12 ms·

Ribbons (2007)

maliker 7y ago
I confess, I am a ribbon hater. For three main reasons: 1) It kills muscle memory by changing the size and location of the buttons depending on the window size. And not just the size, but also their shape, appearance and place in dropdown hierarchies (i.e. top level versus behind a dropdown). So even after years of using MS Office with the ribbon I still hunt for commands. 2) It encourages multiple copies of the same command. So instead of learning the one place font-size (e.g.) shows up, you end up hunting every time through 3 or 4 tabs for the place you saw it last. 3) The UI features it was meant to replace was left in the program further increasing the number of areas you have to search through. Looking at Powerpoint as an example, it has the ribbon, formatting panes, traditional formatting dialogs, and the right click quick options menu. There are features available on all of them, but there are also options missing on some but not others. Sometimes I find myself hunting through 3 or 4 of these places for some obscure (e.g. table padding) option. This opinion is based on using the ribbon in MS Office, which was the first and (I would hope, based on the team's resources) best implementation. Maybe somebody uses the ribbon to its fullest. I buy their pitch that they studied beginner users and those people had an easier time with the ribbon. But for advanced users, this interface is a nightmare. And can't really be avoided.
- maliker 7y ago
  Self-reply, sorry, the ribbon really gets my goat. Here's the deck from the Office team on how and why they designed the ribbon: http://video.ch9.ms/slides/mix08/UX09_Harris.pptx http://video.ch9.ms/slides/mix08/UX09_Harris.pptx I realize the Office team had a very hard task. They can't remove features or some of their 100 million users get mad, and they're making a ton of money so they've got a lot of devs looking to add features, so they've got thousands of features and of course users can't find things. For a contrasting approach, I think the Keynote app on Mac went a different and easier-to-use route: 1. All the options with no context (e.g. insert new object) are in the top menubar, and the contextual options (e.g. change font color) are in a sidebar. So it's clear where to look for things. 2. Commands are in one place only, so you remember where you should look. (Okay, there's a little bit of duplication as the OS-level font menus are in the menu and the sidebar). 3. The contextual stuff is on the side instead of the top, which works better with the wide screens we use everywhere on desktops these days. 4. Contextual menus options stay the same size and shape and in the same location relative to the content, so you retain your muscle memory.
- bilekas 7y ago
  > This opinion is based on using the ribbon in MS Office I was just about to say the same thing.. Ribbon is good, when done right, but recent iterations of office have just obfuscated things so much that its infuriating.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I hate the ribbon so very much. You stated the many problems with it better than I, but here's why it actively makes me angry: It takes a lot of space, and seems to always make it very hard to find the things that I need to use. If I have no option but to use the ribbon, my productivity using that software plummets because I so often have to take a lot of time to find the operation that I need. It's incredibly frustrating.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Did you know you can scroll through Ribbon tabs on most (every?) implementation with your scroll wheel? I've been surprised how often that seems to differentiate between people that think finding things in a ribbon is hard/slow versus easy/quick. Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard? It has also surprised me how many people that liked the old menus because of keyboard navigation don't realize a lot of the same tricks and navigations work exactly the same (Alt, arrow keys, Esc, letters, etc).
    - benhurmarcel 7y ago
      In addition, when it comes to taking too much space, most people don't know it can be collapsed (double click the active tab).
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > Did you know you can scroll through Ribbon tabs on most (every?) implementation with your scroll wheel? > Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard? Yes, to both of those things. Scrolling through the ribbon tabs doesn't address or ease my issue with the ribbon (which is trying to find the operation I want). The problem isn't how quickly I can scroll through the ribbon, but that finding things in it is hard. That said, a good UI solution wouldn't require me to scroll anything like that in the first place. Keyboard shortcuts let me bypass the ribbon, which is good, but they don't help me with things that I don't do all the time because I won't remember the shortcuts. Aside from the waste of screen space, the ribbon doesn't bother me when doing the routine things.
- Smoosh 7y ago
  Microsoft also added a "Tell me what you want to do..." search box, which I think is a clear indication that the current UI is unsatisfactory for a large number of people.
  - mcswell 7y ago
    I tried that today. We moved to the new Outlook 365, and it had a bunch of useless (to me) dividers when I sorted by date that said "today" and "yesterday" etc. I wanted to get rid of them, so I asked the search box "how do i omit the today and yesterday dividers". All I got was how to search for emails sent today/ yesterday. I finally found what I wanted using a web search. (The old Outlook probably had those dividers as well, but I must have found the trick to get rid of them back in 2010.)
NotTheDr01ds 7y ago
I was always surprised at the hatred that many (most) "power users" expressed toward the Ribbon design. To me, the greatest thing about it was that it exposed every Ribbon action with an easily discoverable and repeatable key-sequence. Just hit the Alt key once, and every top level category's hotkey showed up as a hover. Hit that key, and the commands on the ribbon (or next level dropdown) were displayed. "Paste Special", a very common action, became Alt+H+V+S. And you didn't have to do finger twisters like Ctrl+Alt+V (all held down together) to achieve it. And again, almost EVERY command was available in this way. Sure, you could create your own hotkeys in versions of Office before this, but the Ribbon brought almost every command within easy reach of those that hate removing their fingers from the keyboard. It wasn't quite VIM (no command mode), but it was a far sight better than anything than had existed before in Office, where most of the advanced UI had been buried away in difficult-to-automate AND navigate (either by keyboard or mouse) modal dialogs. And by exposing most of the UI to the keyboard, it also enabled easier automation via utilities like AutoHotkey. All-in-all, it was a power user's dream, but I definitely see how it was harder for a mouse user to develop the muscle memory on the Ribbon vs an icon bar. That, however, I believe is simply a matter of having nearly 100% of the UI be available via the Ribbon, vs. the 20% (or less) of icon bars. The always present trade-off between power and ease-of-use, at least for the mouse user.
