REDMOND, Wash., June 13, 2018 /CNW/ -- Starting Wednesday,
the most-used productivity product in the
world is getting a makeover.
Whether you're writing a letter in Word, managing a budget in
Excel or sending an email in Outlook, Microsoft Office is the
go-to place to get stuff done for people around the
world.
Beginning today, millions of people who
use Office at home and work will begin to see
some welcome changes designed to deliver a balance of power and
simplicity. These updates are exclusive to Office.com and Office
365 — the always up-to-date versions of our apps and
services:
- Simplified ribbon. A new, updated version of the ribbon
is designed to help users focus on their work and collaborate
naturally with others. People who prefer to dedicate more screen
space to the commands will still be able to expand the ribbon to
the classic three-line view.
- New icons and color. Across the apps you'll start to see
new icons and colors built as scalable graphics — so they
render with crisp, clean lines on screens of any size. These
changes are designed to both modernize Office design and make it
more inclusive and accessible.
- Search. Search will become a much more important element
of the user experience, providing access to commands, content and
people. With "zero query search" simply placing your cursor in the
search box will bring up recommendations powered by AI and the
Microsoft Graph.
These design changes are focused on the following:
- Customers. We're using a customer-driven innovation
process to co-create the design of the Office apps. That
process consists of three phases: initial customer research and
analysis; concepting and co-creation; and validation and
refinement.
- Context. Customers love the power of Office, but
they don't need every feature at the same time. We want our new
designs to understand the context that you are working in so that
you can focus on your content. That means both surfacing the most
relevant commands based on the work you are doing and making it
easy to connect and collaborate with others.
- Control. We recognize that established skills and
routines are powerful — and that the way someone uses the apps
often depends on specific parts of the user interface. So we
want to give end users control, allowing them to toggle significant
changes to the user experience on and off.
Over the last year, Microsoft completed extensive customer
research and spent many months working side-by-side with customers
to guide design changes. As a result, customers will benefit from a
more simplified experience while maintaining the full power of
Office and a design ethos that is more inclusive — empowering
everyone to create, communicate and collaborate. The team also
increased its focus not just on what people think of the product,
but how they feel using it.
"Through gathering feedback from thousands of people, we've
found that people react most positively to feeling in control,
productive and secure," said Trish
Miner, principal design researcher, Microsoft.
And to ensure that we continue to listen, learn and respond
quickly to customer feedback, the company is including an
in-product survey to ascertain how features make people feel. "The
good news is that as we better understand these correlations
between the design of features and how people feel while using
them, we can develop technologies that are more empathetic," Miner
said.
The design refresh will start rolling out to business and
consumer customers beginning in June. More information on the new
Office design can be found at
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/06/13/power-and-simplicity-updates-to-the-office-365-user-experience/.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables digital
transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an
intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every
organization on the planet to achieve more.
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.