I was lucky enough to give two sessions at our Expression Session 07 in San Francisco and this discussion was about how we used principles of interaction design and user experience to redesign the Office 2007 interface and Vista. The conversation was both a forensic exploration of how Office got into its predicament (circa 2003) and a detailed explanation of some of the things that motivated us as we redesigned the interface.
This was the first time I'd given this presentation and to be honest, I spent a little too much time in the slides and not enough time in the application actually showing what I was talking about--I'll do more of that the next time I give the presentation. In addition, my own take, is that I was a bit too 'markety.' I'm going to spend more time in my next iteration of this presentation actually talking about some of the processes that we went through, including some of our design processes. One thing I've learned is that it's difficult to give this presentation if you're unsure of the composition of your audience. It's easy to bore designers with ideation and design process talk so I usually focus on techniques applied with that type of crowd. But I've found with folks that don't know much about design (or at least design process) that it requires more background or I lose people.
There's a podcast of this somewhere and I'll track down and link to it as soon as I'm able. After the launch events are concluding and my presentation is in it's final form I'll post that as well. (Picture from iStockPhoto.com)
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