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Designing any piece of software is tough. Fundamentally redesigning one of the few pieces of software that professionals, students and 450 million people across the planet know like the back of their hand is a formidable challenge. That's what Microsoft did earlier this year, when it ripped out the creaking menu structure that had served Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the best past of 20 years and introduced the groundbreaking new Ribbon interface.

Over the course of this feature, we'll explain exactly how Microsoft undertook what the company admits was the biggest design gamble in history. We'll examine how the software literally made it from the drawing board to your computer, revealing both the scientific and aesthetic reasons behind the placement of buttons, menus and other design elements.

We'll also take a behind-the-scenes look at the software design of another industry giant, Nokia. The company's design guru, Jan Chipchase, will reveal how the world's biggest mobile maker tailors the design of its software for different parts of the world. We'll take a close look at the phone software it sells in developing nations and the underlying differences between that and Western models.

If you've ever wondered why that button is placed there or why you can never find the command you're looking for, this feature may help you understand the reasons behind the decisions.

Time for a change

Even before Office 2003 hit the shelves, Microsoft knew the software's old-fashioned menu system had reached

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the end of the road. The product had turned into a sprawling beast, stuffed to the gills with features that had been incrementally added since Word 1 was launched in 1989, but with most of them hidden from view in the labyrinth system of drop-down menus. "The number of top-level menu items increased by release," says Darren Strange, Office's UK product manager. "It starts off at 50 and by the end we had over 300 top-level menu items. And because we're experts at analysis, we were able to put them on a graph and extrapolate it, and we realised there wasn't going to be enough space on the screen to do it again."

Office had, ironically, fallen into the trap that the company's former chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, had warned against as far back as 1997. "Software is a gas," Myhrvold wrote in a paper entitled The Next Fifty Years of Software. As the hardware expands, the software that runs on those computers will continue to grow to fit the capacity.

Microsoft attempted to combat Office's feature bloat before, allowing customers to customise toolbars and hiding rarely used menu commands, but with little success. "Fewer than 2% of Office 2003 users customised their user interface," admits Strange. In fact, providing the option to customise the buttons that appeared onscreen ultimately proved counter-productive in many instances. "When you look at what people are really doing on their desktop, they have rows and rows of buttons and toolbars. They've got the same button on the screen more than once; they're not tiled very accurately, so there are gaps and they're using more lines than they need to; they've got the panes open on the right-hand side, they've got the Help pane open as well; and the screen real-estate they're using is this square in the bottom left, which is much smaller than the screen they've got. And the reason they do all of that is if they close something they're frightened they might never find it again." People's struggles with Office 2003 taught Microsoft a valuable lesson. "What we learnt is the out-of-the-box experience is the experience that almost everybody will see," Strange claims.