I'm a big fan of the latest version of Microsoft Office. Rather than just keep plodding forward with yet another set of new features, the product team tried to re-design Office to make it more useful. A good chunk of that effort went into making the capabilities of Office more visible, since most of the features that accreted over several releases were hidden away in various menus and dialogs.
That's only a small part, however, of the very interesting story behind the Office re-design. I strongly recommend taking the time to watch "The Story Of The Ribbon," a presentation by Jensen Harris, the group program manager for the Microsoft Office user experience team. It's also a good history of Microsoft Office interface design, which led Harris' team to conclude that the most common reaction to the UI, "Good enough," actually wasn't good enough.
Harris' team spent a lot of time with users before forging ahead with the re-design. However, the Microsoft Office team wanted to learn how people used Office, and also what they wanted from it. In other words, it was a much different requirements-gathering effort than the typical "Tell us what features you want" meeting, or other mechanisms (e-mail, the bug database, voting on features, etc.) that convey only bits and pieces of the overall picture.
Ultimately, the overall picture is what makes the new Office way, way better to use. As the results show, building a good product isn't a question of having a creative or inventive team. Nor is a stream of customer requests going to tell you everything you need to know about making them happy with your product. You need both, and the right mental framework into which all these pieces fit.
[Many thanks to Peter Merholz for the link to this presentation. Thanks also to Daniela Busse, one of the members of the Office design team, for a separate explanation of the thinking behind these changes.]
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