Out Of The Box : Scared of the Office Ribbon?

Jon Box has produced another interesting post -- this time on the Office Ribbon (aka the Fluent UI).  In particular, he points out a cool add-in from Office Labs that called "Search Commands" that will help you find your favorite commands in the new UI.  People are different, and like a lot of other things, how long it takes someone to adapt to the new UI can be plotted on a distribution.  If you happen to fall on the end of the distribution that takes a bit longer to adjust, you might find the Search Commands add-in that Jon talks about to be helpful.  I tried it myself some time back (before it was publicly available), and while I almost never actually used it, there were one or two times when it really helped. 

As a coincidence, the Office 2007 UI (aka the Fluent UI) came up at dinner last night with Josh Holmes and others.  (Yes, this is what Microsoft people talk about at dinner ).  One person said that it only took a very short time to get comfortable with the new UI.  Another person at our table claimed that it took them a month to get used to the new UI because they were a "power user".  That's an assertion I've heard before -- that power users take longer to adapt.  I think the rationale is that the more commands you use in the old version, the more commands you need to re-locate in the new version.  I think there's some truth to this in the aggregate, and yet it's not true to say that a power user will take a long time to gain equivalent proficiency with the new UI. 

Which brings us back to distributions.  For a refresher, here is a picture of a normal distribution (the red line) -- often called the bell curve.  This is not a histogram, but it's similar -- in a histogram, the x-access plots an observed value, and the y-axis plots the how many times that value is observed.  In the chart of the normal distribution, the red curve is a probability function that predicts the likely-hood of any observation.  The connection between the two is that for many phenomena in the natural and behavioral sciences, if you took an infinite sample and plotted the observations on a histogram the result would be the shape of a normal curve (thanks to the central limit theorem). 

 

And now (finally) coming back to the Fluent UI, there are many independent factors that determine where someone falls on distribution curve of how long it takes to gain an equivalent level of proficiency with the Fluent UI that they had in the last version of Office -- the degree of  "power user-ness" is just one.  It may be true that power users, as a group, tend to be toward one side of the normal curve (the side that takes longer to gain proficiency with the Fluent UI equivalent to what they had in Office 2003), but that does not mean that an individual power user definitely *will* take longer to adjust to the Fluent UI. 

For example, I would consider myself a power user of Office 2003 (especially Excel) and it took me less than 2 days to get comfortable with the Fluent UI in Office 2007.  In fact, I would say that within a week I could do significantly more significantly more quickly in Office 2007 vs. Office 2003.  So if degree of power user-ness is not the only driving factor, what else helps predict the adaptation rate?  I'm sure I don't have a complete list, but would hypothesize the following factors could help predict how fast a person adapts to the Fluent UI:

• The particular commands a person uses -- few people use more than 25% of Office capabilities, but there are thousands of capabilities and we all use different ones.  If you tend to use commands that are surfaced in the top two context layers of the Fluent UI -- as most people do -- then you will probably have an easier time adapting. If you often use commands that are more rarely used and got less prime real estate on the Fluent UI, then the adaptation process may tend to take a little longer (all other things being equal). 
• Innate orientation toward change -- some times change is easy, sometimes it is hard, and sometimes it is harder.  I don't have anything precise here, but I suspect some part of that equation comes down to us -- our personalities and strengths/weaknesses.  We all have strengths and weaknesses, but they're not all the same. 
• Attitude -- for someone who loves being the person in the department who knows how to do (formerly) complex things, and who takes pride in helping others tap into the Office "power features", the Fluent UI could be a bit of a blow.  Now, for example, pivot tables are easy for everyone.  I imagine the irritation around the Fluent UI for someone in this situation would only partly be that they now do pivot tables differently (after all, they invested the time to learn how to do it when it was much more difficult... now that it's become simple it surely is not beyond their capacity).  Rather, there may be a sense of loss in play as the power user's Office expertise becomes just a little less valuable when others can do more for themselves. 
• I'm sure there are others -- what would you add?

After all of this, the larger point is don't be afraid of the new UI -- even if you are a power user.  Think about where you are likely to fall on the distribution curve, and pick a good time to upgrade (e.g., not the night before a big PowerPoint presentation or an important Excel analysis is due).  In the end, most people find that before long they can do more, more easily in Office 2007 than in Office 2003 -- even many power users -- because in Office 2007 they are almost instantly capable of many features that were previously hidden deep in the Office 2003 menu structure. 

Where adaptation challenges are most significant, I suspect it's for folks who need the commands that are obscure in both the old and new versions of Office (but obscure in different ways).  If you think you might fall toward the longer side of the adaptation curve, or need commands that are obscure in both versions of Office, definitely go to Jon Box's post and grab the Search Commands add-in from Office Labs.   You may also want to check out the Office team's "Help and How-to" site, as well as the especially cool, Community Clips (also from Office Labs)! 

If you've not heard of Community Clips, the site describes itself like this:

If you've ever struggled with a feature in Office, if you want to increase your Office know-how, if you want to show others your favorite feature or trick, or if you've had trouble explaining to your friends how to do something, start using Community Clips today!

It's basically a video sharing site dedicated to sharing short screen-casts on how to do different things in Office. 

Technorati Tags: Office 2007,Fluent UI

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• Anonymous
  April 29, 2008
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