Design manager of the Microsoft, responsible for the Office for the iPad, has published an interesting article in which speculate about the design philosophy this program. Article It will be interesting for those who wish to look behind the curtain design work, and for those who are interested in how to create an application, now used by millions of people. Here are some highlights.
Office for iPad was released in March, and was received with enthusiasm by both users and critics. The number of downloads of the program has exceeded 27 million, and the recent (by the way, the first) an impressive update pleased with the addition of features that are lacking in the initial version.
Han-Yi Shaw talked about the features, which, as it seemed the team will fall to Office users for the iPad like:
- Familiar experience with Office, we do not need to learn again.
- Good old Office, optimized for iPad.
- Immersion. Removing distractions.
- The focus is on the content of the document, not the interface.
- Always beautiful, quick and easy experience.
The purpose of the first paragraph - making experience with familiar Office - is clear and simple: the less education, more awareness and a high confidence on the part of the user. However, it is also important to find a balance between the "good old Office» and optimization platform that is optimized for the iOS platform and justification users' expectations of the touch version. The most important and challenging goal was to find a middle ground between the Office and iOS entities. Fortunately, the team working on Office for iPad and on the Mac, Apple experts recruited from the platform that enabled a deeper knowledge of the Apple platform to work on this task.
Also Han-Yi Shaw said that Microsoft has redesigned The Ribbon - the control panel the upper part of all Office programs - in order to program organically looked with a new design philosophy iOS 7. "This is meant to remove all extraneous detail," - says Shaw.
Office for iPad available in the App Store.