Features

So in August 2003 - three-and-a-half-years before the product was actually released - the Office 2007 user interface team met for the first time. "At that point, the team was faced with understanding that incremental improvements on top of a menu structure approach that had been around for 20 years or so wasn't going to take us where we wanted to go with the next release," remembers Strange. "We decided we needed to make a bit of a mental leap and free our minds. If we were free from the constraints of a menu structure, what would the user interface look like?"

Medieval scrolls to Minority Report

Starting with a blank canvas might sound liberating, but for a design team accustomed to doing things largely the same way for the past 20 years the challenge of overhauling the old menu system was intimidating. The team started with a brainstorming session, during which any idea, no matter how wacky or seemingly unachievable, was encouraged.

"We looked at everything," says Strange, "like the Minority Report-style fluid user interface, or whether speech was ready to be the main user interface for Office." Without admitting as much, Microsoft also considered aping aspects of Apple's widely admired OS X interface. "One idea we took quite a long way was of a very highly animated, very modern, chic user interface, with cross-fading buttons, little refreshes and very nice- looking graphics," Strange reveals.

However,

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the novelty factor of the eye candy soon began to wear thin. "It was cool, except what you find is when you start to use it all day it becomes quite irritating, as you're waiting for that refresh of the button before it will activate. And... those... little... tiny... gaps... just... make... it... feel... slow. And it just cuts down your productivity. These sorts of ideas, while they sound quite good in theory, you realise it's just not the case."

In all, the design team looked at around 200 different concepts before settling on the Ribbon. But even some of the more eccentric ideas influenced the final design. "They had a concept of a medieval scroll across the top of the screen," reveals Strange. "They had this idea that you could roll the scroll left and right to find all the functions. And then they realised you're going to need to jump to sections of the scroll instead of scrolling all the way through it. The idea was a bit stupid really, and it was never actually drawn up, but that's what you've got to do. And when we realised you needed to have marker points along something like that, then you start thinking that we already have tabs that people relate to already. So you start to see how these concepts arrive." The nucleas of the Ribbon had been born.

Testing times

So how did the design team reach the conclusion that the contextual Ribbon was the interface that would adorn Office 2007? Of the 200 ideas that they were kicking around, many didn't even make it as far as the drawing board. A selection was drawn up by designers, so that the team could get a real sense of how the interface might look. From there, a handful were actually coded and tested with focus groups.

Strange says it's surprisingly easy to tell how good an interface concept is simply by watching people use the software. "You know very quickly when you watch somebody try to use your product whether you've got it right or not," he says. "It's almost painful after the first minute of watching somebody struggle."