User Research and the design of Office 2007

Slide 1: User Research at Microsoft: Office 2007 William Tschumy User Experience Evangelist, Western Region February 19th, 2007

Slide 2: The “Ribbon” UX of Office 2007

Slide 3: So what does the Ribbon do? • Task Driven: Each application has • Tactile: Galleries provide a live been broken down into its key high- preview of the format outcome level tasks • Contextual: The interface shows – Word: File, Save, Insert, Page Layout, only those features that are relevant References, Mailings, Review to the task or relevant to the – Excel: Sheet, Insert, Page layout, selection (e.g., Picture Tools when Formulas, Data, Review an image is selected) – PowerPoint: Slides, Insert, Design, • Respectful: of Fitt’s Law. Common Animations, Slide show, Review formatting tools are available at the • Discrete: The UI never extends point of selection – no mouse travel beyond the ribbon required • Visual : If you don’t see it, the application doesn’t do it

Slide 4: How did we get here?

Slide 5: In the beginning…

Slide 8: Adaptive Menus: Office 2000

Slide 9: Adaptive Menus: Office 2000

Slide 11: Where did all that get us?

Slide 12: The customer speaks… • “I’m sure there’s a way to do this, but I can’t figure out how” • “Office is quite complex, I would be better at my job if I knew how to use it more.” Of the top 10 feature requests, 5 had been in Office for more than a release

Slide 13: So how did we get from… to…

Slide 14: Great UX comes from great user insight

Slide 15: Show me the data Our Customer Experience Improvement Program was an invaluable resource to see how users use our tool •How often was a toolbar button clicked? Where was it in sequence? • 1.3 Billion sessions of data was analyzed • ~6,000 datapoints were analyzed • 1.8 Million sessions per day •The data allows us to understand how features chain together to satisfy user tasks

Slide 16: Establish a baseline Over the course of several days, we ran 30+ people through our usability lab to establish: • Task success/failure information • Time on task • Customer satisfaction This would be the baseline against which we’d evaluate the Office 2007 design

Slide 17: Paper Prototypes: Value and Speed We prototyped from the earliest design stages: • In order to speed the cycle time, we used a lot of paper prototyping to quickly vet possible designs • Usability subjects used a pencil to "click" the paper prototype • Whomever ran the test sat at the table with the subject and made the prototype ‘work’ (shuffles the paper) • New designs can be tested on the fly by drawing new screens

Slide 18: Eye tracking Eye tracking helped us understand how users visually parsed data: •As we understood how people use and browse the visuals, we could then refine and study the next revision of visuals •We focused on how people use the chunk titles, the contextual tabs, and the MiniBar.

Slide 19: Card sort helps refine usage data Card sorting gave us IA clues: • In late 2004, we had people organize commands into buckets to help us think about how to generate the tabs. • In late 2005, we gave them our buckets and assessed how well they sorted the commands, especially while coming up with names for some really sticky ones.

Slide 20: Internal Longitudinal Studies We want to avoid backward steps: • Non-product groups installed and used builds, Beta 1, Beta 2, etc… • These groups provided feedback as well as participated in the Office 2003 and Office 2007 Benchmarks for comparison

Slide 21: “The Truman Show” Watching real people: • We convinced some ‘real’ people to replace Office 2000 with Office 12 • ... And allow us to do site visits • ... and work here on campus for a while • ... and have conferences via Live Meeting with us • ... and let us analyze his personal instrumentation data • ... and send us a daily journal of his experience. He's a local guy with a small personal business and excited about this challenge. As are we.

Slide 22: Another Longitudinal Test Pulling more people into the test: • For more than a year, we worked with a large group of users from a local company. • We rolled out Beta 1 to RTM • This was a great opportunity to closely monitor the rollout, training, adoption, and acceptance of the new UI over a long period of time. • We did persistent visits, monitored instrumentation data, and collected 1/1 feedback.

Slide 23: And everything else… Throughout the extended Beta we: • Built up the list of instrumentation metrics • Conducted 3rd party validation studies • Continued "Send a Smile" tracking • Continued consolidation of usability findings from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access, • …And oh so much more

Slide 24: Questions?

Slide 25: Thank You! William Tschumy User Experience Evangelist, Western Region 415.420.3746 William.tschumy@microsoft.com jensen harris parimal deshpande