https://jensenharris.com/contact daily 0.75 2021-02-05 https://jensenharris.com/windows-sounds daily 0.75 2022-08-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1660929958624-9XNS5H2MCHS8VLOI13SQ/103+-+Thumbnail.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1660930119201-VZFNHT5RZQ2WF94J2S3R/104+-+Thumbnail+v2.png https://jensenharris.com/coaching daily 0.75 2023-01-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1621890623458-4XZC1T8I4111M6EAO2R8/Jensen+Whoosh.jpg https://jensenharris.com/apps daily 0.75 2022-12-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/bd20d54c-5a85-4e0e-98ea-78c56d4db54f/CWIcon.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/a5af25a5-604c-4523-980e-ceb0b381c9b7/Download_on_the_Mac_App_Store_Badge_US-UK_RGB_blk_092917.png https://jensenharris.com/apps/camerawindow/privacy daily 0.75 2022-12-13 https://jensenharris.com/apps/camerawindow daily 0.75 2022-12-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/d78b5c44-5a82-405e-b161-5b0cf6b7c504/CW+-+Headshot-min.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/a5af25a5-604c-4523-980e-ceb0b381c9b7/Download_on_the_Mac_App_Store_Badge_US-UK_RGB_blk_092917.png https://jensenharris.com/apps/thermes daily 0.75 2025-02-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/16ff9e4f-5006-4b3a-87ae-10e296496350/Screenshot+2024-11-12+at+5.54.33%E2%80%AFPM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/22b430cd-0d1e-4812-8c19-c6147c6850c0/Download_on_the_App_Store_Badge_US-UK_blk_092917%403x.png https://jensenharris.com/apps/thermes/privacy daily 0.75 2024-11-20 https://jensenharris.com/home daily 1.0 2026-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1621890623458-4XZC1T8I4111M6EAO2R8/Jensen+Whoosh.jpg Jensen Harris https://jensenharris.com/home/office monthly 0.5 2021-01-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611631573145-ZRSKILW9WQYJKSX28OYE/Office+2007+user+experience+principles+document Jensen Harris - Microsoft Office https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611353578478-F33IDE55MLEHT32119JO/Microsoft+Office+2007+user+interface Jensen Harris - Microsoft Office - The Ribbon unified menus, toolbars, Task Panes, and all of the other many places commands lived through the products into one simple and extensible bar that was consistent across more than a dozen Microsoft Office apps. Contextual Tabs allowed for context-specific tools to be woven into the interface when working with a specific object, like a picture, a chart, or a diagram. These additional tools are presented right inside the Ribbon, and disappear when they’re no longer relevant. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611353301012-UDASX3TUV853M55N4CPP/Microsoft+Excel+with+charts+and+colorful+tables Jensen Harris - Microsoft Office - This new, more visual user interface even allowed us to make an app centered on numbers, like Excel, more visual and powerful, unlocking formatting and data visualization capabilities that had always been present but seldom used. One of the things our telemetry data showed us was that 90% of users used less than 10% of all the features in our product. By making this existing functionality more visual and easier to understand, we hoped to enable more people to take advantage of the underlying power of the software. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611352734402-X0PT5E9L3CS6NFCQE0MX/Microsoft+Word+with+a+visual+dropdown+gallery+menu Jensen Harris - Microsoft Office - Galleries combined multiple commands into easy-to-understand visual dropdown menus that shows exactly what the end result was going to be. We also invented Live Preview to enhance this experience: for the first time, just by hovering over an item in a dropdown menu, you could see what the result would be. We wanted to end the frequent cycle we observed of people applying formatting and then clicking Undo because they didn’t like the result. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611353129336-XDGY8LPGWVH99NNOYL9G/Mini+Toolbar+on+selected+text Jensen Harris - Microsoft Office - The Mini Toolbar fades in above selected text to provide quick access to the most-used formatting commands in the product. Taking advantage of Fitts’ Law, this small window required minimal mouse movement and thus can be accessed efficiently. This design can be seen pretty widely in text editing experiences throughout most modern desktop productivity apps. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611352998177-936110TDXQD69B3V7VZS/A+large+visual+tooltip+with+a+picture+included+in+it Jensen Harris - Microsoft Office - Super Tooltips, the predecessor of today’s omnipresent info cards in web and mobile apps, built on the tooltip concept by adding animations, detailed text, and interactivity to help users understand what a command was for and how to use it. https://jensenharris.com/home/surface monthly 0.5 2021-01-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611359514333-931ADPFN64XR7DEMJEH0/Microsoft+Surface+Pro Jensen Harris - Surface - Surface is a line of two-in-one PCs created by Microsoft that can be used either as a laptop or as a tablet. The first two iterations, shipped in 2012, included the ARM-based Surface and an Intel-based Surface Pro. We created a touch user interface from scratch for Surface, a three year odyssey that required breakthroughs in interaction design, a new app development model, launching an app store from scratch, and working closely with the hardware team (in secret) to meld the experience of the software and hardware together. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611360483962-RNQYQOI4SRV2ZV2028WE/Start+screen+of+Microsoft+Surface Jensen Harris - Surface - The Start screen was designed to be a more personal and differentiated alternative to the “endless grid of icons” seen on other mobile devices. Tiles unified the predictability of icons with the power of widgets in a harmonized design language. Larger touch targets made them easy to press with a finger. A key concept was that the tiles could be “live”—that is, they could show what was happening in the app without needing to launch it. A news app could show the most recent story, or the email app might show messages that recently came in. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611361335081-JMWKFFDTZQ17S6B7HO1Z/Sketches+of+tiles Jensen Harris - Surface - The team created thousands of sketches and designs that were considered, refined, critiqued, and ultimately shaped into the final set of designs. My job was to coalesce all of these designs into a coherent experience that would not just power Surface, but also be shipped as a part of Windows for the vast ecosystem of hardware partners who also wanted to ship touch-capable PCs. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611361075299-YCIH12LXY1BSFMCNRNU9/A+search+result+about+Rihanna Jensen Harris - Surface - The visual design language of the apps were centered around the notion of “content before chrome.” Unnecessary commands and widgets were moved to the background to let photography and other content come to the foreground. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611360632802-GF9EY4DYUJ3M8BDFJNU8/A+%22heat+map%22+of+how+easily+people+can+reach+parts+of+a+tablet+screen Jensen Harris - Surface - One of the ways we started to understand the ergonomics of holding a tablet (which were not well known in the time before the iPad) was by giving people special software that tested their grip and their reach on various size devices. The “heat map” that was generated helped us understand what regions of the screen were easy and difficult to reach. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611361031852-Y06ZHFAZ4956DHN6NVVY/A+sports+app+with+a+story+about+LeBron+James Jensen Harris - Surface - Important global functions like search, sharing, settings, and access to devices were designed to give the user instant access to them from any app with just a swipe from the edge of the screen. A set of innovative developer APIs made it possible for any two apps to talk to one another in a generalized way. So, for instance, an up-and-coming photos app could share content to a yet-undiscovered social media app without either app knowing anything about the other one. https://jensenharris.com/home/ribbon monthly 0.5 2021-01-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611364101162-U7UP0AJ050FVL288A99K/PPT+2010+Insert+Tab+copy.jpg Jensen Harris - The Ribbon https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611364247177-LVVZP14WGQFB16N14U2M/2+-+Final+-+Create+Slides.jpg Jensen Harris - The Ribbon - Just for fun, here was the first picture we drew of the Ribbon, way back in 2003. You can see though many things changed between this early sketch and the final version, the bones were there from the beginning. The weird red color came from an idea that we had (that Microsoft eventually did over a decade later!) that every app would have its own color. The PowerPoint color was this tomato-like hue, thus this set of pictures became known to us as “Tomatoeey.” The rest, as they say, is history! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611637847964-IT4CUQ59MKC97LPBNF4J/Three+sizes+of+an+Excel+ribbon+group Jensen Harris - The Ribbon - One of the controversial design decisions we made was to make the Ribbon horizontal. While this might seem to be an obvious decision (since menus and toolbars were historically at the top), it actually made our lives a lot harder in one crucial way: scaling to various window sizes. It’s easy to imagine (and we had many pictures of it) a list of commands along the left side and a scroll bar or other widget letting you page up and down the long list of commands. It was exactly for this reason I insisted we do it horizontally. Because horizontal scrolling is hard, it meant we had to be very thoughtful about the design. It forced us to look at every screen and really think about how we wanted to use the space. As a result, every group in the Ribbon (in this picture labeled as “chunks”, our internal name) had as many as four different designs: large, medium, small, and collapsed. The Ribbon uses a system of group prioritization to decide what to show depending on the window size; the end result is an efficient and predictable use of space. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611363232427-Q1TNKICFNH65JJDMR6O1/The+Ribbon+in+Sibelius Jensen Harris - The Ribbon - So many other apps ended up using the Ribbon; this was not something we ever anticipated when designing the UI system. As a classical trained musician, I was amazed and surprised when Sibelius (the music notation software I personally use) released a new version with a complete implementation of the Ribbon. They did a great job with it, using galleries to show in a visual way concepts, markings, and styles that were hard to represent in their old interface. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611363414820-083BWNOS7897HLPQGNQY/The+Ribbon+in+AutoCAD Jensen Harris - The Ribbon - AutoCAD, the industry-leading computer-assisted design software used by engineers, architects, and construction planners, adopted the Ribbon early on and used it to unify their commands into one single place. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611363643723-GSUDGW57SWS3EBAYXEZZ/The+Ribbon+in+MATLAB Jensen Harris - The Ribbon - MATLAB, the ubiquitous software used by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians adopted the Ribbon user interface in 2012. Some of the things they did, such as including Search as part of the core interface, was later added in Microsoft’s own version of the control. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611363832240-GMULCN4IXY1P439Z0J29/The+Ribbon+in+Microsoft+Paint Jensen Harris - The Ribbon - The Ribbon eventually made its way elsewhere within Microsoft. Notably, it showed up in several of the Windows built-in apps, adorning Paint, WordPad, and File Explorer. https://jensenharris.com/home/augmented-writing monthly 0.5 2021-01-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611384826581-4T8H0IPLV0O1Q0UWVTML/Four+eras+of+writing+software Jensen Harris - Augmented Writing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611384936475-7C4EYDZOQG0GDV8IZAY7/The+Textio+augmented+writing+experience Jensen Harris - Augmented Writing - Although Textio has grown beyond 100 employees now, we started out with just a few people. So, in our earliest days, I designed the entire user experience and wrote the frontend code myself. Coming from my previous job leading a team at Microsoft larger than our entire company is now, this was tremendously fun. I had the chance not just to invent so many new things and play with new interaction concepts, but also to actually write the code and ensure that all the little delightful details I cared about felt exactly right. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611385380843-G37NKXTPCRE4PHNCWFK0/The+Textio+Score+gauge+with+a+score+of+83 Jensen Harris - Augmented Writing - At its heart, Textio analyzes your words as you write, telling you how well they will work. If you are writing an email, for instance, Textio can tell you how likely someone is to read it or respond positively to it. Textio knows this because its technology has been trained from the outcomes of over 1 billion pieces of writing. The Textio Score encapsulates all of this machine learning and natural language processing into an easy-to-understand 0 to 100 score. We tried lots of other visualizations, but the simple, single score model proved key to people understanding and accepting Textio’s advanced guidance. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611385821899-LJ4UX6XRK9IGAASXKGWQ/Gender+tone+meter+and+age+bias+graph Jensen Harris - Augmented Writing - Another really important aspect of augmented writing is the notion of being able to tell who will respond to your writing. For instance, will your writing attract more people who identify as men? Will it attract older people but turn off people in their 20s? Understanding who is likely to respond based on the language you choose helps people to write more inclusively—to write things that will appeal to everyone. Designing the right visualizations to illustrate these concepts was tricky and took a lot of iteration and testing. In the end, the solutions we implemented have worked well and have started to be duplicated by newer augmented writing companies. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611386229512-TBWYELD6N8O6Z3DSKAGX/Textio+in+Outlook%2C+Gmail%2C+LinkedIn%2C+Workday%2C+and+Greenhouse Jensen Harris - Augmented Writing - One of the really interesting challenges in designing Textio’s user interface is that it can plug in on top of other places people already write, like Gmail, Outlook, or LinkedIn. Building the UI with this scenario in mind is a complex. We consider which things translate well as a “layer” on top of the existing interface, and which need to be clarified, simplified, or changed. We weren’t willing to compromise on the quality of the user interface, so we’ve put a lot of sweat and ingenuity into perfecting this hybrid experience. https://jensenharris.com/home/outlook monthly 0.5 2021-01-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611448601847-804SUX49C3GWTN0FOCK0/Microsoft+Outlook+2003+three+pane+view Jensen Harris - Outlook - We changed Outlook to use a three pane view in which each of the panes was oriented vertically. The reason why was pretty straightforward: this new layout was way more efficient in its usage of screen real estate. It showed twice as much of the message you were reading on the screen plus a few additional emails in the message list. We invented friendly separators to break up the message list that were time-adaptive. They became less granular as you went back in time. For instance, they’d show “Today” or “Yesterday” or “Wednesday” (times closer to now), but then eventually as you went back further in time “Last Week”, “January”, or “2019”. We tried to talk about things the way a human would, not a computer. All of this was controversial at the time—I was so nervous in my first ever “high stakes” meeting with a skeptical Bill Gates to walk him through the rationales for these changes. I remember thinking: are they really letting this 25 year old have the keys? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611472229724-RTQCNTM9XANQ3I208ELT/Outlook+conversation+view Jensen Harris - Outlook - Another big belief I had was that conversations should be the atomic unit of email, not an individual message itself. While this may seem obvious now, it felt like a breakthrough at the time, and many people resisted it. We moved the conversation subject to be the “title” of the list of messages, and then threaded the responses underneath, using indentation to show who responded to who. I think I was inspired here by Usenet news readers like WinVN which showed NNTP feeds in a similar threading format. Of course, Gmail latched on to this idea when they launched a few years later, and now it is omnipresent in email apps as well as other discussion forums like Reddit. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611472260091-E02XKXVK5QYMQDUTK8JN/Outlook+Reading+Pane Jensen Harris - Outlook - Reading Pane was the name we used for our vertical preview of the email message. The primary idea was to make it look like a sheet of paper, to separate the content from the cacophony of the organizational focus of the rest of the app. Notice how the white pane is separated from the gray, shadowed background around it. Beta versions had an even larger matting around the message, but on the commonplace tiny 800x600 computer screens of the time, we ended up not being able to spare the extra pixels. In order to make reading easy, we tried to proportion the pane to about 2.5 Roman alphabets wide (65 characters or so), which much research shows to be the ideal width for reading. We did some user studies in our usability lab that showed that the sender’s name was far and away the most important piece of information people used to determine how to contextualize an email message. Hence, we made the sender’s name very large. In beta versions, we also put it at the top of the pane, but user feedback was clear that people preferred the subject on top, so we relented and inverted the hierarchy for the final version. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611472318225-VGOPMVDTP7RORRB58945/For+Follow+Up+search+folder Jensen Harris - Outlook - Search Folders were built out of a really simple but powerful idea: what if you could save a search and turn it into a virtual folder that you could use just like any other folder? It would update in real time, and you could read, flag, and respond to email in it just like any other “real” folder. I imagined that you could do things like have a single folder that included all unread messages + things you had flagged for follow up. Or have a folder that included everything about your family, no matter what physical folder it was in. This has now become a widely-copied feature, but at the time it was totally novel and we had to work through a lot of tricky interaction design challenges. For instance, if you are in an “Unread Email” folder and click the message to read it, it is no longer unread and should disappear from the folder. But that is confusing and leads to a chain reaction where messages seem to be auto-deleting themselves from the folder! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611472358124-5RJOU9KJX1WNZS9IPOVY/Making+a+new+Search+Folder+dialog+box Jensen Harris - Outlook - We knew that Search Folders would be a new concept for people and thus having concrete examples of the kinds of scenarios we imagined the feature being useful for would be key. So, in addition to the more advanced ways of creating a Search Folder (such as defining the search terms yourself, or saving the results of a search as a folder), we created a simple dialog box containing a range of common scenarios. This turned out to be far and away the most popular way people made new Search Folders. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611472392197-6SKIYXHZHULTRLA6MM27/Flag+for+Follow+Up+menu Jensen Harris - Outlook - When we were studying how people use email, we discovered that there were broadly two main categories of users: filers and pilers. Filers tend to move everything to a folder. They often have a well-defined and/or extensive folder system which might include nested folders. Most things filers read end up moved to a specific folder that makes it easy for them to know where to find related things again. Pilers, on the other hand, just let most things pile up in the Inbox. They tend to use search as a primary way to find things, and often rely on categorization or tagging to mark special things to get back to them easily. Quick Flags, which we introduced in Outlook, were designed to give these pilers an easy way to mark things for follow up without the overhead of needing to create a full-blown categorization system. There were only six colors you could use (by design) and marking a message gave you a simple way to see that it was special, wherever in Outlook it showed up. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611472409856-XNI8EF44YNJ1PXU8SZWQ/Outlook+Calendar+view Jensen Harris - Outlook - Our Outlook reinvention wasn’t just limited to email, of course. The Navigation Pane on the left (called the “WunderBar” internally) took the email folder list and imagined “what could we do to make it contextually relevant?” As an example, when you are in the Calendar, the folder list is replaced by more useful widgets such as the date picker and a list of calendars you can view. We also designed and built a side-by-side calendar view that made it easy to see multiple calendars at once with color-coding to help people track which calendar is which. We also added a subtle “current time indicator” to the left side of the calendar list to make it easy to see “where in my schedule am I right now?” https://jensenharris.com/home/flow monthly 0.5 2021-01-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611619422694-SV0IUBDIU5B6LKYH194P/Textio+Flow+user+interface Jensen Harris - Textio Flow - The first question was: what should Textio Flow feel like? We decided that it should feel like a quiet but capable assistant, a helpful force that can help complete your thoughts but doesn’t try to compete with them. The Textio logo (the ring of four colors) “writes” the suggested text, the animation proving to be crucial for people to understand what was happening (as well as just being delightful!) We believe in the notion of augmented writing, not automated writing, so it was crucial to me that the user experience made clear that the writer was in charge. The goal was to always to enhance human creativity, not replace it. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611620471992-AX4RM3URXF3A0DIIP0I9/User+interface+to+select+alternatives Jensen Harris - Textio Flow - A big part of helping writers to feel in control was presenting alternatives. Textio Flow generates 10 suggestions; the writer can use the arrow keys or buttons on the screen to select their favorite one. We tested many versions of this design, from presenting only one suggestion all the way to 40 alternatives. 10 turned out to be a great balance between having enough choice and not being overwhelming. Interestingly, our telemetry data shows that most people accept the first choice, but feel more confident in that choice knowing that there are nine others in the list. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6008fbe89c2d8f3e5162a344/1611620673466-CGMEBVCQ6HPU8ZJIL8Z8/User+interface+to+show+detailed+stats+about+the+writing Jensen Harris - Textio Flow - Another important goal of Textio Flow was helping the writer to know the impact of the suggestion they were taking. We tested many alternative UI ideas here, and ended up with simple gauges that show four measures of how well a suggested piece of writing would work. Meaning is how well the suggestion matches your original idea. Context is how well the suggestion works with the surrounding text. Culture tells you how well the suggestion fits into the way you and your company tend to write in general. And the Score tells you the impact on how well your document will work overall. These measures live in the status bar contextually, and serve mostly to reinforce confidence. We don’t expect most people to notice them or use them often, but when they do, it reinforces understanding of the overall system and of the engine underneath the UI.