new features in two different user interfaces.
In taking such a bold step as redesigning the user interface, we appreciated that it would require some adjustment and a learning curve. Our research showed that for an average user of Office it took two to three weeks to return to previous levels of productivity. So far, the response from our customers reinforces that decision as a majority of our customers have provided positive feedback and do not see the new UI as a deployment barrier. That said, as always, Microsoft welcomes feedback on its products from customers to enable it to better meet their needs.
