Get the latest tech news

Why is it called the Ribbon? (2005)

Jensen Harris' blog about the Microsoft Office user interface

Back when my team was working on the UI redesign of Outlook 2003, one of the areas we were designing was what marketing later named the " Navigation Pane." That worked out great because it was a snappy name, easy to say, it has positive connotations (Wonder) and it was funny because we had a large number of native German speakers on the team at the time. Back in the fall of 2003 we were working hard to produce a number of different prototypes in an attempt to determine what direction we wanted to go with the new UI.

Get the Android app