What You Dram Is What You Get

Being something of a webby type person during daylight hours, I get the e-mail alerts from the guru of Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen.

This weeks alert was about the new User Interface paradigm that Microsoft have adopted for next years release of Office 12. They refer to it as Results Oriented, or WYGIWYS – What You Get Is What You See.

Here the idea is not so much to start with a fresh blank page each time you create a new Word document or Excel spreadsheet, but to say to the machine, ‘I want to create a report for next weeks business review’. Word then scurries away and comes back with a selection of documents preformatted and filled in. You just need to change the contents to reflect what you want to say, the formatting is already there.

This way of doing things, Microsoft believe, will change the whole way we use their Office suite, and they have radically altered the menu and toolbars of the programmes as a result.

At first I thought, ‘huh, this is just templating, it’s not very new nor very clever,’ and got on with my work.

But then, as I was sat tonight playing with Dramatica, it struck me just what Microsoft might be up to. I realised that Dramatica is WYGIWYS, not only in terms of User Interface, but in the whole fundamental structure of what it does.*

You pump in all the information you want to end up with (the story settings) until you get to one storyform, and then it scurries away and comes back with the structure about which you hang your screenplay, novel etc. It isn’t templating (that’s just prettying things up), it’s about creating structure, something that we humans struggle to create very well, especially from scratch.

I wonder if Microsoft have taken the paradigm even further than just the User Interface, and started creating basic structures for the different documents, in the same way Dramatica provides structure to our stories? It’ll be interesting to see…

* I’m looking forward to seeing how the UI for Dramatica changes
with version 5 – a while ago I sent a very long, rambling e-mail to
Chris Huntley about how I thought they could improve things – I even
drew nice pictures! I got a very nice thank you note in response – top man, that Chris Huntley.