What are they thinking?
Check out this screenshot from Microsoft Office 12.
I’ve numbered the graphic for each different style that appears.
1) Aqua, Mac-style glassy “Write” button, or is it a tab? (Light source: above)
2) Mac-style brushed metal (Light source: above)
3) Scary button, different from all the rest, pops out. Was this graphic outsourced? The message options are quite explicitly “down” somewhere. (Light source: left above)
4) Beveled-ribbon bar, sort of purply colored, cluttered with icons of different sizes and diagonal plus signs that apparently bring out more options? All of the icons in this view have the light source from the top left.
5) Icon-buttons, with the hard shine like a OS X Tiger button. (Light source: above)
6) XP-style buttons, with a softer shine and tinted blue rather than purple (Light source: above)
7) Flat blue background. What is this part? Is it an attachment? Is the user sending an RSS feed?
8) XP-style scroll bar (Light source: left)
The whole thing is very inconsistent. Is this design by (huge) committee?
The part that’s the most confusing to me is the “menu bar” where we have a File menu (with an arrow presumably to mean it’s a menu rather than a tab), followed by some icons left over from the old Word toolbar (with a sort of arrow with a line above it that means?) and then followed by these tabs in a completely different visual style.
While there are people who complain that the Mac is inconsistent because it has four different Window styles (normal, brushed metal, Mail.app style, and iLife style), this is a whole different league. Is this just how they think? In all these different styles? Does it seem good that way?
[graphic seen on this is sippey…]
February 28th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
The ratio of pixels dedicated to “getting work done” vs. “interface adornments and empty space” is really really low too.
It’s as if there is the “Toolbar BU”, the “Scrollbar BU”, the “New Menus BU, and the “Diagonal Plus Sign BU” all with competing Senior Vice Presidents vying for a feeling of importance or imapact on the product.
Give me small groups broadly skilled developers or give me death!
February 28th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
I never thought of it like that. The Toolbar BU demands 20% more pixels!
March 1st, 2006 at 2:12 am
Variety is the spice of life!
March 1st, 2006 at 5:40 am
[…]
Vista’s tutti-frutti interface design
Fire and Fury carries a screenshot of a compose window (the new Outlook?) from Office 12. The author has gone over it and highl […]
March 1st, 2006 at 9:26 am
It’s not final. This is beta.
March 1st, 2006 at 9:50 am
Typical microsoft product. Too many cooks…too little original ideas. The design is probably consistant with their programming. Mac people like to get from point A to point in the fewest amount of steps. Pc people like to complicate things, so that even the simplest tasks have at least one or two extra steps.
March 1st, 2006 at 10:01 am
Don’t masquerade as neb :)
March 1st, 2006 at 11:26 am
I believe this is just a mockup, and the final interface elements will be redrawn. They want people to focus on the locations of buttons, etc. but not their appearance.
March 1st, 2006 at 11:52 am
We can do this post again when this supposed “final UI” is released. Regardless, I’ll bet it won’t look like Vista at all.
http://news.com.com/2300-1016_3-5805994-1.html
March 1st, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Geeeez, look at the size of those icons! That’s horrifying! I hope there’s a details view that they’re not showing me. I mean for Vista.
For Office 12, well, it’s not finalized, I know, but how did there get to be ANY version with that ugly button?! That one at least jumps out super fast at a glance:p
March 4th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
[…] easier, they’ve got it badly, badly wrong. Neb at Fury and Frost has published his analysis of the eight - count them, eight - different interface styles used in this one dialogue box. […]
March 20th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
1,2 got me, I could care less about 2, but 1 is truly scary.
3-5 they’re tear off menubars. I suspect the difference between them is whether or not the Icons are large or small, or text, and how large they were sized, the downarrows probably signify that there are more items in that tearoff. You can get somewhat of a similar effect in Word right now.
6-8 this is a standard outlook XP message style, the light blue denotes the title/header area, and the buttons and scrollbars are obviously XP.
This looks like an Outlook XP with Office Vista (Word) screenshot (Outlook can use a variety of Word to edit email), but that’s just what I think.
From the look of the File Menu, it looks like they are moving to where the Menus and Menu Bars are the same, and can be replaced and moved around at will. You can see a little of it already in Windows Media Player 10.
-sw