- jkaptur 7y ago
  FYI, that was how the menus worked in previous versions (Alt-f for the file menu, etc.), so ribbons didn’t expose any new functionality in that regard. In fact, Microsoft bent over backwards to ensure that every old pattern people had used would continue to work exactly the same way.
  - NotTheDr01ds 7y ago
    I thought about mentioning this, but Menus still had a tendency to dead-end into modal dialogs more often than not. A Ribbon command could still end up in a modal, but often times the Ribbon design allowed more functionality to be present in a non-modal way. I worked for Lotus/IBM when Word Pro was being developed, and they came up with the concept of a non-modal floating property bar (they called it the "Info Bar") that pretty much eliminated modals entirely. While I don't recall whether or not it was very keyboard friendly (I was still a mouse user at the time), it definitely showed me that there was a better way than "modal dialogs everywhere". When I moved on from IBM and had to use Office, I remember how grating it was every time I ended up in a modal dialog, so this was one more reason I was excited to see the Ribbon come along (more than a decade after Word Pro's Info Bar). I've never looked to see, but it wouldn't surprise me if some of the MS developers for Office 2007 came from Lotus/IBM, since it was a few years earlier that IBM had really given up the Office Suite fight for good.
olav 7y ago
I think ribbons are one of the great UX failures of the Microsoft Office suite. An alternative arrangement of functions are property palettes like they are used in CAD tools, Adobe Photoshop, Open Office, or Apple Pages. There, functions are not globally aranged in ribbons like "Start", "References", but are presented in the context of a selected object. For example, if I have selected an image, the topmost palette shows properties applicable to an image. In addition, I get tabs with options for the placement of the image in a text frame, and for the page the text frame is located on. Very neat, not at all arbitrary, but reflecting the hierarchy of the objects I am working with.
- MikusR 7y ago
  That's how it works in Office. In if you select an image (might require doubleclick) it shows stuff to do with that image.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jwcacces 7y ago
I look at the change to ribbons through the lens of: "Would they have done it if they had viable competitors?", and I have to think that there's no way MS would have. Everyone would have laughed their way right over to Word Perfect. Perhaps it makes things easier for new users, but only without competitors where they able to shoe-horn it in for everybody. Now I use it on a Mac where there are still menus on the top and I can get stuff done. I wish there was an option to enable the menus (and fine, leave the ribbon if you must) on Windows.
orev 7y ago
When the ribbons first came out, all the techies I knew groused about them with all the technical reasons that people have mentioned here (which I feel are mostly weak arguments and reek of resistance to change). I wasn’t sure myself. Until I saw some non-IT people using them for the first time. They LOVED them. They could easily see and get things done way better than before. The people who didn’t have the confidence to poke around in traditional menus had no problem looking through the ribbons and trying things out. In many cases they started doing things that they had no idea existed. The ribbons really opened up these tools for the users, which is really the whole point. In the case of the ribbons, the techies who rail against them are unequivocally wrong. The arguments against them are the same ones we heard when going from DOS to Windows. It completely loses sight of the point of IT, which is to allow the users to be productive (and no, just because it broke some muscle memory you had, that is not an argument that it broke productivity, that’s an argument that you don’t like change), not to force people to remember random incantations because the greybeard says is “the right way” to do it.
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  I was one of those techies. I was wrong. It was one of the things that completly changed my perspective of computing. That, and teaching, and working on a streaming website. I suddenly saw apple products differently. Linux differently. I started to design things from the UI instead of the data model. And eventually, it lead to accepting many of my limitations in other area, because I took in consideration users limitarions in my area of expertise. Funny how being wrong can be good for you.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  > Until I saw some non-IT people using them for the first time. It shouldn't be surprising that people who hadn't any prior experience would be fine with ribbons, since it is mainly the people who had experience with the same applications but without ribbons that saw the decrease in their productivity. > and no, just because it broke some muscle memory you had, that is not an argument that it broke productivity, that’s an argument that you don’t like change And that is a very good argument, change for the sake of change (or worse, for something inferior) is a waste of time. Building muscle memory is a very good thing when it comes to UIs, the entire point of Windows having a standardized UI in the first place was that people who spent time to learn some program's UI they could apply the same knowledge on another program's UI that they hadn't used before. Ribbon works against that and as a quick example check File Explorer, WordPad, OneNote (the Windows 10 app) and Windows Paint that all use ribbon-ish interfaces that come with Windows. They all look different, have different tabs and even their default state is different. The closest they have in having a common UI is the File tab and OneNote doesn't even have that. Ribbon applications not only do not look like other applications but sometimes they do not look like older versions of themselves, since they had to move stuff around to make space for new or changed functionality. And not all ribbon implementations even behave the same - Windows itself probably comes with 3-4 different implementations that all have little weird differences and that doesn't count all the 3rd party implementations (i think there are more ribbon implementations out there than applications actually using ribbons :-P).
vintagedave 7y ago
When the ribbon was introduced, Microsoft asserted patent rights and asked for a license in order to use it. In fact, you were not allowed to use ribbons in your app without a license. You can read about that here: https://web.archive.org/web/20100719112606/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/11/21/licensing-the-2007-microsoft-office-user-interface.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20100719112606/http://blogs.msdn... Since then, license text has mostly disappeared from Microsoft's site. The license page no longer exists. You can't apply for one. I personally last saw text referring to a license requirement in the ribbon MFC samples distributed with Visual Studio. But the question if Microsoft requires a license or asserts patent rights seems to still be open - there has been no statement from Microsoft, and a quick google shows lots of people asking the same question. * https://office-watch.com/2018/can-microsoft-office-ribbon-used-developers/ https://office-watch.com/2018/can-microsoft-office-ribbon-us... * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/563312/is-the-ms-ribbon-office-ui-license-worth-worrying-about https://stackoverflow.com/questions/563312/is-the-ms-ribbon-... * https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/02/Ribbon-UI/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/02/Ribbon-UI/ * and me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095662
- gitgud 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure Autodesk use a licensed forum of MS ribbons in a lot of their software; AutoCAD, Inventor etc. But I can't find any references to the specific license agreement... https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad-lt/getting-started/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/AutoCAD-LT/files/GUID-D20EF1D7-4135-48A7-B68E-65BF3BFF3D70-htm.html https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad-lt/getting-st...
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  The impression I have is that Microsoft let the patent expire at the basic 7 year mark (~2014) as they deemed their UX R&D investment had given them enough lead over competitors in the Office suite space (the primary applications that required a paid license and were not allowed the free license). Around that time Microsoft added Ribbons to Win32 and WPF as freely available controls with no additional license. Fluent Design also seems working to add Ribbon controls to all UI control toolkits with no mention of licensing or patent rights (and seems to be working to move even Office to shared controls).
UweSchmidt 7y ago
A stunning disregard to millions, maybe billions of human hours spent learning a menu-based UI of incredibly powerful and feature rich office applications, where ultimately there is no obvious place for an option, feature or toggle; at least offer consistency to make the learning worthwhile. At the very least preserve the option to keep the old menu. But no, the boardroom was convinced by a shiny presentation. Out with the old, in with the new. Now, trivial features are easier to find, advanced features are..somewhere else. So you can't discover the advanced features next to the more common ones. The ribbon was the time when you could start to tell when websites or software products had a new generation of product people taking over and changing things around. You could feel the touch of a designer who hasn't loved or really used the product much. All workflows have become weaker, dumbed down. The important "save as..." icon, where I quickly place the thing somewhere else before I proceed with my fleeting thought, is sabotaged by the delay on the click on "File", the confusion why a menu opens slowly from the left, the hunt downwards to my all-important click. Then, force me into a discussion where to save the file. "Maybe in the cloud as that is what we're selling?" Just no. Now I won't ever go the extra mile and learn every last feature of an application. Learn it, become fluent, yes. But my learning can only be invested in permanent knowledge. Be it BASH or programming fundamentals. But your UI, no thanks.
- EdSharkey 7y ago
  I always thought Jobs was prescient to mandate that the menu bar appear as part of the OS chrome on MacOS and not an individual application's chrome like it was on Windows. Always-on menu prevented bored UX folks from EVER removing the menu from the screen. Always active menu has felt clunky on Mac since the advent of multiscreens and very wide screens, but I still appreciate this UX design tenet. The discoverability heavyweight champ always was and always will be the menu. I wonder if Jobs ever discussed Always-on menu publicly and contrasted it with Windows' approach.
  - UweSchmidt 7y ago
    Great point, makes me admire Jobs even more.
thrower123 7y ago
I still despise the ribbon. I really would rather just have the old Office 2003 and previous configurable toolbars, that took up a quarter or a third of the vertical space. The only thing that I hate more than the Ribbon is the way that newer versions of Office products will flash you to a full-screen page when you click on the File menu. All I ever want to do there is do a Save As, and they have shitted up the simple job of popping a save file dialog with all kinds of OneDrive and Sharepoint nonsense.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  I suggest making use of the Quick Access Toolbar. Move it below the ribbon, and put everything you commonly use on it. Then collapse the ribbon. This way, common tools are a single click away, and everything else is two clicks away. Re: the backstage File menu, I agree with you. The app menu in Office 2007 (and the File Explorer) is better because it doesn't change the context—what you're working on is still visible behind the menu. The full-window backstage menu is bewildering.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > newer versions of Office products will flash you to a full-screen page when you click on the File menu. I agree -- this is horrible. But I'd take it if it meant no more ribbon.
- MikusR 7y ago
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-size-of-things https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-s... Word 2007 document area: 1007 x 573 pixels Word 97 document area: 979 x 573 pixels Excel 97 document area: 1004 x 581 pixels Excel 2007 document area: 1008 x 534 pixels
  - thrower123 7y ago
    With all of the images broken/missing (they appear to be linked to a domain that is owned by some domain squatter that is trying to get me to install a skeezy Chrome extension), it's hard to actually compare, and tell what toolbars are enabled on the old version. But in Word 2003, everything that I ever had on the toolbar would fit into a single row, and Word 2016's ribbon uses the same icons, and is three rows high.
kirstenbirgit 7y ago
Looking at this, it's clear a LOT of thought went into this, and it looks great. Computer geeks that hated this didn't realize how good it was because they were familiar with the previous generations and don't like change. The Word/Office 2007 UX design is probably some of Microsoft's best design work ever.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Can we dispense with the "you hate it because you don't like change" argument yet? It's an easy way to write off other people's opinions and often it's not even close to being true. It's particularly unlikely to be the reason when we're talking about something that was introduced about 20 years ago because it's not "change" anymore. Everyone is used to it now, and those that still dislike it don't dislike it because "it's new".
  - kirstenbirgit 7y ago
    It's still new for some of these geeks that were already very experienced with computers around the time when Ribbon was introduced. They've just kept hating it since.
specialist 7y ago
The explicit goal of the ribbon design effort was to better manage the complexity. Rather than simplify the underlying products. Such is the conceit of Microsoft. I watched the "The Story of the Ribbon". Twice. Just to be sure I properly understood what happened. https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09 https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09 It's a great example of a series of rational decisions yielding a terrible end result. Because they started with the wrong question. IIRC, Jensen Harris said Office (or maybe just Word?) had something like 2,000 (or 20,000?) individual operations (commands plus modifiers). Their initial premise was to better organize and present that dizzying number. Create the perfect visual language taxonomy. Instead of first trying to figure how to reduce that number. -- It's been a long, long time since I've used Microsoft products. I used to be quite the Word buff. But you'll get the gist of this example: Embedding an image within a body of text is a common task. With Word, it just fucking sucks. There's an option for every little thing. Dozens of settings to tweak. And predicting where that image lands, especially with reflow, is more launch and pray than anything rational or deterministic. But really, there's just 4, maybe 6. different ways any sane person would want that image to be anchored. Just show a preview of those options and let the user pick the result. If someone needs something more fancy, they should opt to use a desktop publishing app, which is actually built for this kind of work. But no. Word has to be all things to all people. So consequently becomes nothing for anyone. -- TLDR: Microsoft hates their customers.
- fowl2 7y ago
  as simple as possible but no simpler
jerome-jh 7y ago
I remember spending 1/2 hour (really!) with my wife looking for the "print" menu entry after installing Office xyz, that first had "ribbons", on her computer. That's the kind of change that makes you hate computers, and computer programmers.
frosted-flakes 7y ago
I stumbled across this page when I was in early high school, and for someone new to computers in general it was a fascinating read. It taught me that user interface design is something that people actually do for a job and that when done well is delightful to use. Oh, and it set an example of clear, instructive writing with illustrations done right that I think influenced me quite a lot. Some people don't like the Ribbon, but I love it. As a new user back in the day and a "power user" today, I think it's loads better than the semi-random arrangement of cryptic menus and toolbars we had before. In my opinion, Microsoft Word 2007 did it best. Later iterations did away with the app button and menu in favour of the obstructive "backstage" menu, and I don't think the flat design does it any favours.
- stazz1 7y ago
  Did you ever hear the origin story of Ribbons? A smart person at MSFT petitioned Billy G directly about it! It was really a bold move that not a lot of peers supported, and look at what a good move it ended up being. That said, if you can expose a button instead of hiding all the juicy details in a dropdown, you ought'a.
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  And that's certainly an opinion. The wrong one, as it turns out, but you're as entitled to yours as other people are to theirs. It would be nice to have a choice though, rather than having your opinion forced on others.
  - flippyhead 7y ago
    I don't have a strong opinion, but also think that mine would be irrelevant anyways -- isn't what matters most here the research they have undoubtedly done to understand how the UI affects their various customers and their needs? The certainty people often have as to UI design is amusing in light of how successful this line of products has been, as if their small and selfish opinion (or mine!) could somehow be more correct than the millions these guys have invested in getting this right. And not to the problem they or I _personally_ have, but to the problem of shipping a product used by probably billions of people across hundreds of cultures. I have no doubt that if you (or I!) were in charge of design, guided only by our personal opinions, the product would have completely failed.
pojntfx 7y ago
I'm so happy new interface don't use ribbons but just CSD headerbars now. What a terrible UX this stuff was.
- dekken_ 7y ago
  I met someone who worked on the office 2008 ribbon, all I could do was shake my head and ask, why? how many hours were wasted by such an obtuse design decision.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Can you explain your opinion? I think people would be interested in hearing your thinking.
- stockerta 7y ago
  I prefer the ribbon to the old toolbars and menus Office had before.
- matsemann 7y ago
  > What a terrible UX this stuff was. Based on what? I see a lot of strong comments here, but little reasoning. UX is more than feelings.
  - laumars 7y ago
    The below is my experiences based on menus+toolbars vs ribbon bar. Some detail will be subjective but I've tried to add enough detail that can explain why people considered it to be a "bad" UX: Things were more discoverable in menus and the written title in the menu is often more descriptive than an icon glyph (granted some items in the ribbon bar does also have labels). You then also had the glyphs on the toolbars for power users. It meant that super frequent tasks you'd learn shortcut keys for. moderately frequent tasks you'd learn the toolbar icon. And infrequent tasks you could still find through the menus. The idea of the ribbon bar was to make things more discoverable but the issue is having everything presented in one workflow where icons are different sized, some with or without labels and some hidden behind popup menus on the ribbon bar, you make it harder for people to systematically search for something specific that they can't recall where the option is. Another benefit with the toolbar was customizability. That was great for people to morph the UI around their requirements. This isn't possible with the ribbon bar -- it's a one size fits all approach so for some people it will work well but there are so many people that don't fit well.
frosted-flakes 7y ago
I've changed the title to reflect that this was originally published around 2007 and I don't think it has changed significantly since. The date 2007 isn't shown on the page, but I first read it around 2008 and it was published for Microsoft Office 2007. Edit: it may have been published in 2008, since at least one of the linked pages has that date.

