I just saw a very interesting talk by Jensen Harris — the guy responsible for Office 2007’s user experience — about the development process of Office’s new UI Element “Ribbon”.

Jensen Harris

Microsoft Office — as we know it — has it’s roots back in 1989. Over the years thousands of features have been added and the UI designers at Microsoft usually took the easy way to make them accessible for the users: They added menu items, additional toolbars, and — as the users became more and more confused by zillions of buttons — task panes.

Statistics of the number of toolbars and panes in Office

It’s quite obvious that this process won’t scale forever as teaching office to users becomes more difficult with every button you add and users loose the feeling that they are in control of the application (“sense of mastery”).

So it was time for Microsoft to start over.

Jensen Harris talks a lot about the rational behind the Ribbon, the development process behind it, design iterations — including some fancy UI concepts that did not make it into the final product or only heaviliy modified — and how they evaluated their prototypes.

It’s really a great talk for everybody who has the slightest interest in User Interfaces and a must-see for people who are working in the area of Human Computer Interaction.

He talks about using low-fidelity paper prototypes and UI concepts implemented in Flash, he describes what’s behind those anonymous usage statistics that can be send to Microsoft and how the data was used.

Watch it! (90 minutes)

There are several ways to refer to dates. You can use exact dates like "January 1st, 2008", or you may use less precise descriptions like "in April 2008" or "next year". Usually everybody familiar with the western calendar will know what timeframe you are talking about. That's not the case if you're referring to week numbers, as there are several ways to calculate them.

The US have a fairly simple scheme for calculating the week number: The week which contains January 1st is defined as the first week of the year. The only drawback of this approach is that the last days of a year may fall into the first week of the following year.
Most european countries refer to ISO 8601 to enumerate weeks. The first week is the week that contains at least 4 days of the new year.

This is tricky enough if you have to sync an appointment with people who use a different calendar than you, but it gets worse if you need to calculate the week number in an application:

Excel has an build-in function =KALENDERWOCHE() to calculate the week number. However this function can only calculate the US variant of a week number and it does not support ISO 8601.
So: Be aware that there may be cultural differences in the functions you are using and keep in mind that a localized function name does not mean that the function itself is localized, too.

Use the following formula, if you need to calculate the ISO 8601 week number in Excel:

=KÜRZEN((A1-DATUM(JAHR(A1-REST(A1-2;7)+3);1;REST(A1-2;7)-9))/7)

Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woche#Kalenderwoche