4 ms·

What's the difference between a re-design and constant refinement of a design? I believe in making products aesthetically pleasing. I spend a lot of time ensu

What's the difference between a re-design and constant refinement of a design? I believe in making products aesthetically pleasing. I spend a lot of time ensuring my products look good because I know that this is the first impression of any product. I'm constantly improving the design of my products in subtle (and sometimes not subtle) ways. Full redesigns are the design equivalent of full software rewrites. They suffer from all the same issues: second system affect, loss of functionality, loss of knowledge, etc. And like software re-writes, sometimes they are necessary but often they are not.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Redesigns tend to happen because someone in management decides they want to remake the UI in a way that appeals to them, whether or not it makes sense to anyone else. The MS ribbon was a classic redesign. It broke the standard menu metaphor and crashed productivity for no good reason. Flat design was in a similar league, but not quite as bad. Is that a button or a text element? How can anyone tell? Refinement is a much harder challenge. Improving the aesthetics of something while making it subtly easier to use is a really difficult thing to do.
- d0100 8y ago
  I am guessing that only Office power users hated the MS ribbon. I loved it, it's do much easier to find stuff if you already don't know where it is. Great design for the casual Wordster.
  - atoav 8y ago
    yeah but it is software: ehy not serve both?
    - duckmysick 8y ago
      Because it's software. Additional options mean additional code, which leads to increased complexity and burden on maintenance. And it's not a linear increase. It doesn't mean you can't add new features (or code), but doing so leads to trade-offs.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Only a specific set of grumpy people of a specific age give any shits about it. The real difference with the ribbon is that computing shifted from professionals and workers to everyone. The audience that cares about old style windows menus is vocal and tiny. Users struggled to discover, locate and remember items in the old menus. Many users struggled to find the menu. That said, the Mac menu system is the best implementation of that type of menu delivery.
  - btschaegg 8y ago
    There are two interesting factors to the Office Ribbon and its clones. 1) You can absolutely botch it. A good example of that is Sibelius: Their Ribbon does not make any sense at all (and is in multiple instances literally a waste of space). Personally, I find the ribbon design on MS Office to be much better, though; MS has clearly put much thought and experimentation (i.e. many studies) into the concept. 2) What I find to be extremely interesting: For MS Office, the ribbon introduced better shortcuts. Since Office products are totally overloaded with functionality, the parts you don't use often were usually left behind in terms of useful shortcuts. With the Ribbon, these functionalities are usually accessible via a Spacemacs-Style mnemonic keypresses. If you use a specific functionality over and over, it's now much easier to remember a not-so-bad way to trigger it from the keyboard. On another note: I also find the "new" formatting context menu that pops up in MS Word whenever you select some text to be a very clever idea. It remembers me much of an old Xerox demo[1][2] that was done with a mouse and a trackball simultaneously (featuring a palette you could place around where you were currently making changes with the mouse). I'm convinced that to this day, there's a lot of ignored potential in that concept. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w [2]: https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html
- icelancer 8y ago
  > The MS ribbon was a classic redesign. It broke the standard menu metaphor and crashed productivity for no good reason. I thought I'd eventually get used to it. Nope. It's still significantly less productive than a standard menu.
  - hawaiianbrah 8y ago
    Why’s that? Aren’t there shortcuts for about everything?
    - vbezhenar 8y ago
      I have office installed, but I'm not using it often, so I have no idea about its shortcuts and I'm not going to learn them. Menu allows discovery. If you're smart enough, usually you can find your way to required feature via discovery. Ribbons have less items than menu and they are not very well organized (there's only one level of hierarchy), so I'm often stuck not able to find something.
      - wvenable 8y ago
        Everything is on the ribbon. Once you understand that, it actually becomes a lot easier to use. If you think menu's promote discovery better, you haven't looked at the Visual Studio menus in a while.
- hopler 8y ago
  Ribbon may have been a bad idea, but MS claimed they did a bunch of UX research around it. Why is the standard menu metaphor better? Hunting through a hundred menu items whose names I don't need is a pain, especially if I don't have years of experience learning the options.
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    But ribbon does not present those hundred items in a better way. It just presents most used items and rest are gone to some dark place. And those most used items already were present on toolbars.
    - wvenable 8y ago
      Every option that was on the menu is in the ribbon, there is no dark place. In fact, the ribbon probably surfaces even more options.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    I saw a presentation at Mix once where they went through the redesign process in detail. For myself, and many others, the end result wasn’t great—and not only because it was different—but there was study behind it.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

