It's All About Context
Right-click contextual menus were first introduced in Office 4.x (which included Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0) and went on to become a ubiquitous part of using software starting with Windows 95. The basic idea behind context menus was to give power users a more efficient way of executing commands. The concept of "object-oriented" design, both in programming languages and in user interface design were starting to hit their stride.
Back in the early days of context menus, however, we couldn't have paid real people to click on them. Had we given people an electric shock when they used the right-mouse button (ala Dr. Venkman at the beginning of Ghostbusters) context menus couldn't have performed any worse in the usability lab.
Then, over time, something interesting happened. More and more people would come into the labs versed in the language of right-click. Even people we considered "novice" users were regularly exercising the context menus. Today, more often than not, people try right-click almost before anything. Right-click, right-click, right-click.
Why has this revolution come about, and how does the new Office UI take advantage of it? It turns out the answer is only superficially rooted in efficiency and is, instead, all about context.
Let's say you insert a drawing of a circle into your Word document and now you want to put a border around it. A program like Word has well over a thousand discrete commands. Where do you start searching? The menus? The toolbars? If the toolbar you need isn't up, you need to view the full list of 30+ toolbars in the View.Toolbars dialog box. Maybe there's a Task Pane to do the formatting? Once you do start surfing the menus and toolbars, you'll see that more than half of the commands in the product are disabled. Your search is going to encompass hundreds and hundreds of commands.
Now, right-click on the circle. A menu of only 9 commands comes up... and every command is relevant to the circle. Simply by right-clicking, you've reduced the scope of your search from the entire product to just the tools relevant for a drawing. It turns out that people are not right-clicking primarily for efficiency gains; they're right-clicking because that's the best way they've found to get their work done. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few one-off commands like "Cut" or "Delete", context menus are often a series of links to dialog boxes in which you do the real work. So, you actually have to use a more inefficient and advanced UI (the dialog box) by choosing the context menu, but it's worth it because at least you found what you're looking for.
The Office "12" UI introduces a concept called "Contextual Tabs." The way it works is this: The default tabs for the application contain only the commands that are not object-specific. It turns out that this drastically simplifies the functionality you have to look through because so much of Word, for example, only works when you have a Table or a Chart or a Picture or a Header or a Drawing or a Text Box selected.
Whenever you insert or select an object, the Contextual Tabs for that object appear next to the main tabs in the Ribbon. It looks like this:
(click to enlarge)
The Contextual Tabs contain all the features you need for working with the selected object. When you deselect the object, the contextual tabs go away because all of the commands would have otherwise been disabled. If you reselect the object, of course, the tools come back.
The result is this: the core product is drastically simplified. You don't have to scrounge through hundreds of disabled commands when you aren't working with an object. On the other hand, as soon as those tools are relevant (e.g. when you're working with a Table), they come into view. When they no longer could work, they're out of your way.
Contextual Tabs combine the discoverability advantages of context with the ease-of-use and efficiency of the Ribbon. Context Menus are great and are still a part of Office 12 (and are even being improved, as I'll discuss down the road), but we've taken advantage of what we've learned about the value of context and applied it to the core of the new interface.
Comments
Anonymous
September 16, 2005
I had a trivial but instructive example of context based learning yesterday. A user dragged a deleted file from the recycle bin, to an open folder. Er, howzat? I never knew you could do that. I only knew about the Restore option. I said this to the user, who replied: "It never occurred to me that you could NOT do that." So, I - the expert - made assumptions that the reccyle bin would be a special case. The user - nonexpert - just saw the folder paradigm & assumed that it would work the same as any & every other folder.Anonymous
September 16, 2005
"concept of object-oriented design, both in programming languages (...)"
Are you saying Excel is written in C++? I don't think so, everything in the UI smells like it is a C program.Anonymous
September 16, 2005
That raises a question I have about the Access 12 interface. In Word, Excel and Powerpoint you have a single document type to which all the ribbons can apply, but in Access you have a number of different "document types" (ie: tables, queries, forms, reports). You can't use the "Contextual tabs" described above for each document type as you might need them for objects within the "document".
My assumption was that the set of ribbons would change depending on what type of "document" is currently selected. However, this screenshot[1] of Access 12 seems to show a rather global set of ribbons.
Can you clarify how Access 12 will work with the new UI?
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/images/features/2005/09-13Office12-Access_lg.jpgAnonymous
September 16, 2005
anona:
I wasn't trying to make any statements directly about how the Office apps are coded (you don't need to use object-oriented programming in order to have object-oriented user ineterface design.)
Depending on the exact program, Office is a mix of C, C++, and assembler.Anonymous
September 16, 2005
DCMonkey:
Access does indeed use Contextual Tabs and we had to work hard with them to think through the model to make sure it made sense (since in Access the idea of context, as you note, is somewhat different.)
Access does use Contextual Tabs depending on the kind of "document" is up, but of course some commands are global as well.
I put it on my list to do a day about Access when I'll discuss it in more detail and show more screenshots.Anonymous
September 18, 2005
I agree that this ribbon will make it easier for the vast majority of Excel users to find commands. But if I know that Paste Special Values Transpose is ALT-ESVE Enter, and I can type that in 1 second, won't this ribbon thing dramatically slow me down if I have to use the mouse? Do I have to use the mouse? Will the old keyboard commands work?
Thank You.Anonymous
September 18, 2005
marc:
You can definitely use the keyboard to navigate the new UI. In fact, keyboard access has been improved. I'll be blogging about it soon, stay tuned...Anonymous
September 18, 2005
What screen resolution are you aiming at?Anonymous
September 19, 2005
Contextual tabs sound great, but only if they're an addition to the task at hand. For example, if I add a circle to a document, I get the contextual tab for doing stuff with circles (good), but do I still have the tab for adding more circles visible, or was that contextual to the document and therefore not available (bad)? In general, I agree with contextual information, but I've seen too many cases where the action you performed to initiate the contextual information was replaced and therefore not repeatable. In principle (which I hope you've done), whenever context changes, the action that I used to get to the new context should always remain visible and available.Anonymous
October 03, 2005
Mamut: 1024x768, although it's being designed really from at least 800x600 to 1280x1024.
Stephen Bullen: The main ribbon tabs stick around when the contextual ones come up - if you click the contextual tabs picture for the whole image, that's more obvious.Anonymous
October 04, 2005
You say :
It turns out that people are not right-clicking primarily for efficiency gains; they're right-clicking because that's the best way they've found to get their work done.
That's the same thing.Anonymous
February 03, 2006
One of the key design tenets of the Office 12 user interface is making sure
that the set of features...Anonymous
March 02, 2006
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March 07, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
March 09, 2006
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