Microsoft Office 2007: First impressions

I have not used Windows Vista and am therefore not familiar with the look-and-feel of the user interface. However, I used to use Windows XP quite a lot. This is important because applications that run on Windows should feel like Windows. Apple has Human Interface Guidelines that are out of date, sadly, but most OS X apps are consistent with the feel of OS X. Most of the time, Windows apps are good at this, too.

Until Microsoft Office 2007 came along. I haven’t used it very much, so I can’t say how usable it is once you’ve learned the interface. I’m positive, though, that there is a big learning curve. Just look at this screenshot and try to figure out how to open a file or make a new document:

My first comment was “Where is the Fle menu?”, and this is a problem - it’s not consistent with other Windows apps. Turns out that you hit the “Office button” in the upper left to get a traditional “File” menu. No other application uses this interface, and Microsoft has not released a new standard saying how other apps could implement this style. Imagine upgrading from Office 2003 or even switching from another application (like Firefox or Adobe Acrobat) and then being presented with this newfangled interface. There is no transfer of training, where concepts learned in one area should apply to another (Holding, 1991; Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901). This is a concept that has been around for a very long time, and that is because it is a useful one.

Now, admittedly, sometimes you have to throw out transfer of training and start from scratch. Windows 95 did that from Windows 3.1, as did Mac OS X from OS 9. There was a learning curve, but it is worth it in the end. Will the Office 2007 switch be worthwhile? The big problem is that if it’s worthwhile, it’ll ONLY be for Office. Other Windows apps will not use the same Ribbon Interface, so transfer of training will not be present between apps. In fact, the task switching penalty for switching between interfaces is likely to be even worse (Allport & Wylie, 2000) because users will have to switch their task sets from one app to another.

Besides throwing away the mass amount of previous experience users have had with Windows apps, looking at this interface for the first time evokes a sense of… panic. I would love to do a study with visual search, eyetracking, and the new PowerPoint interface. Talk about clutter (Verghese & McKee, 2004)!

Visual clutter in an interface is the exact same problem Microsoft had with previous versions of Office - critics called it too “bloated.” Well, has the bloat gotten any better with Office 2007? If the “Create New Document” dialog box in Word is any indication, the answer is no: