Features

Data can only do so much for the designers, however. "Beyond the top ten commands, the curve flattens out considerably," Harris adds. "The percentage difference in usage between the number 100 command (Accept Change) and the number 400 command (Reset Picture) is about the same in difference between number one and number 11 (Change Font Size). This is what makes creating the new UI challenging - people really do use a lot of the breadth of Office and, beyond the top ten commands, there are a lot of different ways of using the product."

Therefore, a great deal of the design is based on experience and good old common sense. Darren Strange cites one example of how the buttons were made much larger to account for an old-fashioned human failing when making a PowerPoint presentation in front of a large audience. "In Office 2003, you had to find that little icon of a projector screen in the status bar and click it without accidentally clicking something else. When you're nervous, and I speak from experience, that can be harder than it looks. Now we have a huge button that says 'Start Slideshow' on the Ribbon," he says.

Conversely, sometimes the Ribbon simply makes itself scarce. "If we make the windows smaller the Ribbon chunks up - it adapts to the size of your screen," says Strange. "If you go right down

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and make the window thinner and thinner until it's just a column, we make the decision that you're not trying to use the application to do sophisticated editing; you're really just using it as a scratchpad, and we take all the buttons away."

Moving forward

Microsoft claims the public reaction to the Ribbon has been overwhelmingly positive - indeed, three-quarters of PC Pro readers agreed in a poll earlier this year that the Office 2007 interface was an improvement over its predecessor. The gamble paid off. "We've created the foundation for what we'll use for the next decade with our user interface work," says Strange.

That's not to say Microsoft got everything right with the Ribbon. Strange admits there are problems that need fixing, although declines to elaborate on the exact features that need attention. And he admits that satisfying a user base as large as Office's isn't easy. "Even if 99% of people like what we did and 1% didn't, that's still the population of New Zealand that hate it," he adds.

That's why the Office UI team began work on Office 14, due to be launched in 2009, almost immediately after they'd added the finishing touches to Office 2007. The team has already developed a core set of interface components that will be used across all the Office products, and possibly parts of Windows as well.

"We're very proud of Office," says Strange. "Nobody expected Office to be that interesting or innovative. Everyone thought Office was a bit boring. For us to be leading a lot of this innovative thinking, it's really good fun; it makes me proud to be part of this group." When someone describes designing a word processor as "fun", they must be doing something right.

Click here to read 'Making Nokia's phones talk to the world'.