Ribbons (2007)

I confess, I am a ribbon hater. For three main reasons: 1) It kills muscle memory by changing the size and location of the buttons depending on the window size. And not just the size, but also their shape, appearance and place in dropdown hierarchies (i.e. top level versus behind a dropdown). So even after years of using MS Office with the ribbon I still hunt for commands. 2) It encourages multiple copies of the same command. So instead of learning the one place font-size (e.g.) shows up, you end up hunting every time through 3 or 4 tabs for the place you saw it last. 3) The UI features it was meant to replace was left in the program further increasing the number of areas you have to search through. Looking at Powerpoint as an example, it has the ribbon, formatting panes, traditional formatting dialogs, and the right click quick options menu. There are features available on all of them, but there are also options missing on some but not others. Sometimes I find myself hunting through 3 or 4 of these places for some obscure (e.g. table padding) option. This opinion is based on using the ribbon in MS Office, which was the first and (I would hope, based on the team's resources) best implementation. Maybe somebody uses the ribbon to its fullest. I buy their pitch that they studied beginner users and those people had an easier time with the ribbon. But for advanced users, this interface is a nightmare. And can't really be avoided.

maliker 7y ago
Self-reply, sorry, the ribbon really gets my goat. Here's the deck from the Office team on how and why they designed the ribbon: http://video.ch9.ms/slides/mix08/UX09_Harris.pptx http://video.ch9.ms/slides/mix08/UX09_Harris.pptx I realize the Office team had a very hard task. They can't remove features or some of their 100 million users get mad, and they're making a ton of money so they've got a lot of devs looking to add features, so they've got thousands of features and of course users can't find things. For a contrasting approach, I think the Keynote app on Mac went a different and easier-to-use route: 1. All the options with no context (e.g. insert new object) are in the top menubar, and the contextual options (e.g. change font color) are in a sidebar. So it's clear where to look for things. 2. Commands are in one place only, so you remember where you should look. (Okay, there's a little bit of duplication as the OS-level font menus are in the menu and the sidebar). 3. The contextual stuff is on the side instead of the top, which works better with the wide screens we use everywhere on desktops these days. 4. Contextual menus options stay the same size and shape and in the same location relative to the content, so you retain your muscle memory.
bilekas 7y ago
> This opinion is based on using the ribbon in MS Office I was just about to say the same thing.. Ribbon is good, when done right, but recent iterations of office have just obfuscated things so much that its infuriating.
JohnFen 7y ago
I couldn't agree more. I hate the ribbon so very much. You stated the many problems with it better than I, but here's why it actively makes me angry: It takes a lot of space, and seems to always make it very hard to find the things that I need to use. If I have no option but to use the ribbon, my productivity using that software plummets because I so often have to take a lot of time to find the operation that I need. It's incredibly frustrating.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Did you know you can scroll through Ribbon tabs on most (every?) implementation with your scroll wheel? I've been surprised how often that seems to differentiate between people that think finding things in a ribbon is hard/slow versus easy/quick. Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard? It has also surprised me how many people that liked the old menus because of keyboard navigation don't realize a lot of the same tricks and navigations work exactly the same (Alt, arrow keys, Esc, letters, etc).
  - benhurmarcel 7y ago
    In addition, when it comes to taking too much space, most people don't know it can be collapsed (double click the active tab).
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > Did you know you can scroll through Ribbon tabs on most (every?) implementation with your scroll wheel? > Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard? Yes, to both of those things. Scrolling through the ribbon tabs doesn't address or ease my issue with the ribbon (which is trying to find the operation I want). The problem isn't how quickly I can scroll through the ribbon, but that finding things in it is hard. That said, a good UI solution wouldn't require me to scroll anything like that in the first place. Keyboard shortcuts let me bypass the ribbon, which is good, but they don't help me with things that I don't do all the time because I won't remember the shortcuts. Aside from the waste of screen space, the ribbon doesn't bother me when doing the routine things.
Smoosh 7y ago
Microsoft also added a "Tell me what you want to do..." search box, which I think is a clear indication that the current UI is unsatisfactory for a large number of people.
- mcswell 7y ago
  I tried that today. We moved to the new Outlook 365, and it had a bunch of useless (to me) dividers when I sorted by date that said "today" and "yesterday" etc. I wanted to get rid of them, so I asked the search box "how do i omit the today and yesterday dividers". All I got was how to search for emails sent today/ yesterday. I finally found what I wanted using a web search. (The old Outlook probably had those dividers as well, but I must have found the trick to get rid of them back in 2010.)

NotTheDr01ds 7y ago

I was always surprised at the hatred that many (most) "power users" expressed toward the Ribbon design. To me, the greatest thing about it was that it exposed every Ribbon action with an easily discoverable and repeatable key-sequence. Just hit the Alt key once, and every top level category's hotkey showed up as a hover. Hit that key, and the commands on the ribbon (or next level dropdown) were displayed. "Paste Special", a very common action, became Alt+H+V+S. And you didn't have to do finger twisters like Ctrl+Alt+V (all held down together) to achieve it. And again, almost EVERY command was available in this way. Sure, you could create your own hotkeys in versions of Office before this, but the Ribbon brought almost every command within easy reach of those that hate removing their fingers from the keyboard. It wasn't quite VIM (no command mode), but it was a far sight better than anything than had existed before in Office, where most of the advanced UI had been buried away in difficult-to-automate AND navigate (either by keyboard or mouse) modal dialogs. And by exposing most of the UI to the keyboard, it also enabled easier automation via utilities like AutoHotkey. All-in-all, it was a power user's dream, but I definitely see how it was harder for a mouse user to develop the muscle memory on the Ribbon vs an icon bar. That, however, I believe is simply a matter of having nearly 100% of the UI be available via the Ribbon, vs. the 20% (or less) of icon bars. The always present trade-off between power and ease-of-use, at least for the mouse user.

