5 ms·

It seems a lot of UIs these days are designed for beginners instead of people who know what they are doing. Someone’s this is OK but in a professional conetwxt

It seems a lot of UIs these days are designed for beginners instead of people who know what they are doing. Someone’s this is OK but in a professional conetwxt it often isn’t. I can’t even imagine if IDEs like Visual Studio were designed “spacious” and “minimalistic”. It would look cute but you wouldn’t get anything done. Some things are just complex and there is no way to design that away without hurting productivity.

oblio 8y ago
You can do it, but it requires tons and tons of effort. And even after all that, you can't escape the backlash. There's a great series by Jensen Harris, Office Program Manager, about how they designed the Ribbon: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/09/26/the-why-of-the-new-ui-part-1-2/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/09/26/the-why-... (you can find the rest in his blog archives, unfortunately the images are gone) It was an incredibly complex undertaking, Microsoft did many studies, had focus groups and the whole thing (Office after all, is a major business to them, worth billions of dollars). The end result was demonstrably better for the vast majority of users (Microsoft had hard numbers to back their design decisions). And yet if you read many of the comments on tech forums you'd think Microsoft killed the users' puppies.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I don’t know how they come up with the numbers but I still think that menus and toolbars were much more discoverable and faster to use than the ribbon :)
  - oblio 8y ago
    QED. I rest my case :) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/31/inside-deep-thought-why-the-ui-part-6-2/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/31/inside-d...
  - lozenge 8y ago
    Yes, I often open a document and decide I want to use a Tool. ;) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/01/31/flea-market-of-functionality/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/01/31/flea-mar...
  - int_19h 8y ago
    More importantly for power users, they were much more customizable.
    - oblio 8y ago
      They checked that and power users didn't customize that much. There's a lot of studies that show that power users don't customize, since customizations are not portable across PCs/systems in general. I wasn't kidding when I said they went through a lot of numbers while designing the ribbon (I read the whole blog archive at one point). On top of that, the new UI is way more discoverable for new and intermediate users. And at the end of the day, beginners are let's say 10% of the users, intermediate users at various levels are probably something like 85% and power users are probably only 5% ;)
    - velosol 8y ago
      Power users tended to use shortcut keys which are STILL (Office 2016) supported. Want to add an image from a file? Alt, I, P, F and you have a file picker on your screen ready to go.
- rgoulter 8y ago
  This entertaining diatribe about Sibelius' difficult to use design mentions poor use of a Ribbon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    This is great. Makes me think of the change from Visual Studio from 2008 to 2010. They made a very good IDE into a slow, unreadable mess with much less functionality just to have a “flat” interface. I still don’t understand that nobody at MS noticed how bad that change was. Or more likely people weren’t listened to. Even after almost 10 years they barely have caught up to what they had with 2008.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      It was a major rewrite of large chunks of the interface from native C++ using raw Win32 calls (and said C++ was written back in 1996 in many cases, to the point where it'd do AddRef/Release calls by hand sometimes - forget RAII and anything that you know of modern C++), to C# and WPF. And it was necessary even solely from an engineering perspective, because adding features to that original code was becoming a huge pain.
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        The result was worse in pretty much every way. Graphically (whole idea was it to take out all colors from the Ui? I don't know anyone who thought the 2010 UI was a good idea), Slower, less customizable , less features (for example they removed macro recording). It was definitely not a good showcase for WPF.
        int_19h 8y ago
        These are different issues, though. For example, the color was a UX design decision - WPF made it possible to do theming easier, but even so, doing it instead of using stock controls actually required extra effort. But, speaking of colors and preferences - when VS 2012 went with its "black and white" color theme a couple years later, a lot of people actually demanded specifically the return of the blue VS2010 theme. Which is why it's still there today. As for macros, it was essentially on life support for several releases prior to all that. It was essentially a separate subproduct, coming from Office originally (since it also uses VBA for scripting), but forked ages ago, and not well maintained... and it was completely broken by changing the GUI framework. So the choice was basically to rewrite or drop it at that point, and a rewrite would require substantial work - on par with the rest of the product, really. And with <1% of VS users using macros at all, it was very hard to justify a rewrite. I would agree, though, that WPF was not a stellar framework at the time. But, ironically, VS adopting it made it better in so many ways - for example, WPF font rendering was fixed (to be less blurry) largely because of user feedback in VS2010. Perf was improved substantially, as well.
- 13415 8y ago
  > The end result was demonstrably better for the vast majority of users (Microsoft had hard numbers to back their design decisions). I'd rather believe their studies/methodology is flawed than that the ribbon interface makes sense. It's the most illogical and confusing interface I have ever encountered since I got my Sinclair ZX-81 as a birthday present. I still cannot use Word without googling where to find a function in the Ribbon interface, and I have no problem with any other GUI anywhere. (To be fair, I'm mostly using Linux so I'm not Word very often.)
arethuza 8y ago
Not often that you hear Visual Studio described as "minimalistic"!
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Thank god it isn’t. They sort of tried to do that with 2010 but failed miserably.
peeters 8y ago
> It seems a lot of UIs these days are designed for beginners instead of people who know what they are doing. I think the underlying thing is that simple UIs sell better because you're usually presenting it to someone that can't visualize their complex workflow needs up front. The number of times I've seen requirements that are basically sales enablement features that customers would rarely use is not insignificant. Similar to focusing on usability for low-res displays, when the only time the app would be used on a low res display is when hooking it up to a projector in a demo.
GuB-42 8y ago
Not even that. It is designed for aesthetics. That something I didn't realize until lately but aesthetics is hugely important. We once updated our internal issue tracker and everyone raved about how better it is now. The thing is: absolutely nothing changed for the average user besides the style. Things like more tasteful color choice, a more modern look with square corners, etc... nothing practical. Also, from some guys at Microsoft: if you didn't change the UI, from the user point of view, you didn't do anything. The problem with modern UIs for beginners is that too much is hidden. Panels that only appear when swiped from the side, parts that give no indication of being clickable, highly abstract icons, lack of consistency (ex: the "hamburger" menu can be anywhere, or not be present at all).

