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Editor's note: Windows 8 provides a number of platform capabilities for enabling highly responsive touch support in applications, ranging from hardware accelerated graphics and improved touch targeting to the a new app platform that makes it easy to build touch-optimized Windows 8-style apps. The new Office takes advantage of these to deliver great new touch-based experiences on Windows 8. Clint Covington, a lead program manager for our User Experience team authored this post. We're hearing reports of IE10 users not successfully viewing the videos. If you are unable to play the videos, please visit the Office Next page on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/MicrosoftOfficeNext . We've also updated the post to point to higher quality videos on Office channel on YouTube, and these are compatible with IE10 (both modes).
On Monday in San Francisco we took the wraps off of the new Office's touch experience designed for Windows 8. We showed the new touch-optimized Windows 8-style app for OneNote, and we showed how we've touch-enabled Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other apps on the desktop. The new Office is designed for a great experience whether you're sitting on a couch with a tablet, or at a desk with a mouse and keyboard. It makes common tasks fast, fluid, and intuitive, while still enabling the rich capabilities required to create high-quality documents. In this post I'll walk you through the thinking, engineering process and design framework we used to reimagine these experiences for touch.
When we started planning the next version of Office, it was clear that touch was going to be a big part of how people used Office in the future, and we were excited about the opportunity to add a delightful new dimension to our apps. Hardware was evolving rapidly to enable new types of PCs and mobile devices, and along with them new styles of interaction, new physical postures, and new usage locations. We believed people would continue to use Office at their desks, and type on physical keyboards at a desktop or laptop, but would also start to use tablets and hybrid laptop/tablet devices in a variety of other situations: leaning back in a chair, leaning forward on a train, bus, or plane, sitting on a couch, lying in bed, standing and holding with two hands, or walking down the hall.
We analyzed what kinds of tasks were comfortable to do in each of the postures, and what kinds of input were best for different kinds of tasks. For example, a physical keyboard is optimal for large amounts of typing (still significantly faster than an on-screen keyboard for most people). A mouse is optimal for precise targeting, and touch is great for broad strokes such as scrolling and zooming. In some postures, such as standing, touch is the preferred input, while the efficiency of typing at a desk is hard to beat. Each posture and input characteristic is great for some jobs and not as good for others. We wanted to make sure Office apps felt intuitive, natural and comfortable as across different postures and different kinds of input.
In parallel, Windows was introducing deep investments in touch, ranging from new touch digitizer requirements for touch-enabled PC hardware, through new touch drivers, new platform APIs, and a new user experience. This platform provided us with the core capabilities to deliver a natural experience across our applications and the new usage postures. (As a side note, many of Office's new touch capabilities will work on touch machines running Windows 7, but improvements in the underlying platform in Windows 8 make the experience substantially better, improving everything from the touch targeting accuracy - making it easier to tap the button you meant to tap - to the button sizes on the screen, to the speed and responsiveness of the touch feedback.)
We've invested in touch in two ways for the next version of Office. The first is that we've begun to build new versions of some of our apps (OneNote and Lync) specifically tailored for the new experience in Windows 8. For these, we deliberately started from scratch to design new versions that were touch-first. The second is that we've touch-enabled the familiar desktop versions of all of the Office apps. These continue to be designed first and foremost for mouse & keyboard, and to preserve the features & layout you're used to, but now support touch throughout the experience. This dual approach allows you to immediately get the full power of Office on a touch machine with no relearning required, along with new experiences that embrace touch from the ground up and deeply integrate with the new experiences in Windows 8.
The scope of our vision meant we would be making broad changes across all of the Office applications. We started by identifying the heavily traveled paths through each app and using these to focus our efforts. Some examples were working with mail, sending an instant message, reading a document, editing a spreadsheet, and presenting a slide deck. We wanted to ensure that each of these felt great end-to-end using only touch, or a mixture of touch, mouse, and keyboard.
The next step was to develop a common framework for how we would enable touch across Office. After comparing our current experiences with where we wanted to go, we came up with the following areas of investment:
Touch responsivenessTouch targetingSelecting text & objectsTypingCommanding
We wrote detailed guidelines for each of these areas and established minimum bar expectations for how the work should come together. We worked closely with people across the company to make sure the internal touch language is consistent across Microsoft experiences and cultivate learning transfer. We built out scorecards for each scenario and identified areas of work that needed to happen to achieve a consistent, responsive and delightful experience that leaves people touching with confidence. Here is an example of one of our early scorecards for the work with mail scenario:
Let's take a look at each of these guidelines.