jkaptur 7y ago
FYI, that was how the menus worked in previous versions (Alt-f for the file menu, etc.), so ribbons didn’t expose any new functionality in that regard. In fact, Microsoft bent over backwards to ensure that every old pattern people had used would continue to work exactly the same way.
- NotTheDr01ds 7y ago
  I thought about mentioning this, but Menus still had a tendency to dead-end into modal dialogs more often than not. A Ribbon command could still end up in a modal, but often times the Ribbon design allowed more functionality to be present in a non-modal way. I worked for Lotus/IBM when Word Pro was being developed, and they came up with the concept of a non-modal floating property bar (they called it the "Info Bar") that pretty much eliminated modals entirely. While I don't recall whether or not it was very keyboard friendly (I was still a mouse user at the time), it definitely showed me that there was a better way than "modal dialogs everywhere". When I moved on from IBM and had to use Office, I remember how grating it was every time I ended up in a modal dialog, so this was one more reason I was excited to see the Ribbon come along (more than a decade after Word Pro's Info Bar). I've never looked to see, but it wouldn't surprise me if some of the MS developers for Office 2007 came from Lotus/IBM, since it was a few years earlier that IBM had really given up the Office Suite fight for good.

olav 7y ago

I think ribbons are one of the great UX failures of the Microsoft Office suite. An alternative arrangement of functions are property palettes like they are used in CAD tools, Adobe Photoshop, Open Office, or Apple Pages. There, functions are not globally aranged in ribbons like "Start", "References", but are presented in the context of a selected object. For example, if I have selected an image, the topmost palette shows properties applicable to an image. In addition, I get tabs with options for the placement of the image in a text frame, and for the page the text frame is located on. Very neat, not at all arbitrary, but reflecting the hierarchy of the objects I am working with.

MikusR 7y ago
That's how it works in Office. In if you select an image (might require doubleclick) it shows stuff to do with that image.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jwcacces 7y ago

I look at the change to ribbons through the lens of: "Would they have done it if they had viable competitors?", and I have to think that there's no way MS would have. Everyone would have laughed their way right over to Word Perfect. Perhaps it makes things easier for new users, but only without competitors where they able to shoe-horn it in for everybody. Now I use it on a Mac where there are still menus on the top and I can get stuff done. I wish there was an option to enable the menus (and fine, leave the ribbon if you must) on Windows.

orev 7y ago

When the ribbons first came out, all the techies I knew groused about them with all the technical reasons that people have mentioned here (which I feel are mostly weak arguments and reek of resistance to change). I wasn’t sure myself. Until I saw some non-IT people using them for the first time. They LOVED them. They could easily see and get things done way better than before. The people who didn’t have the confidence to poke around in traditional menus had no problem looking through the ribbons and trying things out. In many cases they started doing things that they had no idea existed. The ribbons really opened up these tools for the users, which is really the whole point. In the case of the ribbons, the techies who rail against them are unequivocally wrong. The arguments against them are the same ones we heard when going from DOS to Windows. It completely loses sight of the point of IT, which is to allow the users to be productive (and no, just because it broke some muscle memory you had, that is not an argument that it broke productivity, that’s an argument that you don’t like change), not to force people to remember random incantations because the greybeard says is “the right way” to do it.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
I was one of those techies. I was wrong. It was one of the things that completly changed my perspective of computing. That, and teaching, and working on a streaming website. I suddenly saw apple products differently. Linux differently. I started to design things from the UI instead of the data model. And eventually, it lead to accepting many of my limitations in other area, because I took in consideration users limitarions in my area of expertise. Funny how being wrong can be good for you.
badsectoracula 7y ago
> Until I saw some non-IT people using them for the first time. It shouldn't be surprising that people who hadn't any prior experience would be fine with ribbons, since it is mainly the people who had experience with the same applications but without ribbons that saw the decrease in their productivity. > and no, just because it broke some muscle memory you had, that is not an argument that it broke productivity, that’s an argument that you don’t like change And that is a very good argument, change for the sake of change (or worse, for something inferior) is a waste of time. Building muscle memory is a very good thing when it comes to UIs, the entire point of Windows having a standardized UI in the first place was that people who spent time to learn some program's UI they could apply the same knowledge on another program's UI that they hadn't used before. Ribbon works against that and as a quick example check File Explorer, WordPad, OneNote (the Windows 10 app) and Windows Paint that all use ribbon-ish interfaces that come with Windows. They all look different, have different tabs and even their default state is different. The closest they have in having a common UI is the File tab and OneNote doesn't even have that. Ribbon applications not only do not look like other applications but sometimes they do not look like older versions of themselves, since they had to move stuff around to make space for new or changed functionality. And not all ribbon implementations even behave the same - Windows itself probably comes with 3-4 different implementations that all have little weird differences and that doesn't count all the 3rd party implementations (i think there are more ribbon implementations out there than applications actually using ribbons :-P).

