With each release of Office we are offered the opportunity to introduce feature improvements and exciting new innovations. One area that I am really excited about is our next generation Office 2008 User Experience. For those already familiar with existing Office for Mac, you will find yourself at home --- you will still find the familiar toolbars and drop-down menus, only that they’ve been further evolved to reflect the latest UI trends on the Mac platform. At the same time, you will also discover entirely new suite-wide user interface elements that again, have been designed from the ground up to reflect the visual and behavioral qualities unique to the Mac.

As the User Experience Lead Program Manager, I am excited about many aspects of the new Office 2008 UI and look forward to sharing our design philosophy, goals, and processes. For those familiar with many excellent blogs from elsewhere in the company, my role is similar to Jensen Harris on the Office for Windows team – and I look forward to discussing our UI in a similar level of breath and depth through future blog posts. Also, I will be providing screenshots of the product --- so when you see a link, click away!

There is much to talk about but today I will start with our most noticeable new addition to Office 2008 --- the Elements Gallery. In this post, I will also touch upon other new user interface feature improvements, many of which are “coming attractions� that I will discuss in greater detail in future posts. So stay tuned! (An earlier post from our very own UX Researcher Nadyne is also an excellent read --- so take a look!)

So, what is this new Elements Gallery? Well, it’s a visually rich gallery that allows you to quickly find commonly used, but often times hard-to-create elements. For example, many users know that you can create beautiful tables, charts and diagrams in Office, but not everyone knows where to find or create them. The Elements Gallery is intended to unlock the power of Office by making our rich functionality more discoverable and accessible. No longer do you need to search through hierarchical menus and tunnel through dialogs only to find another sea of commands. With the Elements Gallery, you can focus your time on exploring and perusing the collection of professional and attractive designer content. “Great looking Office documents made easy� is an important pillar of Office 2008 and the Elements Gallery is a cornerstone to this effort.

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Microsoft, Office 2008