When you touch something, it needs to immediately respond. Content needs to "stick to your finger" when you pan and zoom. The UI needs to respond with inertia and bounce when flicked or reach the top/end of sections. Pictures need to immediately resize as you drag your finger, and text needs to reflow around it to give the user a sense of physical realness to the action.
To build an experience where content sticks to a finger, we had to refactor much of the document surface to use a compositor where content is rendered into images and moved around on the screen with animations. This required us to migrate away from GDI to modern hardware accelerated graphics services. The result of this work is an experience that feels natural and responsive. Here are some examples:
Targeting refers to successfully touching the thing you're trying to touch. Targeting is almost entirely about raw physical size. Fingers are much bigger than mouse pointers or pen tips, so things need to be physically larger on the screen in order to be comfortable to touch. The Windows team did extensive research to develop guidelines for hit target sizes, which we used throughout our designs.
The new Windows 8-style apps for OneNote and Lync were designed from scratch, so we were able to ensure that every part of the experience was easy to touch right out of the gate. In the desktop apps, many of the typical hit targets designed for mouse and keyboard did not meet these guidelines, so we had to figure out how to resize them. We identified two types user interface elements that needed to be adjusted larger:
Fixed parts of the user interface that are always visible, such as the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT), status bar, ribbon, and folders in OutlookContextual parts of the user interface that
appear in response to a user action, such as context menus and the MinibarMany fixed user interface elements fell well below the minimum size to be touchable. It was not possible to reliably touch common commands like the Save button in the QAT. So we added a new feature called Touch Mode that increases the size of fixed UI. Touch Mode is automatically turned on for properly configured tablet machines. It increases the size of the QAT, Ribbon tabs, adds spacing around small buttons in the ribbon, increases the height of the status bar, turns on the Outlook touch triage action bar and adds space to expanded folders in Outlook. Here is an example of a portion of the Word ribbon with Touch Mode on and off:
Touch Mode Off:
Touch Mode On:
You can turn on Touch Mode by clicking on the QAT overflow and selecting the Touch Mode icon. The icon then will show up in the QAT and can easily toggle Touch Mode on and off.
A lot of Office’s contextual UI (menus, context menus, color pickers, mini-tool bar, etc) contains small hit targets as well. Since contextual UI isn’t visible until you take an action, we can decide whether to show a touch or mouse-optimized version based on whether the action was a touch or a mouse click. So contextual UI can always be the right size regardless of whether you’re in touch mode. For example, if a context menu was invoked through touch, we spaced items in the menu to make it more comfortable to touch. Here is an example of how the color picker renders differently for touch verses the mouse:
For shapes, charts and pictures we increased the size of the grab handles and used Windows touch targeting APIs to make it easier for users to select and resize objects.
New Windows 8 APIs tell us the shape of a finger on the screen and the first contact point. If the first contact point is not inside the grab handle, we have the opportunity to detect if a finger overlapped it and ensure the selection is successful. The end result is a finger feels more precise and people miss-tap less. These touch targeting APIs are used across Office to help users touch with confidence through more accurate determination of user intent for sloppy or imprecise touches. See the Touch hardware and Windows 8 post on the Windows 8 Engineering blog for more detail.
One special case of targeting is grabbing and object and dragging it. When you are simply dragging something onto another object, for example, dragging an e-mail onto a folder in Outlook, the difficulty of targeting the folder while dragging isn’t much different from trying to simply tap on it. (It’s actually a bit easier.) However, when you’re dragging an object in order to position it, it’s hard to get the same precision you get with a mouse. To help with this, we’ve added guidelines and snap points that appear automatically when moving or resizing pictures, shapes and other objects. This makes it easy to line them up with margins or other objects.
One of the most fundamental actions in Office is selection of text and objects. Mice and keyboards make selection easy with precise targeting & modifiers such as the shift and control keys. A finger lacks the precision required to do these operations efficiently, so we worked with the Windows team to develop a series of selection patterns for text and objects.