vintagedave 7y ago

When the ribbon was introduced, Microsoft asserted patent rights and asked for a license in order to use it. In fact, you were not allowed to use ribbons in your app without a license. You can read about that here: https://web.archive.org/web/20100719112606/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/11/21/licensing-the-2007-microsoft-office-user-interface.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20100719112606/http://blogs.msdn... Since then, license text has mostly disappeared from Microsoft's site. The license page no longer exists. You can't apply for one. I personally last saw text referring to a license requirement in the ribbon MFC samples distributed with Visual Studio. But the question if Microsoft requires a license or asserts patent rights seems to still be open - there has been no statement from Microsoft, and a quick google shows lots of people asking the same question. * https://office-watch.com/2018/can-microsoft-office-ribbon-used-developers/ https://office-watch.com/2018/can-microsoft-office-ribbon-us... * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/563312/is-the-ms-ribbon-office-ui-license-worth-worrying-about https://stackoverflow.com/questions/563312/is-the-ms-ribbon-... * https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/02/Ribbon-UI/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/02/Ribbon-UI/ * and me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095662

gitgud 7y ago
I'm pretty sure Autodesk use a licensed forum of MS ribbons in a lot of their software; AutoCAD, Inventor etc. But I can't find any references to the specific license agreement... https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad-lt/getting-started/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/AutoCAD-LT/files/GUID-D20EF1D7-4135-48A7-B68E-65BF3BFF3D70-htm.html https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad-lt/getting-st...
WorldMaker 7y ago
The impression I have is that Microsoft let the patent expire at the basic 7 year mark (~2014) as they deemed their UX R&D investment had given them enough lead over competitors in the Office suite space (the primary applications that required a paid license and were not allowed the free license). Around that time Microsoft added Ribbons to Win32 and WPF as freely available controls with no additional license. Fluent Design also seems working to add Ribbon controls to all UI control toolkits with no mention of licensing or patent rights (and seems to be working to move even Office to shared controls).

UweSchmidt 7y ago

A stunning disregard to millions, maybe billions of human hours spent learning a menu-based UI of incredibly powerful and feature rich office applications, where ultimately there is no obvious place for an option, feature or toggle; at least offer consistency to make the learning worthwhile. At the very least preserve the option to keep the old menu. But no, the boardroom was convinced by a shiny presentation. Out with the old, in with the new. Now, trivial features are easier to find, advanced features are..somewhere else. So you can't discover the advanced features next to the more common ones. The ribbon was the time when you could start to tell when websites or software products had a new generation of product people taking over and changing things around. You could feel the touch of a designer who hasn't loved or really used the product much. All workflows have become weaker, dumbed down. The important "save as..." icon, where I quickly place the thing somewhere else before I proceed with my fleeting thought, is sabotaged by the delay on the click on "File", the confusion why a menu opens slowly from the left, the hunt downwards to my all-important click. Then, force me into a discussion where to save the file. "Maybe in the cloud as that is what we're selling?" Just no. Now I won't ever go the extra mile and learn every last feature of an application. Learn it, become fluent, yes. But my learning can only be invested in permanent knowledge. Be it BASH or programming fundamentals. But your UI, no thanks.

EdSharkey 7y ago
I always thought Jobs was prescient to mandate that the menu bar appear as part of the OS chrome on MacOS and not an individual application's chrome like it was on Windows. Always-on menu prevented bored UX folks from EVER removing the menu from the screen. Always active menu has felt clunky on Mac since the advent of multiscreens and very wide screens, but I still appreciate this UX design tenet. The discoverability heavyweight champ always was and always will be the menu. I wonder if Jobs ever discussed Always-on menu publicly and contrasted it with Windows' approach.
- UweSchmidt 7y ago
  Great point, makes me admire Jobs even more.

thrower123 7y ago

I still despise the ribbon. I really would rather just have the old Office 2003 and previous configurable toolbars, that took up a quarter or a third of the vertical space. The only thing that I hate more than the Ribbon is the way that newer versions of Office products will flash you to a full-screen page when you click on the File menu. All I ever want to do there is do a Save As, and they have shitted up the simple job of popping a save file dialog with all kinds of OneDrive and Sharepoint nonsense.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
I suggest making use of the Quick Access Toolbar. Move it below the ribbon, and put everything you commonly use on it. Then collapse the ribbon. This way, common tools are a single click away, and everything else is two clicks away. Re: the backstage File menu, I agree with you. The app menu in Office 2007 (and the File Explorer) is better because it doesn't change the context—what you're working on is still visible behind the menu. The full-window backstage menu is bewildering.
JohnFen 7y ago
> newer versions of Office products will flash you to a full-screen page when you click on the File menu. I agree -- this is horrible. But I'd take it if it meant no more ribbon.
MikusR 7y ago
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-size-of-things https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-s... Word 2007 document area: 1007 x 573 pixels Word 97 document area: 979 x 573 pixels Excel 97 document area: 1004 x 581 pixels Excel 2007 document area: 1008 x 534 pixels
- thrower123 7y ago
  With all of the images broken/missing (they appear to be linked to a domain that is owned by some domain squatter that is trying to get me to install a skeezy Chrome extension), it's hard to actually compare, and tell what toolbars are enabled on the old version. But in Word 2003, everything that I ever had on the toolbar would fit into a single row, and Word 2016's ribbon uses the same icons, and is three rows high.

kirstenbirgit 7y ago

Looking at this, it's clear a LOT of thought went into this, and it looks great. Computer geeks that hated this didn't realize how good it was because they were familiar with the previous generations and don't like change. The Word/Office 2007 UX design is probably some of Microsoft's best design work ever.

