Microsoft Teases Office Future

In a long blog post, Jon Friedman, the head of Microsoft Office design, has outlined some future changes to Office. Changes include de-emphasizing the role of the ribbon in favour of a floating toolbar, more contextual commands, enhanced search, and a common graphical and colour scheme across applications. 

We’ve been on a multi-year design journey to create more focused, immersive experiences, from the single-line ribbon, to Dark Mode, to Fluent. The next wave of Microsoft 365 UX changes will go even further by fading brand colors from app headers and exploring adaptive commanding. A flexible ribbon that progressively discloses contextually relevant commands at the right time just where you need them.

We’ll further advance our seamless, cross-suite Search to bring relevant information to your fingertips, and myriad forthcoming experiences will leverage Fluid Frameworks. Microsoft 365 will bring the power of Office to wherever you are, ensuring you won’t need to interrupt your creative process to open a different tool. 

Throughout, we’re grounding everything we build in deep research about the nuances of attention. We’re often presented with a false dichotomy — you’re either focused and in flow or distracted and unproductive — but we traverse a broad attentional spectrum while achieving our goals. Some moments call for lengthy, sustained concentration. Others, such as many mobile scenarios, are optimal for microtasking. By designing for multiple cognitive states, focused experiences throughout the Microsoft 365 ecosystem minimize external distractions, lessen self-interruptions, and jumpstart flow.

It's not clear when these changes will begin rolling out to end users and the pandemic may cause delays.

If you don't want to wade through screens of Friedman's corporate bafflegab, Mobile Syrup and The Verge have good summaries of his post.