[Sigia-l] office redesign (was: Nielsen: It's the end! (long))

[Listera]

Karl Fast:

> So when Nielsen wrote about a "new interaction paradigm" ... Well, I didn't.

You may not have, but the rest of the universe thinks different:

Google on "results-oriented user interface": <http://tinyurl.com/c8rey>
Bloglines: <http://tinyurl.com/b68u7>

It's the new mantra from MSFT, dutifully regurgitated by industry rags and
blogs following the PR launch, as you can see in a wide variety of pubs
cited above.

Now, I'm not going to engage in semantic hairsplitting between "original"
and "new" because Microsoft has a two-decade old, well-documented history of
appropriating stuff from other sources and introducing them as homegrown
"innovation" to their own userbase that's typically too insular to know or
care any better. As you yourself noted, what they see as new (it's new to
them) is then regarded as innovative/original. That's just the way it has
been. 

My comments focused on the very role Jakob Nielsen and his company NN/G is
playing in this charade. To be more precise, when JK says:

"The next version of Microsoft Office (code-named "Office 12") will be based
on a new interaction paradigm called the results-oriented user interface."

he's doing so to tell you (yes you, too) that there's a new ballgame, a new
paradigm, a new and better way to do UIs. It walks like innovation, it talks
like innovation, who cares about historical accuracy or precedence. It's a
new paradigm for new articles/books/reports/seminars/etc. Indeed, it just so
happens:

Evening Plenary: The Results-Oriented User Interface
<http://www.nngroup.com/events/main_event.html>
which, conveniently, features Tim Briggs, a Design Research Lead in
Microsoft¹s Office Design Group. So the commercial back-scratching circle is
complete: results-oriented user interface 99% good.

That's what the Church Lady would refer to as "Well.. isn't that special?"

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.