I mentioned Jensen Harris of the Office team had begun blogging in a PDC-related post earlier this week. Today, he busts some myths that have already cropped up in reaction to the first public viewing of Office 12. In a post today, he tackles three myths that have been getting a lot of pickup in the blogspace:

1. The new UI tries to guess what I want to do

2. The visual design of the ribbon is stolen from Mac OS X.

3. The ribbon is huge

I particularly liked the explanation Jensen provided about #2 and #3.  On #3, consider this illustration Jensen posted:



Those of you who work in the software biz know that the actual artwork used in UI elements is the last thing to be built. The functionality needs to be frozen first. Addressing #2, Jensen explains:

"The important point to take away is: The visual look and feel you are seeing in the screenshots is not what we intend to ship.  Keep in mind is that this is the earliest we've ever shared detailed information or screenshots of an Office release.  We're still months away from even beta 1!

One of the ways we structure our engineering of Office is such that we're often done doing most of the coding before we have the full set of production visuals finished.  It takes a lot of money and time for our design team to coordinate the creation of thousands of visual elements necessary for a full production skin.  So, what we do is define the structural requirements of the visual design ahead of time—things such as "we need a 9-grid bitmap with three different states behind this button" or "we'll need a stretched tiled vector image behind this surface".  Then, in order to test the code behind the visuals, we create some temporary artwork that allows our test and development teams to make sure all the drawing code works as it should.

In the meantime, as we start to finalize the interaction design, we work to create the actual visual skin so that they fit "hand in glove" together and complement one another.  That's a process that has just about finished up, and we're now starting to make the actual production artwork.

The long and short of it is: what you're seeing now is just temporary artwork and doesn't share the visual look and feel we intend for the final product.  What you can focus on is the interaction design: the controls, concepts, and way of working with the product.  That is a piece we're ready to start getting feedback on."

If you're seriously interested in the next version of Office you ought to be subscribed to this blog. It's rapidly becoming of my favorite Microsoft employee blogs. Great writing, honest explanations, and some great insights into what it takes to produce a product as massive and ubiquitous as Office.