The most important blog you probably aren't reading...
...is from Microsoft's Jensen Harris. He's the Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office "user experience" team. And he deserves your full attention.
I'm still digging through the wealth of material there, but if you care at all about human interface design, you want to check out the incredible detail he's providing on the decision cycles for Office 2007.
I'm sure that my friends at IBM won't have the opportunity to take the bold steps that Microsoft is within the Hannover timeframe. But boy do I hope they're reading and watching this stuff for Hannover+1! Putting some of these tools in the hands of Notes developers, who could combine with the speed of development and deployment that the platform makes possible would yield astounding results.
I will note one important thing for the folks in Westford. Take a look at this particular post about context menus. The money line is "Today, more often than not, people try right-click almost before anything." THAT is why us poor Notes developers need proper control over the right-click menu. It's no longer a secondary vector. And it will no longer do to show 27 items in a menu list to present this stuff.
Comments
I've been using the Office 2007 beta for a while and I really don't like the UI. It's not intuitive at all for me, too much changed and I can't find anything. I still have to click through at least two tabs before I can find anything. I set up a demo PC for my users with Vista and Office 2007 and after a couple of weeks they stopped using it. The most often cited reason: "It's just weird." This was often followed by "We're not going to be using that, are we?"
Posted by Charles Robinson At 11:55:49 AM On 06/30/2006 |