I'm at Microsoft Canada's UX roundtable for the next couple of days (in lovely Bellevue, Washington). One of our first presentations was on the much-touted ribbon UI for Office 2007.

The ribbon UI in Microsoft Word

There's been a lot of coverage about the ribbon development process. It's definitely worth reading about that process even if you're not a fan of Microsoft technologies. Microsoft used a mix of low- and high-fidelity prototyping techniques, field research, usability testing, and qualitative and quantitative research methods to design the ribbon.

One impressive example: Microsoft worked with a local company to review the Office 2007 betas. They had the whole company install the betas and then observed how it impacted their work.

One of the most interesting parts of the Office 2007 story--for me--is how Microsoft broke from their previous Office development practices. Since the first version of Word, the number of features in each Office release has grown exponentially. Word alone now has hundreds of features, and that complexity was managed (poorly) through things like task panes and expandable menus.

Consider, for example, that five of the top 10 features requested by Word users were for features that existed in the product already--people just couldn't find them.

So over dinner last night I got a chance to chat with David Morton, one of the developers who worked on the ribbon team. I asked about the culture change that had to happen enable this break from previous Office interface development efforts.

He said: "The biggest thing was that we had project managers that wanted an iterative process."

This brought home a few important points for me:

• Mindset matters. The ribbon is evidence of how a change in mindset--moving to iterative design process--can be a driver of significant innovation. I don't want to minimize the effort and skill that went into the ribbon; but those changes started with adopting an iterative mindset.
• Leadership matters. Process change doesn't happen on its own; someone has to lead the change.
• Leadership can come from the middle. It doesn't take a C-level executive to change a mindset. At some point the C-levels will certainly need to buy into the changes if they are to become institutionalized. But many of the ribbon changes started with people in the middle.

This is encouraging. If the world's largest software company (working on its flagship product worth billions of dollars in profits) can develop a culture of iteration, then certainly smaller companies can do it too.

Posted in Opinions on February 20, 2007

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