Office App simplification - Power and Simplicity

The spectrum of work and ideas that Microsoft Office supports is diverse beyond imagination. For Office Design, our biggest challenge and our biggest reward is that our audience is quite literally everyone.

An audience of this size brings into laser focus the universal need for simple, powerful tools that help people stay focused amid an increasingly crazy world. Office has always offered a powerful set of tools with a wide range of useful features. Through refreshed user experience, we make that power even more accessible with simple designs.

Many people who subscribe to Office 365 find it to be complex and overwhelming. Even O365 fans find it difficult to take advantage of the breadth of the suite and the full capability. To effectively address these issues, we need to focus on designing for power and simplicity, hitting the sweet spot between the two in O365.

The commanding ribbon area is the core of Office products. There are 93 functions grouped within it for Office Word. The number is even more significant for PPT and EXL. But for light editing users, or who reply on small or medium monitors, the heavy ribbon is too burdensome to be powerful.

We simplified the commands ribbon, but didn't take away it's numerous functions. While updating the first level controls, we also redesigned the overflow menu by clean up the control misplacement and moved some lower usage controls down to the second level.

There are ninety three default controls in Word online ribbon, grouped under six regular tabs and two contextual tabs. After re-prioritizing and re-grouping by studying the ribbon telemetry and talk to users, we minimized the default first level controls to seventy four and updated the multi-line ribbon into a single-line version.

The early rounds of user feedback we got for the ribbon simplification are mostly positive. But there are still 13% of users who prefer the multiline or need it as an option. Those are the power users who require full functionality. So we brought in the ribbon switcher, so users can easily toggle between multi and simplified ribbon.

Problem - Taskpane is the supplemental commanding surface in core office products. Over 83% of users need at least one task pane open when they are editing. 46% of users will need more than one, but only users with bigger monitors will leave them all open, because of the limit screen real estate.

Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean.

User study: We did several rounds of user study for both models in Office Word, PPT and EXL. The results are very different based on the App. So reviewed again all the pros and cons for both model, also considering tech constrains and edge cases. We decide to go with Model B.

With the new tab navigation bar and refreshed UI, Office now offering a better supplemental side commanding system with a more coherent and harmonious interface. Users will be able to focus more on they content.

As part of the App silhouette visual refresh, we built up a visual tool kit for compact surfaces like task pane. We have more than hundreds of task panes within all office products owned by generations of designers.

It's a powerful system, but lack of clean and cohesive visual and experience, which is another factor that creates visual noise beside of limited real estate.

Office Canvas Team     Office Calc Team
Office.com Team           Office Outlook Team

1. UX Ideation
2. Art direction - UI refresh - Build up visual guideline and Toolkit
3. Participate and provide materials for research
4. Work close with partner teams for coherent UXUI
5. Design review with engineer partners