Have you ever wondered how the Office Fluent interface can into being? Jensen Harris, Principal Group Program Manager Office User Experience Team, made a presentation at Microsoft's MIX08 conference this year titled "The Story of the Ribbon." He talked about the general design process they used to come up with the Office 2007 user interface, to iterate on it, and to evaluate it. As part of the discussion, he showed for the first time some of the early prototypes they worked on (and abandoned or refined) along the way.
We will be playing the video of Jensen's presentation this month.