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> Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake. You keep saying this, and it's just not true. The extreme skeuomorphism in the older iO

> Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake. You keep saying this, and it's just not true. The extreme skeuomorphism in the older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today. I wouldn't mind adding some more shading to buttons to make them more easily identifiable, but let's leave the cheesy leather textures in the Calendar app dead and buried, please. I'm not a fan of the Windows 95-era design either. As an example that comes to mind, traditional menus have atrocious usability. Ribbon-like interfaces that feature actual buttons you can click or tap on, with more important buttons larger and/or highlighted, have been a huge improvement over trying to wade through a sea of identical-looking pull-downs full of text. It's important to remember that the move away from pull-down menus was informed by a good deal of end-user research, a lot more than this article. Regarding iOS, I'd like to see this study try modern UI fonts like San Francisco. There's a reason why Apple, Google, and Microsoft invested in new fonts, and that's because faces such as Helvetica (which, by the way, was used in iOS 6) that weren't designed for screens are harder to read.

ryacko 8y ago
But pull down menus were influenced by pre-mouse interfaces. Many pull down menus still allow for keyboard based navigation through arrow keys and keyboard letters.
marcosdumay 8y ago
How do you navigate the Ribbon using a keyboard? How do you learn about shortcuts now that they are displayed nowhere? The Ribbon traded a bunch of text pull-downs for a bunch of icons pull-down that you have to hoover to discover what they mean, it kept the "multiple levels of pull-downs" problem, but now the extra levels have no icon or text with even more levels because each one has a limited space, and threw away the icon toolbars that had a much larger density of icons.
- user5994461 8y ago
  Same thing as with a traditional dropdown menu. Press or hold the Alt key to display the available shortcuts.
- mbel 8y ago
  > How do you navigate the Ribbon using a keyboard? Mostly the same way as you used to do with pull-down menus. Press alt to display tooltips with shortcuts over ribbon buttons. Then you do bunch of alt + [letter] to get the option you want. The underscored letter in traditional pull-down menus in my opinion was similarly non-obvious.
  - jimktrains2 8y ago
    Menus show the hotkey by default. Needing to know a hotkey to figure out what hot keys are seems backwards. And I don't mean the underscore, that was for fast access in the menu. Most menus would say actual hotkey on the right side of the menu by default. But even the underscore gives a default visual clue that you can do something with that letter, and you can then ask what. If you're new to computers, the concept of anyotkey may not be obvious to even ask about.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    That works. It is also more clear than the pull-down menus, because the letters have a large contrast and are spread through more of the screen (what is a problem from another point of view, but it's a benefit here), so it's harder to get stuck on the keyboard navigation mode without noticing it. I can take that out from my list of Ribbon problems :)
userbinator 8y ago
Ribbon-like interfaces that feature actual buttons you can click or tap on, with more important buttons larger and/or highlighted, have been a huge improvement over trying to wade through a sea of identical-looking pull-downs full of text. I completely disagree. Being a list with each item on a line, regularly spaced, a menu is easy to read. Humans have been reading lines of text for a long time outside of computers, so they're quite skilled at it. The buttons on a ribbon change appearance and position depending on the width of the window, and the barrage of icons makes for difficult skimming. It's essentially visual overload. ("A picture is worth a thousand words. However, sometimes you don't want a thousand words when one or two is enough.") It's important to remember that the move away from pull-down menus was informed by a good deal of end-user research, a lot more than this article. The problem is that those who participate in such research are unlikely to represent the majority of the userbase. It's unfortunate, but those who have seen calls for such studies and then thought to themselves, "I have better things to do with my time" will understand this completely.
phkahler 8y ago
Sure, I like how the top level menus are still there - edit, view, etc, but File has been replaced with some weird badge up in the corner. That's just dumb, there is no user-centric explanation whatsoever.
- userbinator 8y ago
  ...and clicking it brings up a full-screen/application monstrosity that was really disorienting the first time I saw it, and still feels slightly unsettling: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ofs_5.png https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ofs_5.p... What's also irritating is the fact that an extra click or two is now needed to Save As or Open from that ridiculous "menu".
rayiner 8y ago
I have my beef with ribbons, but ribbons came out in Office 2007. I’m talking about subsequent developments, like Edge throwing away both ribbons and hierarchical menus and moving to an ellipses menu. There were some pre-2009 mistakes for sure. Arguably it started going downhill with Jaguar and metal windows. But now the wheels have come completely off. You can’t tell what’s what anymore—is it a button or a label or just text? Tap on it and find out! Discoverable buttons and menus have been replaced with undiscoverable gestures and swipes. Not even consistent gestures: how do you move the the insertion point in iOS? It depends on what kind of phone you have! The apocalypse happened, and the righteous were saved. We were left behind to suffer through flat design, material design, the new gmail, Edge, and web apps.
UIZealot 8y ago
>> Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake. > You keep saying this, and it's just not true. You saying it's not true doesn't make it so. > The extreme skeuomorphism in the older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today. Citation needed. As I remember, most pundits simply had some beef with a few extreme cases of skeuomorphism in iOS 6. Nobody advocated that Apple throw the baby out with the bath water as they did in iOS 7. > It's important to remember that the move away from pull-down menus was informed by a good deal of end-user research Again, citation needed. Windows 95, now that's informed by a good deal of research. Everything Microsoft did starting with Windows XP? Not so much.
fiblye 8y ago
Ribbon has to be the absolute worst interface I've ever dealt with. Things seem to be organized completely randomly, things I never use are emphasized, things I always use are de-emphasized, things are hidden behind various panels and determining which involves a tedious search through every single panel, ultimately giving up and having to google where the hell the button I'm looking for is--and seeing thousands of results from people searching the same exact thing. That's not even getting into the fact that it consumes a ridiculous, and I mean simply ridiculous amount of space. I feel like every recent step "forward" in UI is just an attempt to make useful features harder to find, make useless buttons bigger while simultaneously making them harder to identify as buttons, and reducing the actual active input space to the bare minimum. MS Office and gmail started a race to minimize input space a couple years back and now it seems to be spreading everywhere. What used to be nice, full screens of input and being able to visually scan everything is now a tiny white box with absolutely useless garbage everywhere, from ribbons full of buttons I'll use maybe once a year to now auto-suggested text that never aligns with what I want to say and could potentially have disastrous results when I inevitably accidentally click it.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > and reducing the actual active input space to the bare minimum. That's because the the point of computers has shifting from allowing you do create to allowing other people to feed you content. Also: The ad driven model always wrecks everything it touches.
jonhendry18 8y ago
"extreme skeuomorphism in the older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today" No, no it wasn't. Because skeuomorphism wasn't a usability issue the way flat design is.
jonhendry18 8y ago
Leather textures aren't a usabiliy issue.
atombender 8y ago
I'd like to see desktop apps adopt a Spotlight/Alfred/Sublime-type autocompletion UI. Hit some keyboard shortcut and you get a "command palette". By typing, you get command suggestions. An app could easily display not just matches but also a help screen about each match (not possible with today's menus). Also, text matches could be in categories/tags of commands. Type "select" (or even just "sel") and it'd offer commands related to the category "selection", for example. Such a UI could easily work as a replacement for a classical menu bar, in that it would be a superset of this functionality (a menu bar is essentially an "unfiltered" match UI, exploded).

