Welcome to the New User Interface
Interesting post from a Microsoft developer about how the new Office UI is designed for usability and minimal training...
Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Welcome to the New User Interface: "One of the questions people ask about the new user interface is 'how much training is required to get up to speed?'
Well, our design goal was to require no training at all. From the earliest prototypes, we were trying to design an experience so that people could sit down in front of Office 2007 and be effective right away at getting their work done. One of the reasons we didn't go more radical on the overall design was that we wanted to make the product comfortable to use--after all, at the end of the day, it's still Microsoft Office."
posted by Jeff Kirvin @ 11:33 AM
2 Comments:
At 4:24 PM,
Anonymous said…
Microsoft's design goal may have been to make sure that non-techie users can sit down in front of Office 2007 and hit the ground running, but they, I think, are forgetting all about the non-technical-only-use-it-because-the-company-makes-me users.
The company I work for has over 50% of it's workforce over the age of 40. These folks use the computer because they are required to for their jobs, but many of them do as little as possible with it to get their jobs done. I don't see my company upgrading to Office 2007 in the first year of release simply becuase there would be little compelling business justification for it. Heck, we haven't even rolled out Office 2003 yet.
I think from a corporate customer perspective, it will be difficult to justify the upgrade cost (licensing and labor) to do the upgrade. Home users may upgrade more quickly when then begin to purchase computers from Dell and others that come preinstalled with Vista and Office 2007.
At 5:00 PM,
Jeff Kirvin said…
I disagree. I think there's a compelling business case to upgrade to 2007 in order to reduce training costs. The new UI is just that good.
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