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Jakob Nielsen recently spoke of the future of the UI, shifting from WYSIWYG to more results oriented interfaces in popular applications like Microsoft Office. Is it any good, or is Nielsen trying to cosy up to Microsoft?

Jakob Nielsen recently spoke of the future of the UI, shifting from WYSIWYG to more results oriented interfaces in popular applications like Microsoft Office. Is it any good, or is Nielsen trying to cosy up with Microsoft?

Having read through the piece twice, I am inclined to think that Nielsen may be currying favor with Microsoft before the whiz bang launch of Microsoft Office 12 (and here), clearly a sweet spot for the software giant. Knowing how Office has moved from its 2000 version to 2003 version, I wonder if there is much they can tout as New in the next update. Frankly, a document is a document and a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. It’s the mother of commoditized industries. The fixes, oops, enhancements, cannot be so earth-shattering as to warrant a boatload of upgrade dollars - but we are being led to believe precisely that, with fancy-pants (but ultimately ponderous) interface issues.

Excel is pretty much saturated. Financial firms have their set spreadsheets, accountants have theirs, business analysts have something that works for them. It is all basically set, kinks and all. There are minor annoyances that could be fixed, like the need to F2 everytime I wish to edit a cell, instead of clicking slowly twice that makes things editable in other Windows software. But mucking about with force-fit simplification is more likely to tick people off than to ease pains that only Microsoft thinks users have.

PowerPoint - same thing. How much more convenient can you make a presentation, except perhaps to include post-preparation features that allow easy export of PowerPoint PPTs into editable SWF (Macromedia Flash) format, or XML, etc, so external applications could make use of them, or for them to be viewed easily via the web.

But that’s not to say that there is nothing worth improving. In Outlook, I would like to see a Google Mail type “label” interface instead of folders — the difference being that the same email can be assigned different labels and sorted in a variety of ways, as opposed to an email being physically moved into a folder. I would also like to see a Google Desktop or Copernic type fast indexed search built right into Outlook. The current default search that’s shipped with Office is way too pathetic if you have anywhere more than 5,000 emails.

Microsoft Word is probably the most-used business application, and will rightfully get its due attention, but I fear the kind of results orientation Nielsen talks about. I would be the last one to want “wizard” type iconography to affect my established workflow. Using his metaphor, with the new method, I would simply need to choose the shape I want my marble block to ultimately look like - David or D’mello. Problem is, this assumes that a user base of millions will have a finite number of templated outputs in mind, which is unbelievably flawed if not stupid. The only reason I can possibly imagine for this is to create a new sub-market for template makers, who can then charge for these output formats. I sure hope they don’t do away with menus and toolbars. I am not much for cosmetic enhancements for the sake of misdirected beauty.

Either way, one hopes they’ll be kind enough to give the user an option to stick to his old way instead of having a new supposedly better way shoved down his throat. There’s a reason over 35% of Office sales in Asia are bootleg, or that newer alternatives like OpenOffice (free!) are now maturing into full-blown competitors. I am quite liking the Open Office actually - smoother, simpler, no-nonsense interface, and it gets the job done, including Exporting to PDFs faster than Acrobat itself. Such convenience is ultimately the point of a UI, no?

This post is tagged Excel, Microsoft, MS Word, Musings, nielsen, Office, Powerpoint, UI, wysiwyg