Jakob Nielsen says that the new UI paradigm to replace Apple’s will come from Microsoft:
“Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future…The next version of Microsoft Office (code-named “Office 12″) will be based on a new interaction paradigm called the results-oriented user interface”
Results-oriented UI turns out to be templates. Because there are too many options in MS Office to have individual commands the idea is that the results of groups of them are displayed.
It is, perhaps, a bit rich for anyone to champion Microsoft over Apple in terms of design at the moment, but design is subjective, I guess. Where Nielsen is provably wrong, however, is where he confuses User Interface with User Interaction (isn’t he supposed to be an expert in Interaction?):
“rather than typing in commands and parameters, users select commands from menus, freeing them from typing errors. Menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes operate on the screen’s visual objects, which faithfully represent user goals. This is known as WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get.”
No. WYSIWYG refers to the fact that what you see on the screen is what it looks like when printed or nowadays, printed on the web. It has nothing to do with dropdown menus rather than typing commands, it is just that command line interaction sits in a UI that is not WYSIWG. This is just a confused metaphor.
I used to work with a CAD system that had several thousand menu items because templates don’t tend to work for professional software. Templates are often the ‘hide the crap under the carpet’ approach of UI design avoiding stripping out superfluous features for true design elegance and providing the worst UI experience of all when templates can’t be adapted intuitively
This would be OK, but for the fact that from ‘clippy’ to the automatic insertion of things like bullet points in Word, Microsoft has a terrible record at UI which is results oriented, i.e. tries to guess what results you want and groups commands together.
What’s currently badly designed about Office is not the details or the bloat, but the premise. Yes, the WYSIWYG UI is dead, but only in the sense that it refers to printing a document from what you see on screen.
Paper documents, ledgers, and overhead projector slides were the metaphors that, Word, Excel and Powerpoint were based on. But we live in a realm of email and weblogs, websites, shared web updatable financial data and multimedia mashups. Office is not designed to deal with these types of documents. What is wrong with Office is Word, Excel and Powerpoint not the principal of menus.
R.I.P. WYSIWYG – Results-Oriented UI Coming (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)