Development History of Microsoft Office software interface (I)

This article uses the previous development and improvement of the MS Office interface as a line to reveal some reasons for introducing a new user interface in Office 2007. This article describes a series Article For more information, see the help knowledge of the office system.

Jenkins Harris is in charge of the MS Office UI development team.ProgramThe design director has been working in Microsoft for nearly eight years. In the first five years, I was engaged in the Outlook mail and PIM design program. Then, the lead team re-designed the Outlook 2003 user interface released in Office 2003. After finishing Office 2003, I came to the office user experience team.

Source of the office Interface

Microsoft developed word 1.0 using an early Apple prototype, which was released on its MAC in 1984. Multiplan and chart were also developed under the 512 K Mac, and finally they joined together in 1985 as Microsoft Excel 1.0: The first blockbuster retail program to be used on the Macintosh.

Therefore, the early Microsoft Office program originated from MAC and, of course, also reflected on the user interface. As the first and largest software provider for Mac, some of the UI decisions made on the original Macintosh were affected by the requirements of the Microsoft development team. Of course, the most basic outline of the office graphical user interface (especially top menu bar) has its root cause in the first Macintosh version.

Evolution of the office Interface

The following uses word as an example to describe the evolution of the office user interface.

(1) Microsoft Word 1.0 for Windows was released on July 15, 1989 and runs on Windows 386. Word 1.0 has an application-level menu bar, which is developed from the top menu bar of MAC and the menu displayed at the bottom of Microsoft DOS program. At the same time, word 1.0 also contains a new interface element: toolbar, which was used in Microsoft Excel first. In the word 1.0 interface, it seems that there are two toolbar. In fact, only the above column is called the toolbar. Interestingly, the button row at the bottom is called "ribbon ". Figure 1 shows the page for word 1.0.

Figure 1 word 1.0 page

(2) Word 2.0 was launched on the market in 1992. At this time, the basic structure of the word user interface has been fixed, just like the current Word 2003. The menu bar is: file, edit, view, insert, format, tool, table, window, and help. The "common" toolbar and "format" toolbar are shown below. 2 shows the word 2.0 interface designed 15 years ago, which has been used until today.

Figure 2 word 2.0 page

(3) Word 6.0 was running on the popular Windows 3.1 At that time. Its release has brought a huge impact to the office market, which is also a turning point in the competition between word and WordPerfect. Some new user interfaces are added to Word 6.0: Right-click context menu, tabbed dialog box, and Wizard) and toolbar along the bottom of the screen. The number of Word 6.0 toolbar has increased from 2 to 6, because the new function has been added, the menu has become richer. The Word 6.0 page is shown in figure 3.

Figure 3 Word 6.0 page

(4) Word 95 is the first 32-bit word application version. Although it is only a transitional version of Word 6.0, it also introduces a small innovative feature popular with most people: A spelling check with an underline with a red curve. Some people use Word 95 as a simple, reduced, and last-generation word processor before the Internet.

Figure 4 Word 95 page

(5) Office 97 is a sensational product, which not only brings a huge impact to individuals and companies, but also creates a software sales record. Word 97 marks the beginning of a new period of ultra-rich productivity applications.

Office 97 introduces the "command bar", a fully customized user interface, which is actually the same as the menu and toolbar. Each menu or toolbar can be dragged to any place on the screen, floating or docked. However, the most important user interface (UI) in Word 97 is the introduction of hierarchical menus. In all previous word versions, menus are a separate project list, which is easy to browse and navigate. Excel draws clues from 1-2-3 complex user interfaces (UIS), has introduced hierarchical menus, and finally excel mode is successful, so Word 97 adopts hierarchical menus. Figure 5 shows the page for Word 97.

Figure 5 Word 97

"Office Assistant" is also introduced in Office 97, which is more like setting context help for users. "Office Assistant" 6 is shown.

Figure 6 Office Assistant

(6) Office 2000 introduces several new UI mechanisms, namely:

· Adaptive menus or personalized menus )". The most common menu item ("short" menu) is displayed first, and when the cursor stays in the menu for a while, all menu items ("long" menu) are displayed automatically, or you can click the two-way arrow below to display all menu items. In addition, when you use a function that is not in the default "short" menu, the menu item will be automatically added to the "short" menu next time. You can select "always show entire menu" in the "Custom" option box to disable this function. See Figure 14.

· "Compressed toolbar (rafted toolbars )". Two or more toolbar can be accommodated in the same line of the screen. By default, the "common" toolbar and "format" toolbar are compressed in the same line. Because there is no space monitoring tool bar in the same row, the least-used command will appear in the last overflow area. When you use this command, it will appear in the visible tool bar space, just like "Adaptive menu. See Figure 15.

Figure 7 Word 2000 page

(7) The task pane is introduced in Office XP and Office 2003, where new functions are placed.

Figure 8 Office XP page

Figure 9 Office 2003 page

As Mr. Jenkins Harris said, the Office UI development team aims to help users "seamlessly" find and use functions in office. I think this may be one of the main reasons for the continuous improvement of the interface.

(1) more and more functions and more complex functions

In word 2.0, there are less than 100 commands, and the toolbar also simply and effectively copies the functions that can be found in the menu structure. No other functions are available only in the toolbar. Therefore, at that time, the word development team was able to easily plan the ideal menu structure and make them more meaningful. You can directly and quickly browse menus in the word 2.0 interface, because most menus have less than 10 items, and there are no sub-menu items.

The number of Word 6.0 toolbar has increased from 2 to 6.

In office 97, the rich features make it more complex. The number of tool bar quickly reached 18, and the number of commands in the top-level menu almost doubled. Taking word as an example, its top-level menu is full. Although some newly added functions can only be executed in the toolbar, some functions still need to be added to the menu item, but there is no space for them, and adding commands to the multi-level menu will provide more space for new commands, which can also provide more functions, plus the successful application in Excel. Therefore, hierarchical menus are also introduced in Word 97.

Although there are more and more features, there is no end to user needs. Therefore, every version of the Office allows developers to focus on developing new functions. But where are these new functions? It is difficult to determine the location of these new features each time.

If you still follow the previous user interface structure, there will be a task pane 10 times more than Office 2007 in Office 2003, and about 2007 task panes will be published in Word 100. How can we arrange and organize them? Therefore, the task pane is the last method to adjust the old style UI.

Figure 10 and Figure 11 below demonstrate data comparison between top-level menu items, toolbar, and task pane in Word 1.0 to Word 2003.

Figure 10 number of top-level menu items in each word version

Figure 11 Number of toolbar and task pane in each word version

It can be seen that the number of features continues to increase in each version. The pie chart is used to demonstrate the growth process of word over the past 15 years. You can clearly compare the features of word in different versions.

Figure 12 Proportion of features added by word in each version

(2) Some commands are difficult to find, find, and use.

As mentioned above, hierarchical menus are introduced in Word 97, but this also brings some disadvantages, that is, increasing complexity. Hierarchical menus make it difficult for users to browse commands. Each time, you must remember which menus have been accessed and which menus have not been accessed. A Visualized and simple menu structure is now more complex due to its branch structure. The browsing function is no longer like viewing the product list, but more like studying a complex data structure. In this way, it is not only difficult to find and use commands.

In Office 2000, the menu bar and toolbar are essentially full. In this way, the additional project added here is only a small part of the entire structure. From one version to another, the user does not notice the newly added commands, which makes it difficult for the user to find the features they have previously required to be added to the office. In short, this menu structure makes it difficult for users to discover and use new features.

The task pane introduced by Office XP tries to add a new rectangle to the screen and discover new features in it. The task pane is a complete addition. It does not try to change the existing menu bar and toolbar structure. Most traditional functions are in the menu and toolbar, but new functions are placed in the task pane. The PowerPoint development team has done a lot of work in the use of the task pane. Some traditional functions such as slide switching are also migrated to the task pane. However, the added task pane does not improve the user interface. On the contrary, the user has an additional area for searching functions, which makes it inconvenient to find a command.

Figure 13 task pane

Source: Skynet