Designing the pen toolbox.

The pen toolbox project was a project to understand how people used their digital pen in Office and if we could make easier, more natural, more useful for users. Turn out, yes for all of it. We did a series of usability studies that focused on aspects like drawing, selection, ribbon organization, and conversion. We spent 2 months observing how customers use the Draw Tab by having them recreate two simple diagrams using only pen and touch in Win32 PowerPoint.

WHAT WE SAW: A lot of really bad drawings. PowerPoint is a tool used by millions of people to create polished, professional content. We created the Draw Tab a few years ago as a way for many of these people to get the ideas in their head onto the slide in an easy, natural way. Unfortunately, the current design is confusing, and the tools don’t work like most of our users would expect.

THE PROBLEMS WE IDENTIFIED:

1. Drawing with the pen is easy. Everything else is hard.
2. Ink features tend to not be consistent with how people expect technology to work.
3. Lack of feedback causes people to make errors and not understand what the pen is going to do.
4. Experience cliff that people can’t overcome.
5. People can’t complete tasks because they don’t understand how to approach using the pen.
6. People don't know what they can and can't do.

WHAT WE DID: We spent many hours watching video recordings from our interviews to understand patterns and errors our users were making with the simple activity we had them do. From there, we created several different affinity diagrams, trying to synthesize all the problems we saw, it's a few key takeaways we'll go design for. At the end of the project, we identified several key components on the pen toolbox that needed to be explored, designed or all together deleted. This simple research project lead us to a whole new framework for the pen toolbox. One that users not only understand how to use, but also enjoy using it.

Ink intelligence & gestures.

For those who have to build documents, we know it can be hard starting. Some like to build an outline, others might draw shapes for how or where elements of a presentation could go. We think the best way for users to start is with their pen - it's something everyone is already familiar with. The great thing about ink intelligence is, Office can take those hand-written notes or shapes and transform it into something polished and final, not just allowing users an easy way to start, but an easy way to finish.

When users ink in Office, there are three outcomes: to create content that's part of the document, to annotate/add comments to a document or to use ink as a tool for editing content. The ink gesture library is that tool for editing. When users click the Ink Editor button in the ribbon, their pen becomes the tool for deleting words, highlighting, selection, adding new words, etc.

Below are a few Microsoft commercials to showcase some of the features related to ink. These investments are larger than just inking in Office - instead this effort highlights the collaboration between a variety of app teams, the Windows platform team, the hardware team and marketing.