oblio 8y ago

You can do it, but it requires tons and tons of effort. And even after all that, you can't escape the backlash. There's a great series by Jensen Harris, Office Program Manager, about how they designed the Ribbon: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/09/26/the-why-of-the-new-ui-part-1-2/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/09/26/the-why-... (you can find the rest in his blog archives, unfortunately the images are gone) It was an incredibly complex undertaking, Microsoft did many studies, had focus groups and the whole thing (Office after all, is a major business to them, worth billions of dollars). The end result was demonstrably better for the vast majority of users (Microsoft had hard numbers to back their design decisions). And yet if you read many of the comments on tech forums you'd think Microsoft killed the users' puppies.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I don’t know how they come up with the numbers but I still think that menus and toolbars were much more discoverable and faster to use than the ribbon :)
- oblio 8y ago
  QED. I rest my case :) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/31/inside-deep-thought-why-the-ui-part-6-2/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/31/inside-d...
- lozenge 8y ago
  Yes, I often open a document and decide I want to use a Tool. ;) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/01/31/flea-market-of-functionality/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/01/31/flea-mar...
- int_19h 8y ago
  More importantly for power users, they were much more customizable.
  - oblio 8y ago
    They checked that and power users didn't customize that much. There's a lot of studies that show that power users don't customize, since customizations are not portable across PCs/systems in general. I wasn't kidding when I said they went through a lot of numbers while designing the ribbon (I read the whole blog archive at one point). On top of that, the new UI is way more discoverable for new and intermediate users. And at the end of the day, beginners are let's say 10% of the users, intermediate users at various levels are probably something like 85% and power users are probably only 5% ;)
  - velosol 8y ago
    Power users tended to use shortcut keys which are STILL (Office 2016) supported. Want to add an image from a file? Alt, I, P, F and you have a file picker on your screen ready to go.
rgoulter 8y ago
This entertaining diatribe about Sibelius' difficult to use design mentions poor use of a Ribbon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  This is great. Makes me think of the change from Visual Studio from 2008 to 2010. They made a very good IDE into a slow, unreadable mess with much less functionality just to have a “flat” interface. I still don’t understand that nobody at MS noticed how bad that change was. Or more likely people weren’t listened to. Even after almost 10 years they barely have caught up to what they had with 2008.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    It was a major rewrite of large chunks of the interface from native C++ using raw Win32 calls (and said C++ was written back in 1996 in many cases, to the point where it'd do AddRef/Release calls by hand sometimes - forget RAII and anything that you know of modern C++), to C# and WPF. And it was necessary even solely from an engineering perspective, because adding features to that original code was becoming a huge pain.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      The result was worse in pretty much every way. Graphically (whole idea was it to take out all colors from the Ui? I don't know anyone who thought the 2010 UI was a good idea), Slower, less customizable , less features (for example they removed macro recording). It was definitely not a good showcase for WPF.
      - int_19h 8y ago
        These are different issues, though. For example, the color was a UX design decision - WPF made it possible to do theming easier, but even so, doing it instead of using stock controls actually required extra effort. But, speaking of colors and preferences - when VS 2012 went with its "black and white" color theme a couple years later, a lot of people actually demanded specifically the return of the blue VS2010 theme. Which is why it's still there today. As for macros, it was essentially on life support for several releases prior to all that. It was essentially a separate subproduct, coming from Office originally (since it also uses VBA for scripting), but forked ages ago, and not well maintained... and it was completely broken by changing the GUI framework. So the choice was basically to rewrite or drop it at that point, and a rewrite would require substantial work - on par with the rest of the product, really. And with <1% of VS users using macros at all, it was very hard to justify a rewrite. I would agree, though, that WPF was not a stellar framework at the time. But, ironically, VS adopting it made it better in so many ways - for example, WPF font rendering was fixed (to be less blurry) largely because of user feedback in VS2010. Perf was improved substantially, as well.
13415 8y ago
> The end result was demonstrably better for the vast majority of users (Microsoft had hard numbers to back their design decisions). I'd rather believe their studies/methodology is flawed than that the ribbon interface makes sense. It's the most illogical and confusing interface I have ever encountered since I got my Sinclair ZX-81 as a birthday present. I still cannot use Word without googling where to find a function in the Ribbon interface, and I have no problem with any other GUI anywhere. (To be fair, I'm mostly using Linux so I'm not Word very often.)

arethuza 8y ago

Not often that you hear Visual Studio described as "minimalistic"!

maxxxxx 8y ago
Thank god it isn’t. They sort of tried to do that with 2010 but failed miserably.

peeters 8y ago

> It seems a lot of UIs these days are designed for beginners instead of people who know what they are doing. I think the underlying thing is that simple UIs sell better because you're usually presenting it to someone that can't visualize their complex workflow needs up front. The number of times I've seen requirements that are basically sales enablement features that customers would rarely use is not insignificant. Similar to focusing on usability for low-res displays, when the only time the app would be used on a low res display is when hooking it up to a projector in a demo.

GuB-42 8y ago

Not even that. It is designed for aesthetics. That something I didn't realize until lately but aesthetics is hugely important. We once updated our internal issue tracker and everyone raved about how better it is now. The thing is: absolutely nothing changed for the average user besides the style. Things like more tasteful color choice, a more modern look with square corners, etc... nothing practical. Also, from some guys at Microsoft: if you didn't change the UI, from the user point of view, you didn't do anything. The problem with modern UIs for beginners is that too much is hidden. Panels that only appear when swiped from the side, parts that give no indication of being clickable, highly abstract icons, lack of consistency (ex: the "hamburger" menu can be anywhere, or not be present at all).