According to Diggnation, Microsoft ran a number of focus groups for Office 2007 and asked people what new features they wanted Office to do. They gave a list of needs and nice-to-haves. Funnily enough, all of the requested functionality was in Office already, but nobody could find it because it’s all hidden away in the many-layered UI.
This is an important lesson – if your users can’t find a feature, it may as well not exist and you’ve wasted your time making it. The Ribbon menu has done a lot to fix this problem, since it only shows you the features relevant to what you are doing at that particular point in time.
I’ve worked with a lot of great engineers over the years, but it’s shocking to me how a vast majority didn’t understand what this (a user requesting a feature that already exists) signifies, and blamed the user. I’m glad that slowly it’s becoming easier to convince non-ui-designers that user perception is key, even if their perception is wrong.
MS user interface designer Jensen Harris’s Microsoft Office blog has just a ton of great posts about how the ribbon and other aspects of the new UI were designed (including the tidbit you mentioned). His blog has kinda run out of steam as of late, but his old posts are great. Check out the “History” tagged posts, and also look for his series of “Why the new UI” posts. That blog is a great peek into what MS did to redesign Office.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/
From observation, the biggest difference between people who can and can’t ‘do’ computers is how they deal with tasks that they don’t know how to achieve. People who are ‘good with computers’ take the attitude that there is bound to be a way to do it and the task is to figure out what it is. People who are ‘bad at computers’ either give up exploring really quickly or don’t even start in the first place. Intelligence has very little to do with it (except in my case of course).
Andy – It sounds suspiciously like you’re saying people who can’t find the many ‘hidden’ features in word are ‘bad with computers’. Although I think you’re making a different point entirely. I think what you’re saying is that some people have a really good strategy for getting their heads around new software. These people don’t necessarily have any programming experience, just a bit of determination and the motivating knowledge that they’ve done it successfully a few times before. I think I remember reading somewhere that good learners act like this – they take the knowledge and cognitive ‘tools’ they have and try to apply them to a new problem, even if they don’t fit well. Bad learners throw their hands up and say ‘I simply don’t know how to do this’.
The great thing about the Ribbon menu (allegedly) is that it makes everyone’s lives easier, however motivated or unmotivated they are.
Yes I am saying people who can’t find the many ‘hidden’ features in word are ‘bad with computers’.
That is the people who self-idetify or get categorized as ‘bad with computers’ have certain cognitive habits rather than a lack of intelligence or innate inability.
Wanna make something of it?
Yes ok now I understand and agree … but also – not finding a hidden feature might be a symptom of being really busy. This would be even more prevalent in things you use use-once or use-rarely …