Redesigns tend to happen because someone in management decides they want to remake the UI in a way that appeals to them, whether or not it makes sense to anyone else. The MS ribbon was a classic redesign. It broke the standard menu metaphor and crashed productivity for no good reason. Flat design was in a similar league, but not quite as bad. Is that a button or a text element? How can anyone tell? Refinement is a much harder challenge. Improving the aesthetics of something while making it subtly easier to use is a really difficult thing to do.

d0100 8y ago
I am guessing that only Office power users hated the MS ribbon. I loved it, it's do much easier to find stuff if you already don't know where it is. Great design for the casual Wordster.
- atoav 8y ago
  yeah but it is software: ehy not serve both?
  - duckmysick 8y ago
    Because it's software. Additional options mean additional code, which leads to increased complexity and burden on maintenance. And it's not a linear increase. It doesn't mean you can't add new features (or code), but doing so leads to trade-offs.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Only a specific set of grumpy people of a specific age give any shits about it. The real difference with the ribbon is that computing shifted from professionals and workers to everyone. The audience that cares about old style windows menus is vocal and tiny. Users struggled to discover, locate and remember items in the old menus. Many users struggled to find the menu. That said, the Mac menu system is the best implementation of that type of menu delivery.
- btschaegg 8y ago
  There are two interesting factors to the Office Ribbon and its clones. 1) You can absolutely botch it. A good example of that is Sibelius: Their Ribbon does not make any sense at all (and is in multiple instances literally a waste of space). Personally, I find the ribbon design on MS Office to be much better, though; MS has clearly put much thought and experimentation (i.e. many studies) into the concept. 2) What I find to be extremely interesting: For MS Office, the ribbon introduced better shortcuts. Since Office products are totally overloaded with functionality, the parts you don't use often were usually left behind in terms of useful shortcuts. With the Ribbon, these functionalities are usually accessible via a Spacemacs-Style mnemonic keypresses. If you use a specific functionality over and over, it's now much easier to remember a not-so-bad way to trigger it from the keyboard. On another note: I also find the "new" formatting context menu that pops up in MS Word whenever you select some text to be a very clever idea. It remembers me much of an old Xerox demo[1][2] that was done with a mouse and a trackball simultaneously (featuring a palette you could place around where you were currently making changes with the mouse). I'm convinced that to this day, there's a lot of ignored potential in that concept. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w [2]: https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html
icelancer 8y ago
> The MS ribbon was a classic redesign. It broke the standard menu metaphor and crashed productivity for no good reason. I thought I'd eventually get used to it. Nope. It's still significantly less productive than a standard menu.
- hawaiianbrah 8y ago
  Why’s that? Aren’t there shortcuts for about everything?
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    I have office installed, but I'm not using it often, so I have no idea about its shortcuts and I'm not going to learn them. Menu allows discovery. If you're smart enough, usually you can find your way to required feature via discovery. Ribbons have less items than menu and they are not very well organized (there's only one level of hierarchy), so I'm often stuck not able to find something.
    - wvenable 8y ago
      Everything is on the ribbon. Once you understand that, it actually becomes a lot easier to use. If you think menu's promote discovery better, you haven't looked at the Visual Studio menus in a while.
hopler 8y ago
Ribbon may have been a bad idea, but MS claimed they did a bunch of UX research around it. Why is the standard menu metaphor better? Hunting through a hundred menu items whose names I don't need is a pain, especially if I don't have years of experience learning the options.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  But ribbon does not present those hundred items in a better way. It just presents most used items and rest are gone to some dark place. And those most used items already were present on toolbars.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    Every option that was on the menu is in the ribbon, there is no dark place. In fact, the ribbon probably surfaces even more options.
- ghaff 8y ago
  I saw a presentation at Mix once where they went through the redesign process in detail. For myself, and many others, the end result wasn’t great—and not only because it was different—but there was study behind it.