ryacko 8y ago

But pull down menus were influenced by pre-mouse interfaces. Many pull down menus still allow for keyboard based navigation through arrow keys and keyboard letters.

marcosdumay 8y ago

How do you navigate the Ribbon using a keyboard? How do you learn about shortcuts now that they are displayed nowhere? The Ribbon traded a bunch of text pull-downs for a bunch of icons pull-down that you have to hoover to discover what they mean, it kept the "multiple levels of pull-downs" problem, but now the extra levels have no icon or text with even more levels because each one has a limited space, and threw away the icon toolbars that had a much larger density of icons.

user5994461 8y ago
Same thing as with a traditional dropdown menu. Press or hold the Alt key to display the available shortcuts.
mbel 8y ago
> How do you navigate the Ribbon using a keyboard? Mostly the same way as you used to do with pull-down menus. Press alt to display tooltips with shortcuts over ribbon buttons. Then you do bunch of alt + [letter] to get the option you want. The underscored letter in traditional pull-down menus in my opinion was similarly non-obvious.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  Menus show the hotkey by default. Needing to know a hotkey to figure out what hot keys are seems backwards. And I don't mean the underscore, that was for fast access in the menu. Most menus would say actual hotkey on the right side of the menu by default. But even the underscore gives a default visual clue that you can do something with that letter, and you can then ask what. If you're new to computers, the concept of anyotkey may not be obvious to even ask about.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  That works. It is also more clear than the pull-down menus, because the letters have a large contrast and are spread through more of the screen (what is a problem from another point of view, but it's a benefit here), so it's harder to get stuck on the keyboard navigation mode without noticing it. I can take that out from my list of Ribbon problems :)

