Rogier Bikker - Articles

Better looking graphs in Excel

Sander Viegers is User Experience Design Lead in the Microsoft Office Design Group. He mainly talked about his work on Excel 2007. He admitted that older versions of Excel where very good in creating ugly graphs and diagrams. So one of the main goals of the new version of Excel was to come up with a tool that makes it easy to create meaningful and appealing graphs and diagrams.



He also presented some interactive prototypes. I especially like the one shown below. But it appeared that the thumbnails of style variations where too small for users to distinguish and so it didn’t make it into the final version.

Toolbars VS ribbon

As you might have noticed if you use the latest version of Office, Microsoft decided it was time for a change. Office 2007 had to be revolutionary. Automatically gathered feedback of usage patterns in older versions and loads of user research and testing gave them the ability to focus purely on the most used features and abandon the icon craze in the toolbar forever. So the toolbar was replaced with the so called ribbon. Resulting in a heavily changed UI and User Experience. But if you thought that the amount of icons had decreased in the new version, think again. There are over 3000 icons in the latest version of Excel!

No outsourcing to India

The development of Excel 2007 was divided in 12 teams. Each including 12 programmers, about 24 testers and only 1(!) designer (UxD) per team. So those 12 designers basically decided how Excel looks and behaves; an enormous responsibility considering the market share of Office. And even more shocking if you consider that many users all around the world spend more time looking at Word or Excel at work then they might do at there wife at home!

Dynamics research

Arne De Booij talked about Microsoft Dynamics. Microsoft Dynamics has a very specific target group, compared to Word or Excel. But the target group is at the same time very wide; businesses from all kinds and all places use dynamics on a daily basis. Very extensive research was used to found out exactly why, how and who is using Dynamics. About 1400 interviews at 280 companies and an additional 574 already existing research documents resulted in 50 personas. Quite an amount, if you consider that Windows only uses 5 personas!

Boring Dynamics

Designing Microsoft Dynamics is of course more then just making it beautiful. Because people need to use it on a daily basis in a business environment, functionality should be prior. They did some user testing on the design of Dynamics. Instead of asking questions about appeal (i.e., do you think this is beautiful?) they came up with an interesting test. Test users where given the task to use the program for a while. Then they where exposed to 25 pictures that indirect represented emotions, the task was to pick 5 and explain why. For example a picture of someone yawning with the explanation that the program felt boring. With this test they captured exactly what they where looking for; the effectiveness of Experience design, not Visual design.

It was definitely a very interesting evening with lot’s of great new insights which go much further then designing for the web.