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The story of the Office Ribbon
My thanks to Anthony for passing me this video link, “The Story of the Ribbon”. Having read Dreaming in Code a little while ago, I found the video fascinating as explaining how the interface was created and why. It doesn’t pull any punches with criticisms of user interface either.
The screenshot history of Word was something of a nostalgia trip for me. What I hadn’t realised was that the menus used for Word for Windows 2.0 didn’t change all the way up to Word 2003!
Technorati Tags: office2007,ribbon
Amazing! Not clear for me, how offen you updating your www.windowswatch.co.uk.
posted-by Rufor | April 15, 2009 10:52 PM
The post focuses on product design rather than programming, but it's very interesting to see the story behind this significant user-interface innovation, especially as Autodesk has adopted the ribbon paradigm in AutoCADiew.
posted-by Elizabethhiguer | April 16, 2009 5:33 AM
I came across this great presentation about the evolution of the Office 2007 Ribbon. While I'm not personally much of a fan of the ribbon, the development process was really interesting to listen to. I found the story of "feature creep" up to Office 2003 to be a really good example of what to avoid in revisions of a product.
posted-by FordRanger8899 | April 17, 2009 8:42 AM
One portion which I found interesting was where he showed various solutions they had to deal with placing the thousands of commands within the simpler, reorganized design. There was one where they would switch the entire display of the application to reflect the current task. For example, picture task would invoke a unique ribbon with all of the formatting options for a picture.
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posted-by acne treatments | April 20, 2009 4:33 AM
I came across this great presentation about the evolution of the Office 2007 Ribbon. While I'm not personally much of a fan of the ribbon, the development process was really interesting to listen to. I found the story of "feature creep" up to Office 2003 to be a really good example of what to avoid in revisions of a product.
posted-by Douglasescobedo | April 22, 2009 6:21 AM