userbinator 8y ago

Ribbon-like interfaces that feature actual buttons you can click or tap on, with more important buttons larger and/or highlighted, have been a huge improvement over trying to wade through a sea of identical-looking pull-downs full of text. I completely disagree. Being a list with each item on a line, regularly spaced, a menu is easy to read. Humans have been reading lines of text for a long time outside of computers, so they're quite skilled at it. The buttons on a ribbon change appearance and position depending on the width of the window, and the barrage of icons makes for difficult skimming. It's essentially visual overload. ("A picture is worth a thousand words. However, sometimes you don't want a thousand words when one or two is enough.") It's important to remember that the move away from pull-down menus was informed by a good deal of end-user research, a lot more than this article. The problem is that those who participate in such research are unlikely to represent the majority of the userbase. It's unfortunate, but those who have seen calls for such studies and then thought to themselves, "I have better things to do with my time" will understand this completely.

phkahler 8y ago

Sure, I like how the top level menus are still there - edit, view, etc, but File has been replaced with some weird badge up in the corner. That's just dumb, there is no user-centric explanation whatsoever.

userbinator 8y ago
...and clicking it brings up a full-screen/application monstrosity that was really disorienting the first time I saw it, and still feels slightly unsettling: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ofs_5.png https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ofs_5.p... What's also irritating is the fact that an extra click or two is now needed to Save As or Open from that ridiculous "menu".

rayiner 8y ago

I have my beef with ribbons, but ribbons came out in Office 2007. I’m talking about subsequent developments, like Edge throwing away both ribbons and hierarchical menus and moving to an ellipses menu. There were some pre-2009 mistakes for sure. Arguably it started going downhill with Jaguar and metal windows. But now the wheels have come completely off. You can’t tell what’s what anymore—is it a button or a label or just text? Tap on it and find out! Discoverable buttons and menus have been replaced with undiscoverable gestures and swipes. Not even consistent gestures: how do you move the the insertion point in iOS? It depends on what kind of phone you have! The apocalypse happened, and the righteous were saved. We were left behind to suffer through flat design, material design, the new gmail, Edge, and web apps.

UIZealot 8y ago

>> Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake. > You keep saying this, and it's just not true. You saying it's not true doesn't make it so. > The extreme skeuomorphism in the older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today. Citation needed. As I remember, most pundits simply had some beef with a few extreme cases of skeuomorphism in iOS 6. Nobody advocated that Apple throw the baby out with the bath water as they did in iOS 7. > It's important to remember that the move away from pull-down menus was informed by a good deal of end-user research Again, citation needed. Windows 95, now that's informed by a good deal of research. Everything Microsoft did starting with Windows XP? Not so much.

fiblye 8y ago

Ribbon has to be the absolute worst interface I've ever dealt with. Things seem to be organized completely randomly, things I never use are emphasized, things I always use are de-emphasized, things are hidden behind various panels and determining which involves a tedious search through every single panel, ultimately giving up and having to google where the hell the button I'm looking for is--and seeing thousands of results from people searching the same exact thing. That's not even getting into the fact that it consumes a ridiculous, and I mean simply ridiculous amount of space. I feel like every recent step "forward" in UI is just an attempt to make useful features harder to find, make useless buttons bigger while simultaneously making them harder to identify as buttons, and reducing the actual active input space to the bare minimum. MS Office and gmail started a race to minimize input space a couple years back and now it seems to be spreading everywhere. What used to be nice, full screens of input and being able to visually scan everything is now a tiny white box with absolutely useless garbage everywhere, from ribbons full of buttons I'll use maybe once a year to now auto-suggested text that never aligns with what I want to say and could potentially have disastrous results when I inevitably accidentally click it.

Gibbon1 8y ago
> and reducing the actual active input space to the bare minimum. That's because the the point of computers has shifting from allowing you do create to allowing other people to feed you content. Also: The ad driven model always wrecks everything it touches.

jonhendry18 8y ago

"extreme skeuomorphism in the older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today" No, no it wasn't. Because skeuomorphism wasn't a usability issue the way flat design is.

jonhendry18 8y ago

Leather textures aren't a usabiliy issue.

atombender 8y ago

I'd like to see desktop apps adopt a Spotlight/Alfred/Sublime-type autocompletion UI. Hit some keyboard shortcut and you get a "command palette". By typing, you get command suggestions. An app could easily display not just matches but also a help screen about each match (not possible with today's menus). Also, text matches could be in categories/tags of commands. Type "select" (or even just "sel") and it'd offer commands related to the category "selection", for example. Such a UI could easily work as a replacement for a classical menu bar, in that it would be a superset of this functionality (a menu bar is essentially an "unfiltered" match UI, exploded).