New Details Revealed About the Design Process for Office for iPad

[Maura]

Well it took long enough, but Microsoft Office for iPad was finally released back in March, and today MacRumors has a very interesting feature about how the Microsoft Office team designed the app for iPad.

MacRumors writes that Office for iPad has already had more than 27 million downloads, and been very well received by both critics and consumers alike. In the feature, Microsoft’s design manager, Han-Yi Shaw talks about how the Office for iPad team imaged what scenarios a typical user of the app might find themselves in, as well as outlining the team’s user-experience goals.

“The purpose of a familiar Office experience is simple: a low learning curve and high user confidence. However, it’s just as important to strike a balance between ‘unmistakably Office’ and ‘platform optimization,’ which means optimizing for iOS platform conventions and touch-first user expectations. The most important, yet challenging, goal was finding the sweet spot between the essence of Office and iOS. Fortunately, since the Office for iPad and Mac team (formally known as the Macintosh Business Unit) is made up of Apple platform specialists, we were able to apply our deep knowledge of Apple platforms to the task.â€

Shaw also talks about how The Ribbon at the top of all Office programs was redesigned for the app so that it would fit in with Apple’s post-iOS 7 aesthetic.

“That meant stripping out extraneous detail. If there was a visual treatment or text label that wasn’t absolutely necessary, we stripped it away.â€

You can see the results of all that stripping in the picture at the top of this post.

Source: Office for iPad Design Manager Talks About Design Process - Mac Rumors

 

[Victoria022]

Looks great!!