The following are taken from the study of micsrosft entitled Developer Overview of the User Interface for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (March, 2006)

In the design of the 2007 release, the Microsoft Office User Experience team reevaluated the way our customers interact with Microsoft Office programs. Informed by vast quantities of usability data and taking into account recent advancements in hardware and software, the 2007 Microsoft Office release delivers the most significant update to the user interface (UI) in more than a decade. The result is the Microsoft Office Fluent UI system, a comprehensive set of controls that work together to help users be more productive and efficient while using Microsoft Office programs to create documents that are more effective.

This document describes the underlying philosophy and the goals that directed the design of the Microsoft Office Fluent UI system in the 2007 Office release. It presents an overview of the individual system components—including graphics of major UI features—and describes how these components deliver an enhanced user experience that enables users to more easily find and use the rich functionality of Microsoft Office programs in their daily work.

The 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system introduces an extensibility model for the Ribbon that allows you to integrate seamlessly and add functionality to Microsoft Office applications. The new model supports adding functionality to existing Ribbon tabs, adding new tabs, groups, and controls to the Ribbon, and replacing the existing Ribbon.

The extensibility model introduces a consistent way to modify the UI and persist the modifications across the core Microsoft Office programs. The 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system exposes richer controls, such as big buttons and split buttons, so that you can communicate priority and hierarchy in a manner consistent with the UI system. It is also easier for you to reuse built-in graphics and images when creating controls. An updated identification scheme for UI elements makes it much easier to reference built in controls and to localize add-ins and custom solutions.

This section presents the fundamental principles of results-oriented design. These principles guided and informed the design of the Office Fluent UI. To ensure a consistent user experience and to empower workers to create better documents by efficiently accessing the core strengths of Microsoft Office tools, when building solutions based on the Microsoft Office system, you should embrace the following principles:

·         Focus. The user’s attention should be on the content, not on the UI. The results-oriented approach allows the user to perform sophisticated formatting and advanced tasks without diverting their attention from the document or content on which they are working.

·         Context. The contextualization of as many commands and properties as possible is crucial. Increase the user’s sense of mastery by reducing the number of choices presented at any given time. Reduce the command space by eliminating redundant or seldom-used features.

·         Efficiency. Focus on efficiency rather than scope. Users must be able to find the most powerful features for the task quickly and easily. A small gain in the scope of features used is not worth a significant loss in the efficient use of the features.

·         Consistency. A results-oriented user experience is best accomplished by clearly providing intuitive ways to solve different problems. When applying tools to tasks, flexible consistency is desirable; homogeneity is not.

·         Permanence. Clearly defined access to tools ensures better usability. Ambiguity is reduced by establishing permanent homes for groups of features. A consistent-location UI is favored over a "smart" UI.

·         Predictability. The Microsoft Office applications offer a long and rich legacy of acceptance, upon which you can build successful UI innovation. Straight-forward design ensures continued user comfort and maximized results. Favor the predictable over the novel.

The 2007 Office release introduces an innovative model that developers can use to enhance the user experience. A new extensibility model enables you to add new functionality to Microsoft Office applications and to expose entry points in the Office Fluent UI in a more integrated way, and with a much larger control set, than in any previous release. The Office Fluent UI addresses many issues developers have identified with the current Command Bars object model, making it easier to accomplish common developer scenarios.

For existing solutions, the 2007 release ensures compatibility by revealing UI changes made to the legacy menu and toolbar set. This ensures that third-party add-ins and custom solutions developed for previous releases will work in the 2007 release without requiring modification.

The following sections address compatibility of existing Microsoft Office application customizations and Office-based solutions with the 2007 release, and they provide guidance for developing solutions using the Office Fluent UI system. Sources of detailed information about the extensibility model for the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system are listed under Additional Resources.

Conclusion

The Office Fluent UI offers both business users and organizations an opportunity to take information worker productivity to a new level. As users achieve a new level of mastery over Microsoft Office programs, the UI in the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system helps them harness their full power to create rich and stunning documents. For developers who build solutions based on the Microsoft Office system, the flexibility and ease of customization of the Office Fluent UI, along with the improved functional organization, helps create a powerful but responsive user experience, enabling both beginners and advanced users to achieve sophisticated results with much less effort.

The introduction of a new, XML-based development model, optimized for common developer scenarios and applied consistently across the core Microsoft Office applications, streamlines the development of rich solutions and helps ensure that custom solutions can realize the benefits of results-oriented UI design.