Features

Microsoft's critics might argue that using several of the products the company has released over the years has involved more than its fair share of pain. The old adage that it takes Microsoft three attempts to get a product right had clearly stung the Office 2007 design team, who this time decided they'd get their first two failures out of the way before the software was unleashed on the public. "In many cases, we built three whole versions of the product into the design plan - three total rewrites," admits Strange. "Not for every feature, but for some features we genuinely did rebuild the whole thing three times. So you'd try it out, build it, you'd test it in focus groups and realise that despite your best efforts you hadn't made it very obvious... and go back to the drawing board."

Learning for experience

Microsoft's designers weren't only relying on their own expertise and a selection of focus groups when it came to deciding the exact layout of the Ribbon interface. They could also call on the experiences of millions of Office customers from around the world.

The company's Customer Experience Improvement Program - an opt-in feature that anonymously collects data on how you're using an Office application, and then sends that information back to Microsoft over the internet - provided the designers with massive amounts of feedback on how its customers used Office applications. The company had amassed data from 1.3 billion user sessions since the launch of Office 2003. It collected 352 million Word command bar clicks in just 90 days.

"We know which commands people use most often,

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and which ones they don't. We know which commands you use in sequence with each other. We know how many commands you use seven times more with the keyboard rather than the mouse. We know how big your screen is. We know how many times you used Excel maximised or minimised. We know how many documents you have open at one time," says Strange, momentarily sounding more like a stalker than a software maker.

Microsoft has dedicated analytical software that painstakingly extracts the trends from that vast mass of Customer Experience Improvement Program feedback, but even so Strange admits the company discards around 70% of the data because "it's inhumanly huge and serves no useful purpose after a certain point". However, the data does reveal patterns about Office usage that are both insightful and hugely surprising.

Before the launch of Office 2007, lead designer Jensen Harris challenged his blog readers to guess what the top five most used commands in Word 2003 were. Not one managed to get all five. They are:

1. Paste

2. Save

3. Copy

4. Undo

5. Bold

Paste romped home: in fact, it accounts for more than 11% of all commands used, and has more than twice as much usage as Save in the number two slot. Even more surprisingly, Paste is also the number one command in both Excel (15% of all commands) and PowerPoint (12%). Harris admits the results caught the Office 2007 designers by surprise and radically altered the design of Word's Ribbon.

"Early on, we were toying with the idea of not having buttons for Cut/Copy/Paste in the Ribbon. Everyone 'knew' that people mostly used to do most Clipboard actions (which was true)," he writes on his blog. "What we didn't know until we analysed the data was that even though so many people do use and do use 'Paste' on the context menu, the toolbar button for Paste still gets clicked more than any other button. The data kept us from making a crucial, stupid mistake. One that we might not have caught during the beta due to the high expertise level of our beta users. Once we recognised the importance of the Paste toolbar button, it was promoted to the first big button on the left side of Word's first tab."