[gxx]

I worked on the design of the first several versions of Excel. For Excel 3.0 we were intensely interested in user behavior. We often compared alternative prototypes of proposed features in the usability lab. We sometimes would invite develpers to watch users strugging with what they thought was great idea...

Also, long before the Internet we asked users permission to send them a special version of Excel (called the Instrumented Version) that would intelligently log actions, but not data to a floppy disk. Users would send the disks back to us for analysis. We used the analysis to understand how users really did things vs what we thought the did. Sometimes we got some surprises. We used this to prioritize features where users were having difficulty that needed special attention. It also indicated frequenty performed actions that would benefit from, for example, being put on the toolbar.

I think our user focus was an important reason why Excel has been so enduring. (Although Office 2003 screwed it up to some extent - I was no longer there.)

Back then at Microsoft the applications group tended to take the lead in UI developement and many of the things we designed made their way into Windows. Some were even picked up by the Mac! Although Steve Jobs would never have admitted it.

It grieves me to see the shoddy state of software design these days. There is no craftsmanship. Visual design take precedence over real usability. Maybe this is because with fast developemnt cycles and the ability to instantly change a web based design, it's easer to throw crap at the wall and keep iterating until it sort of works.

These days user interaction designers have endless great user data on which to craft wonderful UI but it rarely happens. If they happen to hit on something good, usually another team takes over and changes it, often for the worse!

(End Rant)

[galaxyLogic]

Interesting to hear. One thing I never understood about Excel is why the cells which have formulas don't look different than cells which contain leaf-data. That I think would make it a lot more "user-friendly".

2ndly why not allow users name their columns, why do they have to always be "A", "B", "C", .. ?

[MaulingMonkey]

> One thing I never understood about Excel is why the cells which have formulas don't look different than cells which contain leaf-data.

There are some styles actually meant for this, but you have to apply them manually.

> 2ndly why not allow users name their columns, why do they have to always be "A", "B", "C", .. ?

Named columns do exist actually! Not of the excel sheet itself - but in tables you can mark within that sheet. You can use the names in equations and everything. You can also name individual cells as well.

Joel Spolsky has a whole talk where he goes into this and some of the other stuff Excel has that you might not realize it has: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

[juped]

By far the worst UI choice in Excel, which has stopped many potential power users from forming, is that "Format as Table" is named like a visual formatting option, is stuck on the ribbon next to visual formatting options, and prominently makes you pick colors and border formatting.

Whereas the reality is that making a table is the on-ramp to many of Excel's more powerful features.

[galaxyLogic]

I imagine that some developer or team had to hide such useful features under the name of "table formatting" because they could not get the ideas through in their organization. Don't know but I imagine.

[tempguy9999]

This is good stuff. Excel was (and in many ways still is) extremely well designed UI-wise (thanks for that).

In fact a lot of windows is (up to 7), and MS can be very good at UIs when they try. It's remarkable what an extraordinary amount of work went into making the interface usable without a mouse - for example, selecting something in the taskbar without a mouse:

Press ctrl-esc, press escape, press tab, then press the right arrow to move along the taskbar, the press return when you're on the one you want. It is actually logical too!

[ptidhomme]

Thanks for sharing this.

Totally agree with the nowadays lack of craftsmanship. I guess it goes with the "maximum profitability" focus we got to have.

[tempguy9999]

But the UI is the product for the user. The amount of lost goodwill (and lost customers if there is an alternative) is real money ie. less-than-max profitability. It baffles me because UI design needn't be very expensive.

[gxx]

Paying attention to how users work and and what they need can also be extremely profitable. The entire idea for Microsoft Office came from our discovering how often they were struggling with differerences in basic UI between say Excel and Word (which were quite different back then). Also how often they wanted to say copy data from Excel to Word or embed an Excel table in a Word document.

Based on this we decided to make the products more compatible in UI and able to work together better. It was a huge challenge because the products were designed by different teams that intensely belived in they way they had chosen to do things. It required Bill Gates to push it to make it happen and even then it was difficult.

Office 97 was the result and Office grew into a product that made billions for Microsoft. This came from our obsession with user experience...

[ptidhomme]

I think we all agree. I should have rather said maximum short term profitability : fancy features and half-baked UI redesigns, rather than carefully improving the efficiency of the existing ones.