Office 2007: The Best Microsoft Design Ever?
by DanMicrosoft launches Vista today (the pro version), and while I don’t have much to say about that (yet), I have been looking over the changes that have taken place in MS Office 2007, and all I can say is, wow. Office 2007 just might be the best interaction design to ever come out of Microsoft, and it’s certainly the most significant upgrade to a major suite of applications since, well, probably ever.
Lest you think I’m some sort of Microsoft apologist, I should note that I use OS X and I’ve taken pretty much every opportunity possible in print and in presentations to bash Clippy. But good design is good design and should be recognized, sometimes in spite of where it comes from. In this case, because I have some idea what it takes to get good design through a large company, the achievement is probably even greater. And that doesn’t even take into account the type of constraints you have with an installed user base of tens (hundreds?) of millions.
And yes, I know Apple’s Pages and Keynote are good programs (although I only know a handful of people who actually use Pages). But I don’t want to get into an Apple-MS debate. Instead, let’s look at what the designers at MS have accomplished: reportedly 1000 enhancements. They broke with convention when they had a better solution. They applied known interaction design principles and come up with some awesome results, including the minibar. They understood tasks and modeled them before designing. They fixed known issues that have been annoying people for years. In short, they took a set of products that have been an interaction design punching bag for years and rethought them. While I’m sure this is going to cause some serious redesign reorientation, the suite really looks and feels designed now. In a good way.
From a business sense, it’s unclear if all these upgrades might be too little, too late. In that Vista Associated Press article, one CEO says, “To me, Office 2007 is a complete non-event. I have no interest in an upgrade…Most of what I like about computing now lives online.” I suppose only time, the final arbiter of all designs, will tell. But for now, Office 2007 looks damn good. And I never thought I’d say those words.
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on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Interaction Design.
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