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)

I frequently need to send a file here and a file there to other people. I’m using this two services for this.

drop.io

This first is drop.io for quick and hassle-free uploading and sharing of files. Just go over to drop.io, create a so called “Drop”, define (optional) passwords for you and your guests, specify what they are allowed to do (just view or allow them to add files), and the lifetime of your drop. Finished. No account sign-ups, no email confirmations. And no need to tidy up afterwards, as the drops are deleted after the lifetime is expired. It’s that easy.

You can subscribe to RSS, email, or twitter updates of your drop, which can be stuffed via web, email, phone, and fax. Nice.

Downside: Your drops are limited to 100MB if you’re using the free service. Premium services are available, too.

Dropbox

The second service Dropbox has a slightly different approach. It also provides some sharing mechanisms, but it’s primarily focused on providing a local folder that is automagically synchronized between multiple computers. Just add a file here, wait a sec, and it is available on your second computer. Synchronization clients are available for Windows, Linux and OS X.

The files are regular files on your local computer and can therefore be accessed without using awkward browser upload/download forms, although a web interface is also provided.

What’s nice is Dropbox’s versioning feature: Older revisions of your files are available and can be restored. I wouldn’t use it for software development, but this is a nice feature for documents and such.

You get 2GB for free. Bigger dropboxes can be rented.

The data is SSL-encrypted on the way to the remote servers and stored with AES encryption,

What I especially like is dropbox’s escheresque 404 message :)

Update: arstechnica just wrote about dropbox, too.