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When interface design attacks 15 March 2006

Office 12 UI

A friend pointed me in the direction of this blog entry as a demonstration that Microsoft’s UI designers are moving in the right direction. To a point I agree, it certainly looks nicer than Windows FP even if we ignore the worrying similarities to a deviantArt hax0r’s Mac skin for Windows. What’s actually bothering me here though is the usability. This interface uses what I call “secret tabs”, notice the titles of the un-selected tabs just floating in mid air with no indication as to what they actually are. You don’t know that’s a tab until you click on it, by which time it’s too late. It might turn out to be the “erase my harddrive” button, or a goatse hyperlink.
Considering all the freely available resource material on how to make an application GUI work for the user, this is well slack.

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  1. We’ve seen Growth and productivity in line of Interface design, this is a positive media asset… ;D Thanks for the link


    — Jolo    Mar 18, 03:11    #

  2. andy, i liked a pic you had up on flikr and i was wonderin if i could use it as a song pic on my myspace, i’d give you credit and a link, get back to me

    Paul


    — paul    Apr 7, 21:42    #