Modes And The Office 12 UI

Adrian Sutton

As soon as I saw the new Office 12 interface I questioned why you would add modes to a user interface when modes are so frowned on in usability – particularly by Jef Raskin. I was immediately banging my head against the table with the thought that to do anything in the new Office I’d have to figure out which mode the functionality was hidden under instead of just working with the menu categories that I was used to (no better than the ribbon modes but at least I’m used to them). Then I watched Scoble’s video about the new office interface and felt a little better – hey, they’ve got a ton of user data to back them up, people do seem to work in different modes with Word and now the user interface matches the user model. Something just kept bugging me about it though.

This morning I came up with a theory of what I think is wrong. I think the Office team is right, people do use different modes when working with Office, and in fact software in general. The ribbon however isn’t likely to work with the user model well. The user model relating to modes is something like:

  1. Need to enter content for my document.
  2. hmmm, this needs a table.
  3. Table is ugly, better make it look pretty.
  4. Review content.
  5. Add more content.
  6. Overall document ugly, better fix that.
  7. Final review.
  8. Print/save/submit/whatever.

The required model for using the ribbon however is something like:

  1. Need to enter content for my document.
  2. hmmm, this needs a table.
  3. Mental note: I’m switching to my table editing mode now.
  4. Note to software: I’m switching to table editing now.
  5. Review content.
  6. Add more content.
  7. Mental note: I’m switching to content entry mode now.
  8. Note to software: I’m switching to content entry again.
  9. ….

The mismatch is that while humans use modes of thought intuitively and automatically throughout their day, software doesn’t know which mode their in and in fact the user doesn’t typically realize they’re switching modes. This means that instead of intuitively switching modes, the user has to train themselves to realize when they switch modes and tell the software about it. I suspect that this will be a major source of frustration with the new Office interface, though I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than the current system, just that I don’t expect it to be the saving grace of user interface design. Is it enough to justify throwing out the users existing knowledge on how to use the software? Not sure, but probably not.

It will be interesting to see what the feedback about the new interface is once it makes it out to typical end users rather than geeks who have access to MSDN subscriptions and Microsoft Betas. It will also be interesting to track that feedback over time to see if it mellows out and becomes favorable as people get used to it or whether it’s another Clippy. Maybe someone like The Basement will do an analysis of buzz trends after Office 12 ships – it would definitely be interesting to see.