J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

The Making Of The Office 2007 UI

An interesting post at Jensen Harris' Office User Interface Blog. It's a few months old, but I hadn't seen it: The Story of the Ribbon.

Last week, I presented a session at MIX called "The Story of the Ribbon." I talked a bit about the general design process we used to come up with the Office 2007 user interface, to iterate on it, and to evaluate it. As part of the discussion, I showed for the first time some of the early prototypes we worked on (and abandoned or refined) along the way.

You can download a video of his presentation, including his PowerPoint deck. The video is about 90 minutes long, and it's pretty interesting if you're into that sort of thing. It contains lots of inside information that has never been seen by the general public.

For example, here's a screen shot of an early "ribbon on the left" prototype:

If you're one of those people who just hates the Office 2007, the video will at least help you understand why Microsoft did what they did.