3 ms·

admittedly, the new ribbon interface (well I guess it's no longer new, it's just that I went from using excel for about 6hrs/day to maybe 12hrs/year circa 2005)

by xixi77 11y ago

admittedly, the new ribbon interface (well I guess it's no longer new, it's just that I went from using excel for about 6hrs/day to maybe 12hrs/year circa 2005) does look prettier -- but how do people actually go about finding anything in it? does everyone just use google & try to find some blog post with screenshots?

dragonwriter 11y ago
> but how do people actually go about finding anything in it? The discoverability is pretty much the same as the old pull-downs and toolbar approach (and how you find things is pretty much the same -- click on the category whose label seems like what you might, and then look through whats revealed by that), but consolidated into what amounts to a set of toolbars organized into tabs, rather than a combination of toolbars and menus. (And what often gets ignores is that a lot of the improvements have been in the contextual right-click pop-up, which means what you usually need often doesn't require using the ribbon at all.) > does everyone just use google & try to find some blog post with screenshots? No more so than with the old interface.
- scholia 11y ago
  > The discoverability is pretty much the same as the old pull-downs and toolbar approach One of the main points -- possibly the main point -- of the move to the ribbon was to increase discoverability, and it worked. Gates said Microsoft had lots of compliments about new features in office 2007 that had actually been in the old version, but people hadn't found them. Microsoft did an enormous amount of work (and research) when developing the ribbon. Jensen Harris covered this in great depth in an 8-part series at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_3f00_/default.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_... I'm pretty sure you can find videos of him giving presentations about it as well. (I saw him present.)

by xixi77 11y ago

dragonwriter 11y ago

> but how do people actually go about finding anything in it? The discoverability is pretty much the same as the old pull-downs and toolbar approach (and how you find things is pretty much the same -- click on the category whose label seems like what you might, and then look through whats revealed by that), but consolidated into what amounts to a set of toolbars organized into tabs, rather than a combination of toolbars and menus. (And what often gets ignores is that a lot of the improvements have been in the contextual right-click pop-up, which means what you usually need often doesn't require using the ribbon at all.) > does everyone just use google & try to find some blog post with screenshots? No more so than with the old interface.

scholia 11y ago
> The discoverability is pretty much the same as the old pull-downs and toolbar approach One of the main points -- possibly the main point -- of the move to the ribbon was to increase discoverability, and it worked. Gates said Microsoft had lots of compliments about new features in office 2007 that had actually been in the old version, but people hadn't found them. Microsoft did an enormous amount of work (and research) when developing the ribbon. Jensen Harris covered this in great depth in an 8-part series at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_3f00_/default.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_... I'm pretty sure you can find videos of him giving presentations about it as well. (I saw him present.)