A couple of days a go Alan Lepofsky did a post on the Outlook 2007 UI which included some truisms but also lacked in some area’s. In the comments I promised I’d get back to him with some feedback and a few screenshots of Outlook 2007 B2TR (Beta 2 Technical Refresh). As you may or may not know, I am running Microsoft Office 2007 since February of this year and Windows Vista since June. Currently I am running Office 2007 B2TR and Windows Vista RC1. Within Microsoft we call this process ‘dogfooding’ but one of my colleagues rephrased it to ‘drinking your own champaign’ so I stick to that.
Creating a new innovative UI is hard
Creating a new and innovative UI is very hard. IBM knows this; the best example of this is IBM/Lotus SameTime. Carl Tyler did a post on this a while back which is one of my favorites :
Spot the difference competition
I think Microsoft is seriously challenging IBM in the Real Time Collaboration / Unified Communications space and innovative solutions (from a functionality and a UI standpoint) such as Live Communications Server and Office Communicator resulted in IBM releasing IBM Sametime 7.5 which finally shows a new face …
Alan’s post on the Outlook 2007 UI
Back to Alan’s Post … First of all Alan is working with a Beta 2 version of Office 2007 and judging from the screenclippings it is not a recent version. This in itself is not an issue ofcourse, but you do have to bare in mind that changes still apply; technically , functionally and also to the UI. Feedback on all issues is received from a variety of sources and many through beta testers, which judging from the downloads could very well be over a million right now.
My main concern of the information Alan is providing, is that he did an effort to make it look complex with loads of different red arrows.
He states:
My top concern about using Outlook, is that in the main screen, there are more than a dozen different "widgets" which users need to understand. Many of them seem to do similar things (open/close, drop down, flyout, etc), so why are so many different conventions used?
Imagine me showing a picture of the dashboard of your car with red arrows pointing to buttons and handles you rarely use (and that’s a lot of arrows). You might think ‘hey my car doesn’t seem that complex when I’m driving it’ …
It isn’t, it’s as simple as that, you don’t need all the features and functions and different users have different needs. And Outlook has the luxury of lots and lots of different users, even IBM/Lotus Notes/Domino users 😉
Furthermore, all "widgets" have so called tooltips, providing the user with to the point information of what a button is designed to do; simple and easy. Some of them you may use frequently, others rarely, because you define your screen layout once and when you’re satisfied you leave it at that.
Here’s an example of a tooltip in the Calendar screen of Outlook 2007 :
To show you an example of a significant change to the UI from the early Beta 2 versions to the later one’s and now B2TR is this one :
This is a screenshot of the UI when composing a new mail message. In the old version the ‘send’ button would only appear in the ‘Message menu’ (like in Alan’s screenshot, 2nd one from the top). In the new UI, the send button is next to the To: / Cc: / Subject bars and is visible also when choosing other parts of the menu.
I am not pointing this example out to indicate some kind of rocket science breakthrough, but merely to illustrate that changes are still applied and improvement is made with each and every step in this Beta process and although I can not proof it with statistics the Office 2007 and Windows Vista Beta are huge beta project and maybe amongst the largest ever done.
In summary, Alan has got some good points in his ‘judging’ process, but has gone the extra mile in overstating complexity in the wrong context. He is not taking an end-user perspective; a typical end user is not interested in the dozens of features every pull down menu has to offer, hence the presentation of relevant functions, in context of the users work at hand ….
Peter, thank you for the response. You are correct in that I am not using the technical refresh, so I apologize if I mislead anyone that this is “the latest from Microsoft”. I certainly disagree with “has gone the extra mile in overstating complexity”. All I did was click on the Outlook icon on my desktop, and point of the overwhelming amount of features that I, as a daily Notes user was faced with when trying to use Outlook. You are correct, perhaps I would not click on each widget everyday. However, that still does not explain why there are so many types of widgets, many of which appear to do the same thing. Sorry, but I’m still not a Ribbon convert. I don’t use Word, but I do use PowerPoint, and I am finding it very frustrating. (and I’ve been using it for a long time now). At every MS event I’ve been to, the first question I’ve heard from the audience is “Can I turn it off and use menus?” Anyway, I acknowledge MS is doing a lot of work on trying to innovate the user experience with Vista and Office, and it is not easy. I know Lotus is doing similar things (Hannover for example), and I accept that we may face similar challenges with our users.
Alan,
It is not my objective to turn you into a “ribbon convert”.
I can see where you are coming from with regards to PowerPoint. The Beta 2 version is not performing very well. That has been improved substantially and will be more convicing to you I assume.
I can’t confirm your statement :”every MS event I’ve been to, the first question I’ve heard from the audience is “Can I turn it off and use menus?” ”
as all the events we organise / present at we get far more positive feedback ..
Funny that you mention Hannover. There is ofcourse a lot of buzz about it and should be a major step forward from a UI perspective. However I browsed (not read I have to admit) the whitepaper ( ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/notes/Hannover_white_paper.pdf) and did not see very much concerning the UI, its advantages and stuff whereas I should have thought the UI / combining all of the nifty activity based collab features in 1 UI is a prime goal …