We added new text selection handles to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Visio, Lync and messages in Outlook. Here are a couple of examples from Word and Excel:
These are the same text selection handles you see across Windows 8 in apps like the new modern browser. To select multiple objects, we followed the Windows guidelines for cross-slide to select multiple slides and drag and drop to rearrange. You can easily select multiple objects in PowerPoint by keeping one finger down and tapping on other shapes and pictures. Typing is a part of many scenarios in Office. Windows 8 made a large investment in its on-screen or “virtual” keyboard. In the new Windows 8-style apps for OneNote and Lync, the virtual keyboard appears and disappears automatically, leveraging APIs provided by Windows.
In the desktop apps, we needed to do some more work:
The keyboard didn't appear automatically when you needed itIt sometimes covered what you were typingYou had little space left to work while it was visibleWith Office 2010 and Windows 7, people have to manually invoke the keyboard through clicking on the keyboard icon in the Windows task bar. Windows 8 provides new desktop APIs that allow Office to hide and show the virtual keyboard automatically.Few things cause more frustration in touch than when the virtual keyboard shows up and overlaps content or the area where you are typing. It is even more frustrating when as you type, the cursor scrolls under the keyboard. Windows 8 includes new desktop APIs that inform our applications when the keyboard is coming and going, as well as where it is on the screen. This lets our applications scroll content out of the way and keep the cursor in view as you type.
We found there was little space to work with content when the ribbon is expanded and the virtual keyboard is up. This leaves users feeling cramped and frustrated. To solve this problem, we default the ribbon to collapsed mode on tablet machines. This gives users more space to work. We introduced a number of subtle refinements to the interaction model of the ribbon to make it work even better in collapsed mode. You will notice that it now is possible to execute multiple commands at a time (such as Bold, Italic and Underline). Yet, when you execute a command that is highly unlikely to be followed up by another ribbon click, it goes away (e.g. Insert Table).
We also build a full screen view that allows users to hide the ribbon and status bar so they can focus on content and see even more lines of text or rows of cells without the chrome taking away from valuable content space. We will provide more details about full screen view in a subsequent post.
The virtual keyboard is not as efficient for typing text as a physical keyboard. Many of our scenarios and new postures required users to use the virtual keyboard to complete a job, and we wanted to reduce traffic to the virtual keyboard where ever possible.
Common patterns include suggestion menus and most recently used (MRU) lists that remember previous input. For many years, applications remember paths to recently opened documents. This used to work well, as people primarily used one computer. With the use of Smart Phones, Tablets and the cloud, people need to access documents across different machines, at home and at work. If you are connected to the Office service, your document and common locations MRU will roam across all of your devices. This significantly reduces traffic to the file open and file save dialogs which invariably involves typing in hard to remember, archaic file paths.
Excel's new Flash Fill is another feature that saves you time because Office does the typing for you. Here's how it works:
The final area of focus for touch is the command experience.
In the desktop apps, it was nearly impossible to complete any of our scenarios without using the Ribbon, Backstage, Context Menus or MiniBar. Additionally, we know from the Customer Experience Improvement Program that many commands are executed through the keyboard. Some of the most common commands like Cut, Copy, Paste, and Delete are most frequently executed through the keyboard and not the application's command interface. Here are a few of the guiding principles we came up with as we refined the commanding experience:
Common commands are easy to find and fast to useUsers locate commands in consistent places between touch and mouse/keyboard experiencesFrequent keyboard actions (cut/copy/paste/delete) are easily accessibleThe user experiences feels familiar and touchable
As we evaluated our scenarios, we found that most would be accomplished with a small subset of commands. When people use Office with touch, we expect them to work on different tasks than sitting at a desk with a mouse and keyboard. We also found for many contexts (selected text, picture, shape, table, etc) a small number of commands make up the majority of actions. As mentioned earlier, the vertical real estate becomes a scarce commodity. All of these insights lead us to want to provide users with quick access to common commands while keeping enough vertical real estate to work with their content.
In addition, in designing our new apps for Windows 8, we aimed to be consistent with the goals and design language of all of the other Windows 8 apps that are being developed and deliver an experience optimized to help you get your work done. Most importantly, we expect you to be able to focus on your work and we want the Office user interface to get out of the way. Windows 8 is designed so that apps have control of every bit of real estate on the screen and we want to pass that real estate on to you. This gives you the room you need to work - to read, to type, to move around and see your content. When you do need to take an action, then the commands that you need are just a click, tap, or swipe away.
