Interaction design / Usability / UX

Office 2007 UX Victory

Posted on:

Microsoft Office 2007 has a completely new user interaction paradigm.

The old interfaces for Microsoft Office 2003 (and earlier) organized the menu structures around features or capabilities. Each grouping represented tasks that appeared to be related in functionality. This, unfortunately, doesn’t help the user very much. The new interface is very task based, and organizes capabilities based upon the task the user is currently performing. What the Office team has done is innovate. And the innovations differentiate them from every other business application I’ve ever seen.

Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements

Epicenter software design – 37signals applies Kano

Posted on:

Jason at 37signals has started a discussion about feature prioritization with his recent post. He describes the epicenter of software as the most important, must-have feature. He argues that this feature should always be the one that is built first, since without it you don’t have an application. This is the same approach we reccommended in our recent post about prioritizing requirements with Kano analysis. The epicenter, while critically important, isn’t sufficient to drive success for the software.

Requirements / Slightly off-topic

Magic square of innovation

Posted on:

Marcus Ting-A-Kee has a post on his blog with a great magic square diagram describing a perspective on innovation. This framework provides us with an easy way to assess the potential impact of an innovation. We will…

* show how to use the square
* look at some example innovations
* and use the square to prioritize requirements