What You Get Is What You See: Results-Oriented UI

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen announced today that WYSIWYG is dead.

In a Monday morning moment, I thought for a second that the lover of white backgrounds, black text and blue underlined links had decided to banish this pink monstrosity from the interweb 😉 Fear not, he is actually talking about user interfaces!

The article is very interesting and argues that What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interfaces have reached the end of the road. It was once wondrous to build up a document from scratch in Word, seeing what you would eventually print on screen at all times, while happily making text look pretty as you worked. However, nowadays there is so much functionality packed into common applications such as Word and Excel that it can be hard to know where to start! Many of us (well, I for one… ) end up desperately digging through menus in an effort to complete relatively simple tasks.

Well, Microsoft think they have found a solution! Nielsen links to demo shots of the new Microsoft Office interface, an example of a "Results-Oriented UI":

As the demos show, the most obvious departure from the past is that menus and toolbars are all but wiped out. The focus is now on letting users specify the results they want, rather than focusing on the primitive operations required to reach their goals.

The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target — say an org chart or an entire document — and watch it change shape as you mouse over the alternatives in the gallery. The interaction paradigm has been reversed; it’s now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.

Where Microsoft Office leads, the rest have little choice but to follow, given that this suite of applications is what people are most familiar with. It will be interesting to see how this fresh perspective is received.

Perhaps I will even rebrand my blog to keep up 😉 Although, while WYSIWYG may be a rather cryptic moniker to most, ROUI just does not do it for me! 🙂