Incremental Search and Office 2007
Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror has expressed his annoyance with finding features in Microsoft’s new Ribbon user interface. If you’d like a bit more information I urge you to read his excellent rundown on part of Microsoft’s new Fluent Interface called the Ribbon , Microsoft’s cancelled “Scout” functionality and how incremental search is useful. It’s a great read.
I’m sure many companies are trying to justify the expense of upgrading to Office 2007. Microsoft certainly touts large gains in productivity and the savings due to it are used to justify the extra software costs. There are other costs that may not be apparent to the people not writing the business cases. Training and an initial loss of productivity are very important to quantify. With such a radical departure from the existing menu and toolbar metaphor many business users end up spending hours trying to find things that used to take seconds. Scout was supposed to provide a searchable way of navigating in the new Ribbon world, unfortunately this feature was killed. Microsoft, helpful as always, has created a couple of tools that they bill as “User Interface Guides” for the Office 2007 System. If Microsoft can lower those training costs then they can sell more software right? Unfortunately the UI Guides are limited to only only a few of Office 2007’s applications: Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. While these hit the most used applications there are still a few gaps such as Access 2007.
Each guide is a small Adobe Flash application that lets you select the menu option you’re looking for in a mock version of Office 2003. If you’re lucky then you’re then shown a quick tooltip listing the steps to take and brief video on how to navigate to that new feature in Office 2007. For a great number of features you’re greeted with an unfortunate message:
Some Word 2003 commands don’t have an equivalent in Word 2007. To find out how to do the task you used to do with this command, search for the task in online Help for Word 2007.
Obviously this rubs a lot of users the wrong way. While it may be helpful for many it certainly doesn’t obviate much training. Apple, on the other hand provides a rather slick way of finding occasionally cryptic commands in their system preferences. Phil Windley recently ran across a problem with his laptop’s contrast while using OS X. In the example below you can see how incremental search lets me easily narrow down which portion of System Preferences I need to consult to change my system’s contrast and then takes me to the specific screen I need. It does all this with some slick highlighting as well. Jon Udell has a couple of screencasts and commentary comparing Vista and Mac OS X’s handling of Phil’s problem if you’d like more info.
Many products today tout Universal Search, and integration with enterprise search platforms as a major selling point. Sometimes this is at the expense of really great search capabilities tailored to an application or is tucked away in the help system. Search should be everywhere! Search has become an absolutely natural way of finding information. It’s a computer thing, not just an Internet thing. Microsoft has begun to realize that with Vista’s incremental search in the Start Menu. Shouldn’t it expand prominently to the other major cash cow as well?
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