Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I’d like to point out the following article from one of the Office 2007 team members about carefully placing the UI elements in the latest version of Office. The placement follows a rule called Fitts Law a mathematical model of how users click on things:

The Start button in Windows is seemingly located in an ideal place for fast acquisition, and in recent versions of Windows that’s certainly true. Prior to Windows 2000, however, the Start button had a single “dead” pixel along the left and bottom sides of it in which clicking didn’t open the Start menu. The result: slower acquisition times and a startling number of missed clicks.

Windows 95: Missed by a pixel
Windows XP: Good to the last drop

It’s wonderful to know that Microsoft is actually paying a great deal of attention to little details in their user-interface. We all know that the Office 2007 ribbon is a great, time-saving idea, but this is new ground. Besides the technical interest, it’s a great PR move. Now, Microsoft consumers all know that it cares as much about user experience, design, details, etc as does a company like Apple. This is exactly what a corporate blog should do!

There’s a lot to be said about Microsoft’s Office 12 / 2007 Beta 2 product, but this post will only focus on the graphical interface elements that have changed or been improved from its predecessors. Office 2007 is rich in tools like the new menu-bars, smooth zooming and scrolling, word counts and improved statistics in the tray, a totally new blue theme, a new loading screen and more.

When you first start Office 12 Beta, you get a cool loading screen:

The first thing you’ll want to do is open a document. However, the new menu system puts the File menu on a strange windows shaped button:

The recent documents space is much larger and easy to navigate, and allows you to pin oft-used documents in place for future reference. The “Options” and “Exit” options are also on this massive, and poorly designed menu. You’ll notice it tried to bring a task oriented approach to managing the document with the “Finish,” “Share,” and “Print” commands, but leaves “New,” “Open,” “Upgrade,” and “Save” to languish by themselves instead of under a common “Create” task.

In a desperate move to copy Digg’s successful v3 redesign, Technorati added some new features of its own. According to a news release on their blog, the new features are:

We’ve added in lots of features to help you make sense of the blogosphere, including Discover, which is topic-based, Favorites, which gives YOU the power to pick your favorite blogs, and Popular, which algorithmically derives the most linked-to items in the last few days.

They also claim to have improved link-counting, back end search systems, ease of use, and other basic core improvements. However, let’s take a look at their Discover feature v.s. Digg v3:

The homepage is a mess of random boxes incoherently placed at random. If there’s some feature or way Technorati can organize data, or pull stats, it’s in one of these boxes. They have a box for Discover, a tag box, a favorite blogs box, ad boxes, your blogs boxes, featured bloggers boxes, and what everyone is blogging about boxes:

There’s some good news for the redesign, though. Search results look very clean! For a company specializing in search, that’s a good thing…