Office 2007 introduced the concept of a MiniBar - a small strip of commands that show up when you select text or certain objects. The minibar was designed to provide efficient access to frequent commands. For Office 15, we extended the minibar to support our touch scenarios.
In the desktop apps, we changed it to show up when users tap on selected items like text, cells, images and shapes. We added common keyboard commands such as Paste, Cut, Copy and Delete to decrease traffic to the virtual keyboard and help people accomplish scenarios much faster. Here the MiniBar for a picture:
For second-tier commands, there is also a contextual menu drop down from the MiniBar. These are the less frequent commands, but makes the common right click actions with a mouse and keyboard also available with touch. When the contextual menu shows, it does not repeat commands already on the minibar (such as cut, copy and paste). Here is the same picture with the context menu expanded:
Communicate with others is one of our most important scenarios for tablets because we expect users to spend lots of time in Outlook triaging mail. We found for mail there were a small set of commands that dominate usage. These frequent commands include Reply, Reply All, Forward, Delete, Move to Folder, Flag and Mark as Unread.
Originally we exposed these options in the mail message list. As we started using Outlook on tablets, it became clear the posture of the usage was different. It was extremely difficult to target a delete button in the middle of the screen when in the preferred lean forward posture while holding the device with two hands. In this position it is much easier to use thumbs to target real estate along the edges. Here is how the thumb bar works in Outlook:
Your tools at your fingertips. That's the goal behind the radial menus that are available while you are typing and editing in the new OneNote app for Windows 8. The commands that we expect you to use most while editing, we make available next to your content. While you are working, your commands stay tucked behind the menu. But when you need to format your text, for example, just click or tap on the radial menu and the commands you need appear:
The radial menu is designed so that the most common commands you need are available immediately. Then if you need more commands, you can just swipe your finger out from the center of the menu or tap on any of the arrows around the menu. For instance, more formatting commands are available right there next to bold:
You'll also notice that when the commands are tucked away, the radial menu changes based on what you are doing. For example, if you are typing and need to insert a table or a bulleted list, you'll see:
However, if you are working with images, you'll see:
Under each menu are the commands or tools that you'll need at that time. And you don't even need to expand the menu to select the 8 most common actions. You can just swipe the radial menu in the direction of the command you want. For example, if you have some text selected, swiping right on the collapsed radial menu will bold text, swiping up will copy, and swiping left will undo. They're like keyboard shortcuts for touch. These quick swipes are just one more way radial menus can make touch interactions more fast and fluid, without getting in the way of your content.
Finally, like all other Windows 8 style apps, we expose the commands that you need to navigate within Lync and OneNote in an app bar at the bottom of the screen. Just swipe in from the edge of the screen or right click (or press the Windows key + Z) and an app bar slides in:
In this screen shot from OneNote, you can see that you can move back and forward through your notes, bring up your list of notebooks or pages, add a new page, or give us feedback on the app (please do!).
The app bar will also change based on what you right clicked on. For example, if you right click on a section within an OneNote notebook, additional commands will appear on the left side of the app bar. Now you can also rename or delete the section or copy a link to that section:
We are excited about the opportunity to enable a whole new set of usage postures for Office, from the bus to the plane to the couch to the hallway. We are excited how with touch common tasks are fast, fluid and intuitive while still enabling the rich capabilities required to create high-quality documents. We hope you enjoy using the new Office as much as we did building it. There is still a bit of touch polish work left but I encourage you to download the preview, install OneNote MX, and please give us feedback. We look forward to your comments! Thanks
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Liz Wilkins is Senior Marketing Manager for Education at Adobe Systems UK. Her involvement with Adobe Education products has seen her work closely with a range of educational institutions, championing the use of digital media tools in the curriculum, and their integration into a number of subject areas in order to better prepare students for the future demands of the workplace. Liz works closely with teachers and administrators integrating software, curriculums, and instructional resources as well as certification options and professional development tools. Through promoting digital literacy in cross-curricular education, teaching essential career skills, and streamlining administrative processes Liz has experience working in partnership with a diverse portfolio of schools and further education institutions. 
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