Microsoft have released the 1^st beta for the new version of Office. I’ve not managed to get my hands on a copy yet, but surprisingly enough, most of the reviews I’ve seen so far are positive, which for a MS product is a big thing. The change that most people are talking about is the new user interface. In short the new office will break what has become an industry standard for so long, the drop-down menu system. The ‘file’, ‘edit’, and ‘view’ menus that have become ubiquitous in applications (even in some applications that have no use for the metaphors they represent) are gone, not just turned off by default, but gone for good.

PC Mag lists Microsoft’s goals for the drastic changes in UI direction:

First, create a user interface that’s intuitive for beginners and experts, unlike the often incomprehensible tangle of earlier versions. Second, improve collaboration for workers who need to share their documents with others or follow company-wide guidelines. Third, tighten corporate control, including easily managed review workflows, easier tracking of document content from centralized management software, and more ways of removing embarrassing or confidential information from files before they’re made public. Fourth, offer simpler and more extensive development tools and a more transparent XML document format that gives developers and managers greater control over what goes into their files.

The PC Mag article also has some nice screenshots from the beta.

When I first heard about the UI changes, I was sceptical. I generally subscribe to the don’t make me think method of interface design, so completely restructuring something that everyone is used too seemed wrong somehow. But after watching the video of Julie Larson-Green, the office team leader, describing what they’d done and why they’d done it, I’m convinced it’s the right decision. There are just so many menu options now it’s often impossible to find what you’re looking for unless you already know where it is. It’s very simple to do the regular, simple things, but there is a whole layer of more advanced functionality that most users just don’t even know about, let alone use. The new UI structure, with it’s tabbed interface, promises to open up the tools and allow a more logical workflow.

If this release is successful, I think we will see other companies following suit, especially companies like Adobe, where Photoshop suffers from the same problem of having tools buried in sub-sub-sub menus, possibly even to a greater degree than the Office suit.

The whole File, Edit, View menu structure is based on the Common User Access guidelines created by IBM nearly 20 years ago (for an extensive report on the guidelines and how they were developed, see this article in the IBM Systems Journal from 1992). This menu structure is, in my opinion, way past it’s use-by date. Most other areas of the user interface has changed dramatically over the years, but there has been precious little work done on developing new ways for the user to do basic interactions with the software. The way people use computer has change drastically since 1987, lets try something new.