Software
Microsoft is promising for its best upcoming Office UI features
Microsoft is announcing the future of the Office UI and architecture today, and that includes several significant improvements to the standard ribbon interface. Throughout the past three years, the tech giant has been slowly developing Office with its Fluent Design system — adding new logos, dark mode, and upgrading the ribbon toolbar by making it smaller and easy to use. The next level of Microsoft Office production saw the company's insistence on usability going more.
"The next round of Microsoft 365 UX updates will go even further by fading model colors from device headers and exploring adaptive orders," states Jon Friedman, Microsoft's corporate vice president of design and analysis.
This helps you to push a simple toolbar across the device to wherever you find it most useful, using incremental disclosure to contextually expose commands.
This adaptive function would have the Workplace ribbon gui replaced with a toolbar that can be enabled to float the actions you perform in documents with specific commands. Microsoft is now researching how this system will work, but according to Friedman, some of the design specifics that the company is announcing today will come out in a year or two.
Since its conception, the ribbon has been a signature interface that ties together user intent and order. It started on the mobile, but when the environment and people's lives become increasingly cross-platform and multi-device, we 're re-imagining what intent and context-conscious order feels like in the future, Friedman said in a statement to The Verge. The ribbon commands accompany the actions and being mindful of the context will decrease your cognitive load and improve your concentration on the job at hand, whether you're on your phone in the subway or on your laptop in the couch or on your screen.
Microsoft first launched the ribbon style to Office 2007, and the company is now able to push past it. Microsoft has been slowly simplifying the ribbon across the smartphone and the internet, but today's new concepts are definitely a major step past the ribbon. Microsoft's streamlined Office app relies a lot more on the real content you 're making than on lipstick.
Many improvements include a basic device icon at the top of the application to show the Workplace device you are using, and a simplified search or order bar at the middle of the screen.
Microsoft has been emphasizing this search and command bar gui in Workplace in recent years, and it's a functionality that still exists in Microsoft Teams.
We 're going to further progress our streamlined, cross-suit quest to get the necessary details straight at your disposal, Friedman says. The aim of all these improvements is to drive productivity gains by reducing unwanted disruptions and concentrating resources on assignments. Overall, we 're rooting everything we're constructing in intense analysis into the dynamics of focus, Friedman says.
Many times call for long, intense focus. Others, such as certain handheld situations, are suitable for micro-tasking. Through creating multiple cognitive states, centered interactions around the Microsoft 365 environment decrease external disruptions, reduce self-interruption, and jumpstart flow.
It's not known exactly when such improvements will be made to Office applications, the internet, and other Microsoft 365 pages. Although some of these improvements will take place within a year or two, some are also very exploratory, says Friedman.
Microsoft is now undertaking "economic surveys" to better understand how job demands are evolving through this pandemic, and to help the organization develop its apps accordingly.
