On 7/29/10 9:02 PM, "Nadyne Richmond" <[email protected]> wrote:
> I realise that your experience with the Ribbon in Office for Windows has > left you with a bad taste in your mouth, but I ask you to set aside your > preconceptions and give us a fair chance when Office 2011 reaches store > shelves later this year. I am withholding criticism of the UI changes in Office 2011 until I get to try it out. But I am not hopeful. The problem with MS software is feature bloat, and it has been that way for many years. Each new release is loaded with more gimmicks than I ever use. I guess they have to do this, in order to lure people into upgrading, and to distinguish themselve from the competition. The problem with this approach is that each addition of new gimmicks impacts discoverability, making it harder for me to find the few features that I do use. MS Word is the worst offender, with Excel a close runner-up. With each new release, we get the same promise: "This time we've done extensive user testing, and we've made it much easier for you to find the features you need." For me, it never seems to work out. The UI design changes, more bells and whistles, things move around, and the wild goose chase starts all over again. If I don't use one of the programs for a few weeks, I forget where everything is. I've participated (as a subject) in usability studies with the Mac BU on the Redmond campus. I've sent quite a few bug reports and suggestions via the feedback mechanism. I think my comments were reasonable, but none of them were ever acted on. Here are just a few examples. MS Office programs still have odd deviations from the standard UI behaviors that we see in other Mac programs. For example, if I place the insertion point at the beginning of a sentence in an email message, and then insert a return character, the sentence goes to a new line, but sometimes there is a space preceding the first letter. And sometimes, there is no space. I have not been able to see a pattern to this. Whenever I create a new installation of Office (for myself and for the users I support), I have to hunt down and turn off all the automatic formatting and substitution features. Otherwise people come to me for help because they are getting unexpected results from their typing. The automatic formatting is surely useful for many people, but why do you insist on having it enabled by default? Everyone I know prefers to run with most (or all) of those features disabled. And almost everyone is confused by these features when they are first learning the software. If I bring up a Notes window in Entourage, the Title field is active, even if the note already has a title and the body contains text. Often, I open a note and start typing, expecting that my text will be added to the end of the body content, where I stopped typing on my last visit to this note. Or I open a note, type command-F and a search term. But then I see that I just changed the title of the note, and I smack myself in the head (again). This just seems like bad UI design. If I am opening an existing note with intention to edit it, it is far more likely that I want to operate on the body content rather than the title. Or consider the Reminder window in Entourage. The Snooze and Dismiss buttons look like popdown menus. On a Mac I expect that a popdown menu will pop and stay open if I click and release. Then I click on an item in the menu to make my selection. Not here. If I click on Snooze and release, the window closes, before revealing the menu. What did I just do? Did I start a Snooze? For how long? How do I get that window back, if I want to select something else? I could go on - there are lots of other UI bugs and annoyances that have been carried over through multiple versions of Word, Excel, and Entourage (I don't use the other Office components). I keep wishing that the Mac BU people spent less time adding more features, and more time fixing these issues, and making the products more polished and consistent with Mac UI conventions. Maybe this time they will surprise me. -- Julian Vrieslander <[email protected]> -- YouTalk mailing list List information: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/support_options/list.html List moderator: [email protected], [email protected] To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
