Being a non-technical publication, the BBC News website has an insightful look (and live demos) at the new user interface in the forthcoming version of Microsoft Office. (The short version for the video-challenged amongst you is that the traditional menus are out, replaced with “ribbons” of buttons which appear to be context-sensitive toolbars.)

So, Microsoft has finally come up with something truly innovative? Perhaps — but the proof of the pudding is in the eating and it’s going to take some time before we get to eat this. Microsoft has “innovated” before: remember the new feature of one Office version which hid “complicated” menu items from users and learnt which menu items you used so only those were displayed in the short list? It was absolute nightmare in usability terms since menu items were never in the same place twice, thus slowing down anyone with even moderate mouse skills, and confused the hell out of beginners. Another problem I foresee is that Microsoft are unlikely to make this paradigm easily available to other (third party) Windows applications, resulting in a great deal of inconsistency across applications, even for Microsoft’s own products (since this is a feature of Office, not Vista). Consistency is one of the most important factors in making a computer easy to use: on a platform with a consistent user interface if I know how to perform task X in application Y, I know how to do it in the application Z; and if I know what pressing a button does in one application, I can be confident it will have the same effect in another.

To be fair, the reason Office has been the application where Microsoft has performed its user interface experiments is because Office has so many features that some feel it has simply outgrown the menu/toolbar paradigm. I am not convinced by this: I have not compared the feature sets, but I found Abiword’s interface to be considerably more straightforward. Personally, I think one of Office’s main problems has been the move to push an ever-increasing number of functions into toolbar buttons of an ever-decreasing size. Sure, large cartoony toolbar buttons may consume screen space, but they’re easy to hit with a mouse, and if you’re not the sort that uses a mouse to press toolbar buttons then you’d be better turning the toolbar off altogether. Thus, new users can use the large, friendly toolbar buttons where there is enough space for the icon to really indicate what the button does; advanced users are going to use keyboard shortcuts anyway.