Nielsen and Office 12

Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, publishes in his newsletter his impressions of the new Office 12 interface.

But the title is provocative, R.I.P WYSIWYG, implying that the Mac-style interface is already dead, and that the new Office brings us a new paradigm, the Results-Oriented User Interface.

Nielsen says:

Much as I have criticized Microsoft for its thousands of buried features, the company actually has a good usability team and was well aware of the problems. Basically, it tried to retrofit usability onto an overly complicated foundation and failed. Microsoft has now finally realized that enough is enough: The company is parting ways with the old UI and going for something completely new.

Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html

How true is it? We’ll have to see Office 12. So far we only have demos, and when we get access to a beta we’ll evaluate it, but despite Microsoft’s good intentions, they are making some mistakes, as discussed in this blog.