Cow’s Blog

June 30th, 2006

Recently Sunny Boy started writing a "Blog of the Week" feature which I really like the concept of. It’s a nice way of writing about and pointing people towards other similar and relevant blogs. At the moment I’m linking to 5 of my favourite blogs in the footer; I’ll probably replace this feature with "Blog of the Week".

I don’t believe I’ll stick to a weekly schedule so the chances are there will be some weeks where there are two Blog of the Weeks and there may be weeks when there are none. It’s just a nice trademark

Jensen Harris

Jensen Harris works for Microsoft on the UI of Office 2007 and has a fabulous blog which details and documents many of the new features and interface improvements in Office 2007. It’s a really interesting blog as it isn’t the normal marketing speak from Microsoft - the blog details some of the thinking behind the interface changes and some of the testing done.

Among the interesting posts:

• History of Office UI
  From Word 1.0 to Word 2000
• Combating the perception of bloat
  A look at how Office 2000 tried to combat bloat
• Office 12 Keyboard Shortcuts
  Key Tips.
• The MiniBar
  A way of reducing command loops and quick way of changing formatting.
• Dialog Launchers
  Exposing advanced options through ribbon panels.
• Be Willing To Be Wrong

For Office 2007 fans, user interface designers, Jakob Nielsen wannabes it’s a great read. The amount of posts has slowed down in the last few weeks but I guess that’s to be expected as Office 2007 is becoming a lot more stable and is almost ready to ship.

• Topics: Office 2007, User Interface Design, Usability
• Reading since: 15th October 2005
• URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/

• Blog of the Week
• Comments(2)