JohnFen 7y ago
Can we dispense with the "you hate it because you don't like change" argument yet? It's an easy way to write off other people's opinions and often it's not even close to being true. It's particularly unlikely to be the reason when we're talking about something that was introduced about 20 years ago because it's not "change" anymore. Everyone is used to it now, and those that still dislike it don't dislike it because "it's new".
- kirstenbirgit 7y ago
  It's still new for some of these geeks that were already very experienced with computers around the time when Ribbon was introduced. They've just kept hating it since.

specialist 7y ago

The explicit goal of the ribbon design effort was to better manage the complexity. Rather than simplify the underlying products. Such is the conceit of Microsoft. I watched the "The Story of the Ribbon". Twice. Just to be sure I properly understood what happened. https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09 https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09 It's a great example of a series of rational decisions yielding a terrible end result. Because they started with the wrong question. IIRC, Jensen Harris said Office (or maybe just Word?) had something like 2,000 (or 20,000?) individual operations (commands plus modifiers). Their initial premise was to better organize and present that dizzying number. Create the perfect visual language taxonomy. Instead of first trying to figure how to reduce that number. -- It's been a long, long time since I've used Microsoft products. I used to be quite the Word buff. But you'll get the gist of this example: Embedding an image within a body of text is a common task. With Word, it just fucking sucks. There's an option for every little thing. Dozens of settings to tweak. And predicting where that image lands, especially with reflow, is more launch and pray than anything rational or deterministic. But really, there's just 4, maybe 6. different ways any sane person would want that image to be anchored. Just show a preview of those options and let the user pick the result. If someone needs something more fancy, they should opt to use a desktop publishing app, which is actually built for this kind of work. But no. Word has to be all things to all people. So consequently becomes nothing for anyone. -- TLDR: Microsoft hates their customers.

fowl2 7y ago
as simple as possible but no simpler

jerome-jh 7y ago

I remember spending 1/2 hour (really!) with my wife looking for the "print" menu entry after installing Office xyz, that first had "ribbons", on her computer. That's the kind of change that makes you hate computers, and computer programmers.

frosted-flakes 7y ago

I stumbled across this page when I was in early high school, and for someone new to computers in general it was a fascinating read. It taught me that user interface design is something that people actually do for a job and that when done well is delightful to use. Oh, and it set an example of clear, instructive writing with illustrations done right that I think influenced me quite a lot. Some people don't like the Ribbon, but I love it. As a new user back in the day and a "power user" today, I think it's loads better than the semi-random arrangement of cryptic menus and toolbars we had before. In my opinion, Microsoft Word 2007 did it best. Later iterations did away with the app button and menu in favour of the obstructive "backstage" menu, and I don't think the flat design does it any favours.

stazz1 7y ago
Did you ever hear the origin story of Ribbons? A smart person at MSFT petitioned Billy G directly about it! It was really a bold move that not a lot of peers supported, and look at what a good move it ended up being. That said, if you can expose a button instead of hiding all the juicy details in a dropdown, you ought'a.
stan_rogers 7y ago
And that's certainly an opinion. The wrong one, as it turns out, but you're as entitled to yours as other people are to theirs. It would be nice to have a choice though, rather than having your opinion forced on others.
- flippyhead 7y ago
  I don't have a strong opinion, but also think that mine would be irrelevant anyways -- isn't what matters most here the research they have undoubtedly done to understand how the UI affects their various customers and their needs? The certainty people often have as to UI design is amusing in light of how successful this line of products has been, as if their small and selfish opinion (or mine!) could somehow be more correct than the millions these guys have invested in getting this right. And not to the problem they or I _personally_ have, but to the problem of shipping a product used by probably billions of people across hundreds of cultures. I have no doubt that if you (or I!) were in charge of design, guided only by our personal opinions, the product would have completely failed.

pojntfx 7y ago

I'm so happy new interface don't use ribbons but just CSD headerbars now. What a terrible UX this stuff was.

dekken_ 7y ago
I met someone who worked on the office 2008 ribbon, all I could do was shake my head and ask, why? how many hours were wasted by such an obtuse design decision.
frosted-flakes 7y ago
Can you explain your opinion? I think people would be interested in hearing your thinking.
stockerta 7y ago
I prefer the ribbon to the old toolbars and menus Office had before.
matsemann 7y ago
> What a terrible UX this stuff was. Based on what? I see a lot of strong comments here, but little reasoning. UX is more than feelings.
- laumars 7y ago
  The below is my experiences based on menus+toolbars vs ribbon bar. Some detail will be subjective but I've tried to add enough detail that can explain why people considered it to be a "bad" UX: Things were more discoverable in menus and the written title in the menu is often more descriptive than an icon glyph (granted some items in the ribbon bar does also have labels). You then also had the glyphs on the toolbars for power users. It meant that super frequent tasks you'd learn shortcut keys for. moderately frequent tasks you'd learn the toolbar icon. And infrequent tasks you could still find through the menus. The idea of the ribbon bar was to make things more discoverable but the issue is having everything presented in one workflow where icons are different sized, some with or without labels and some hidden behind popup menus on the ribbon bar, you make it harder for people to systematically search for something specific that they can't recall where the option is. Another benefit with the toolbar was customizability. That was great for people to morph the UI around their requirements. This isn't possible with the ribbon bar -- it's a one size fits all approach so for some people it will work well but there are so many people that don't fit well.

frosted-flakes 7y ago

I've changed the title to reflect that this was originally published around 2007 and I don't think it has changed significantly since. The date 2007 isn't shown on the page, but I first read it around 2008 and it was published for Microsoft Office 2007. