Inside Deep Thought (Why the UI, Part 6)

Article
10/31/2005

This is the sixth part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. You can read the last installments here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5.

Microsoft is tracking your every move!

Soon after you install Office 2003 on your computer, a balloon pops up asking if you would like to "Help Make Office Better." If you click on it, you are given the opportunity to enroll in something called the Microsoft Office Customer Experience Improvement Program. If you opt-in, anonymous data about how you use Office are uploaded to Microsoft occasionally in the background.

If you're the curious type, you might have wondered where your data goes. Well, today I'm here to answer the question: it goes into an Excel spreadsheet I have sitting on my desktop.

OK, back up. Back in the olden days of designing software at Microsoft (say, pre-2003), design decisions were mostly supported by guesswork. There's a classic Microsoft interview question (that I've never heard of anyone actually using) "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" Many have criticized that type of question as being feckless; personally, I agree and it's not representative of how I choose to spend my interview time with a candidate. But the rough "estimate an answer and defend it" style required to answer the gas station question was at the heart of how many design decisions used to be made at Microsoft.

Suppose you were designing the adaptive menus in Office 2000 and you wanted to know what features people use the most. Well, you start by asking a "guru" who has worked in the product for a long time. "Everyone uses AutoText a lot," the guru says. The louder the "experts" are, the more their opinions count. Then you move on to the anecdotal evidence: "I was home over Christmas, and I saw my mom using Normal View... that's probably what most beginners use." And mix in advice from the helpful expert: "most people run multi-monitor, I heard that from the guy at Best Buy."

So much of what we did was based on feel, estimation, and guesswork. How much that was true only became clear with the introduction of a technology called SQM (pronounced "skwim") .

SQM, which stands for "Service Quality Monitoring" is our internal name for what became known externally as the Customer Experience Improvement Program. It works like this: Office 2003 users have the opportunity to opt-in to the program. From these people, we collect anonymous, non-traceable data points detailing how the software is used and and on what kind of hardware. (Of course, no personally identifiable data is collected whatsoever.)

As designers, we define data points we're interested in learning about and the software is instrumented to collect that data. All of the incoming data is then aggregated together on a huge server where people like me use it to help drive decisions.

Hard at work in the SQM data center.

What kind of data do we collect? We know everything from the frequency of which commands are used to the number of Outlook mail folders you have. We know which keyboard shortcuts you use. We know how much time you spend in the Calendar, and we know if you customize your toolbars. In short, we collect anything we think might be interesting and useful as long as it doesn't compromise a user's privacy.

How much data have we collected?

About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)
Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.

Reflected in these numbers is that we don't even retain all the data points we receive... particularly, we get so much Word and Outlook data that 70% of it is thrown away.

So, one of the biggest reasons that we decided to do the new user interface for Office 12 is simply that, for the first time, we have the data we need to make intelligent decisions. Anything we would have done in the past would have been based more on guesswork and bias than on reality. Data is just one input to the design process, of course, but there's something extraordinarily empowering about knowing which commands people use often and which they don't. And knowing which commands are used in sequence with which other commands. And which commands are used 7x more with the keyboard than with the mouse. And how big people's screens are... and how much of the time they use Excel maximized... and how many documents they use at once... and which commands literally are never used... and which are used much more frequently by East Asian users... and on and on...

Knowledge is power. And having that knowledge makes this the right time to reinvent the user interface of Office.

Want to guess what is the most-used command in Microsoft Word? The top 5 commands used? Post your guesses in a comment and I'll answer in next Monday's post. (MVPs who saw my talk at the summit and therefore know the answers, please refrain from showing off.)

Comments

Anonymous
October 31, 2005
ctrl+c/ctrl+v
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Close?

;)
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
"Yes submit this crash to Microsoft and restart the app" :-)

Just kidding. Sounds like a fascinating initiative and drilling around in all that data has yielded tons of new intelligence already. Nice job
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Here's what I would expect is in the top 5:

Font
Bold
Italic
Save
Print

I'm probably not even close... am I?
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
File-Save
File-SaveAs
File-Print
Those seem the most popular on my desk. :)
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
File-Open
File-Save
File-Print
Edit-Copy
Edit-Paste
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Top 5
Save
Paste
Copy
Cut
Spell Check
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
save,
open,
print,
cut,
paste,
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the most often used command is Undo. After all, to do five different things, I use five different commands; to undo five different things, I use the same command five times.
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Ctrl-Z Undo has got to be one of the top 5. I'm sure that bold/italic are in there too.
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
#1 Undo
#2 Paste
#3 Copy
#4 Cut
#5 Save
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Everyone's top five:

Save
Cut
Paste
Bold
Underline

My own top five:
Ctrl+Z
Ctrl+C
Ctrl+X
Ctrl+S
Ctrl+Shift+S
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Heh, so we're playing "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" anyway.

I'd say Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Save.

Defense: These are used multiple times when editing a document. Commands like Open, Close, Exit, and Print are usually only used once per document. Bet even formatting commands like Bold and Italic beat out Open and Print.
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
PS - I meant to justify my answers! You only OPEN a document once per visit to the document.

But you will probably do lots of saving and formatting.

You may only print it once or twice.

Therefore, Open won't be too common. Save will be down the list, but higher up than printing...
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
My thoughts are:

#1 Undo (for the same reason back is #2 on browsers; would be typing if it was a command)
#2 Paste
#3 Save
#4 Cut
#5 Copy

Select Text if it's considered a command would be close to number #1 if it's a command.

However, if this were a trick question, then there's also the possibility of AppMove or AppRestore or anything else to do with windows management.

Also prime possibilities: Accept Changes and Reject Changes.
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Fonts
Copy
Paste
Undo
Print
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
I'm betting it's Save and Paste. Well, the former might be wishful thinking.
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Save and undo would top my list. Why? Well, aren't those the only buttons that remain on the one remaining "toolbar" in Office 12?
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
I'm betting Save is very rarely used. Most end-users I've known are very hostile to the idea of saving frequently. The problem is that they have to stop and grab the mouse to do almost anything, and that's a major hassle when you're trying to get work done. Word has had auto-save since forever, hasn't it?

If backspace counts as a "command", it's probably the most commonly used.

The punchline of this "guess the most common command" exercise, I suspect, is going to be just how far out of touch with the common user programmers tend to be. That's an important point. It can't be over-stressed.

I love this idea of collecting real usage data. There's a truism that the best software is developed by the people who use it, but that's never going to work for mass-market stuff like Word because the average user will never be a programmer. So this is what you might call "prosthetic empathy".
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Wow, how very 1984 ;)
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Save rarely used by end-users? I think I press Ctrl+S unconsciously every other word I typ in Word.
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
Copy, Cut, Paste, Undo, Save

Looking forward to see how far off we all are! :)
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 31, 2005
File >Print
File> Save
File> Save As
File> Send to> Recipient as attachment
Exit!
Anonymous
October 31, 2005

Paste
2. Print
3. Undo
4. Copy
5. Cut

Anonymous
November 01, 2005
I disagree with everyone.

My mother can't cut and copy and paste, and she's probably much more of a typical user than any of us. Most people will only save and print a document once in a session.

My guesses: spellcheck, bold, underline, undo, print preview. But not necessarily in that order.
Anonymous
November 01, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 01, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 01, 2005
I think backspace/delete is the most used command in Word - provided it counts as a command of course.

After that perhaps underline is among the top 5 and I think spellcheck might be in that list too.

Great blog by the way. It's fun to read about what you can do if you take usability and usability research really seriously.
Anonymous
November 01, 2005
Wow, we've made it through 30 posts and no one's whined about privacy or misleading opt-in dialogs yet. Amazing...and refreshing.

Now, the top five commands, in descending order:
File Search
Record Macro
New Frames Page
Document Map
Outline View

;-)
Anonymous
November 01, 2005
"MVPs who saw my talk at the summit and therefore know the answers, please refrain from showing off."

By now I've completely forgotten. <smile>

Nice blog. Very, very interesting reading.
Anonymous
November 01, 2005
Hmm. Probably quite popular are Open and Save As. I say that because there are many people who don't know how to use Explorer so to put files on a floppy they open it and save it again on the disk.
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
1 ) Open
2 ) Indent
3 ) Header Style
4 ) Save
5 ) Undo
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Open
Print
Font
Save
Copy
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
paste
copy
save
print
undo
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Open
Save
Save As
Spell
Close
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Undo
Paste
Copy
Italic
Save
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Close
Exit
Save
Print
Undo
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
If I may be pessimistic:
Centre
Left
Bold
Italic
Size

Or if I should be optimistic:
New Style
Apply Style
Update Style from Selection
Save
Hide/Show Paragraph Marks
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Exit
Font Dropdown
Font Size Dropdown
Save
Font Bold
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Word Count
Check Spelling
Find
Print Toolbar Button
Format/Font...
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Open
Save
Save As
Print Preview
Print

And not sure if it counts as a command... but I imagine the recently used file list on the file menu would be quite popular, as well.
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Save
Copy
Paste
Switch Document Windows (CTRL+F6)
Find
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
print preview - as I do this more than printing
save - if setting the system to automatically do this counts
word count - I know people who use this with frightening regularity
copy/paste - they're really two halves of the same function to most people
align > center - well i always do it a couple of times per document.
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Assuming that main-keyboard single-keystroke commands don't count (e.g., backspace, enter, tab)

Selection (e.g., Selection.MoveRight, Selection.MoveLeft)
Paste
Save
Open
Exit
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Adding a guess, since there's almost 50 of them:

font
bold
copy
paste
font size
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Given that Open, New and Print haven’t been deemed worthy of icon status in 12 they may struggle to make it to the top 5...First thing I will be doing is configuring the toolbar and bunging New and Open back to their ‘rightfull’ places.

Let’s see: Undo, Paste, Cut, Font, Font size.
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
I'd guess

Buttons:
Undo
Save
PrintPreview
Print
New Doc

Keyb:
Ctrl+z
Ctrl+c
Ctrl+v
Ctrl+s
Ctrl+Enter
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-B, Ctrl-U, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-S & their mouse&button & menu equivavalnts

Do not forget, that for less-so-used commands your results are strongly biased by discoverability, the fact that there is workaround or alternative way to do it and a tradition (e.g. using tabs instead of moving left margin). The way you use your counted data you can establish strong positive feedback (in a "cybernetic" sense), so you take the commands-winners and make them more easily accesibly in Office12 - then no surprise, they will become even more popular in your next polls and on the other hand the commands-losers will get definitely worse results ever. After few cycles you burry any new, only-for-somebody features.
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 02, 2005

New, which is done automatically for you when you open Word anyways
2. Open, which people can call without Word even being open
3. Save, every five minutes, just in case
4. Change font, because everyone loves Times New Roman!
5. Print, because it's hard to Xerox a laptop!

Anonymous
November 02, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Ok, now for a few non-sarcastic guesses:
Open Doc
New Doc
Bold Text
Center Text
Set Font
Anonymous
November 02, 2005
Assuming that we're limiting it to just commands accessed through menus and toolbars (otherwise things like PageDown would be in the list) my guess would be as follows:

Save
Undo
Paste
Open
Print
Anonymous
November 03, 2005
Undo
Print
Paste
Font size
Spelling and Grammar
Anonymous
November 03, 2005
I'm assuming that you're not asking about file menu commands, which is what I would expect most beginners to use, so I'm basing it on just the toolbar. So my guess as a standard user:

- Zoom Page Width
- View Final instead of (Final Showing Markup)
- Font
- Table
- MS Office Word Help
Anonymous
November 03, 2005
I have trouble getting beyond three:

Bold
Italic
Underline

I love a lot of the features of word ... style sheets are my friends, but in all the jobs I've had, I'm the ONLY person I have ever known who uses them. Everyone here formats using bold, italic, underline, and font size, so I should add that to my list.

I don't think open and print will make it. You only open a document once, but you bold things in it a lot.

I wonder if there are statistics which show what commands are used after creation of a new document as opposed to editing of an old document. Does "delete selection" count as a command?

OK, so maybe I'll finalize my guess as

Bold
Italic
Underline
Font Color
Font Size

(Font color because many people I've seen don't understand revisions, and use font color to do revision tracking.)
Anonymous
November 03, 2005
Open
Close
Font size
Bold
Undo
Anonymous
November 03, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 03, 2005
Can't believe no-one has guessed it!! So I'll try some others:

Help/F1
Select All/Ctrl+A
Maximize
Insert Picture
the Window menu (many people are used to office 97)

who knows!
Anonymous
November 03, 2005
My guess on a top 5:

Save
Undo
Print preview
Bold
Bullets
Anonymous
November 04, 2005
Getting 5 in the right order is a bit harsh!

Because most users seem not use Word in a sane fashion, I'll guess:

Font size
Bold
Center
Font [font face selection]
Underline
Anonymous
November 04, 2005
Bold
Tab adjustments
Font size
Delete
Paste
Anonymous
November 05, 2005
I'd think:

- Save ( for those pessimists )
- Help ( people who have no idea what's going on )
- Paste
- Copy
- Spell Check
Anonymous
November 05, 2005
My guess:
New
Print
Save
Close
Exit
Anonymous
November 06, 2005
Most to least:
Exit
Print
Undo
Center
Bold
Anonymous
November 06, 2005
print
save
font size
insert table
bold
Anonymous
November 07, 2005
Very interesting blog. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, Jensen.
Here is my guess (saw your comment that nobody has guessed the right top five yet).
undo
save
open
font selection
list item

Not even close, am I?
Anonymous
November 07, 2005
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 07, 2005
This is the problem with posting at the same time each day: people start to EXPECT you to continue posting at that same time!

So where's my Monday JensenH fix?? :)

Very much looking forward to finding out the "real" top 5 most-used commands in Word.
Anonymous
February 06, 2006
Another interesting series of&nbsp;articles from Jensen Harris, sharing with us the rationale why Microsoft...
Anonymous
February 09, 2006
Today, just thinking aloud...
A minor design conundrum we face is as follows: based
on the data we collect,...
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://jameslin.wordpress.com/2005/12/13/more-on-the-new-microsoft-office-ui/
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This is the seventh part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided...
Anonymous
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This is the eighth part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some
of the reasons we...
Anonymous
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This is the sixth part in my eight-part series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided...
Anonymous
April 07, 2006
This is the seventh part in my eight-part series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we...
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PingBack from http://kingsley2.com/archives/2006/05/24/office-2007-a-gentle-ribbin
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Anonymous
November 02, 2007
I really enjoyed having a beer with Andy Bounds last night. Andy is an inspirational communications coach
Anonymous
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Inside Deep Thought (Why the UI, Part 6)

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