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End users and tech people always knee-jerk about anything that changes, whether it's a positive change or not. The Ribbon interface they introduced in Office b

End users and tech people always knee-jerk about anything that changes, whether it's a positive change or not. The Ribbon interface they introduced in Office back in 2007 was a huge improvement over the mess of dialogs, toolbars and menus they had before by every metric. People still bitch about it, almost a decade later. The people who bitch about it benefit as much as everybody else from the increased usability, but that doesn't stop the bitching. And it's not just Microsoft. People bitched at Firefox when they moved the menu into the tabs. People bitched at Chrome when it removed "http" from the URL bar (I just noticed it seems to have come back at some point), people bitch about everything all the time. Not because they genuinely didn't like it, or because it makes their life more difficult, but because they simply hate change. The only way to keep these people happy is to change nothing, ever. Is that really what you want? It's not what I want.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Not sure I agree. Sure, there's lot of change-bitching (like people complaining about Facebook timelines), and every change breaks someone's workflow (https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/), but quite a lot of those changes people complain about are really making the applications worse. You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available. Nowadays I can't find the more advanced stuff I know that worked in Excel and Word in the past. Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator? I don't know, but the interface doesn't allow me to find out. People bitched at Chrome because removing "http" was seen as a first step of removing the address bar altogether, dumbing down both the browser and peoples' perception of the Internet. The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get. Sure, it may be good for the quarterly sales report, but it's disastrous for the future of technology.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available. I think that the ribbon design itself actually helped discoverability, at the expense of familiarity for long-term users of the old interface (OTOH, I think that simultaneously with the introduction of the ribbon, they also made it so a lot of options that previously were on the UI required customization to actually have them surfaced at all -- which they also, IIRC, did in some previous versions without changing the UI structure -- and, IIRC again, they reversed some of the most egregious of those in 2010.)
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  > You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability That is simply not true. In fact, the major impetus for creating the Ribbon was the Office team dealing with the constant feature requests for features they'd already implemented, but users couldn't find how to activate/use. > and reduced the number of features available. Also untrue, unless you're going to say things like "being able to drag a menu off the menu bar and hover around like a toolbar" are a "feature". Or put another way, it did reduce configurability, but the number of actual useful features was not reduced. > Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator? You should know I mentally translate the phrase "dumb down" to, "I don't like this because of a knee-jerk but I've never bothered to think about it long enough to express why". > The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get. Seriously? How about: the fewer obstacles you put in front of your users, the more useful work they can get done.
pdkl95 10y ago
You should watch the talk[1] by Joe Peacock of fark.com about updating the site (the infamous "You'll get over it" incident). The solution isn't "change nothing". Instead, you involve the people that use the old (current) version in the process, keep them informed, and get some kind of buy-in. Most importantly, you respect that the user has their own schedule and needs with a migration path that allows the user to make the transition at their own pace. What you don't do is surprise users at random times, revoke any agency they had, and force changes on them without any consideration fo the user's situation. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Not sure I agree. Sure, there's lot of change-bitching (like people complaining about Facebook timelines), and every change breaks someone's workflow (https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/), but quite a lot of those changes people complain about are really making the applications worse. You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available. Nowadays I can't find the more advanced stuff I know that worked in Excel and Word in the past. Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator? I don't know, but the interface doesn't allow me to find out. People bitched at Chrome because removing "http" was seen as a first step of removing the address bar altogether, dumbing down both the browser and peoples' perception of the Internet. The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get. Sure, it may be good for the quarterly sales report, but it's disastrous for the future of technology.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available. I think that the ribbon design itself actually helped discoverability, at the expense of familiarity for long-term users of the old interface (OTOH, I think that simultaneously with the introduction of the ribbon, they also made it so a lot of options that previously were on the UI required customization to actually have them surfaced at all -- which they also, IIRC, did in some previous versions without changing the UI structure -- and, IIRC again, they reversed some of the most egregious of those in 2010.)
blakeyrat 10y ago
> You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability That is simply not true. In fact, the major impetus for creating the Ribbon was the Office team dealing with the constant feature requests for features they'd already implemented, but users couldn't find how to activate/use. > and reduced the number of features available. Also untrue, unless you're going to say things like "being able to drag a menu off the menu bar and hover around like a toolbar" are a "feature". Or put another way, it did reduce configurability, but the number of actual useful features was not reduced. > Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator? You should know I mentally translate the phrase "dumb down" to, "I don't like this because of a knee-jerk but I've never bothered to think about it long enough to express why". > The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get. Seriously? How about: the fewer obstacles you put in front of your users, the more useful work they can get done.

pdkl95 10y ago

You should watch the talk[1] by Joe Peacock of fark.com about updating the site (the infamous "You'll get over it" incident). The solution isn't "change nothing". Instead, you involve the people that use the old (current) version in the process, keep them informed, and get some kind of buy-in. Most importantly, you respect that the user has their own schedule and needs with a migration path that allows the user to make the transition at their own pace. What you don't do is surprise users at random times, revoke any agency they had, and force changes on them without any consideration fo the user's situation. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI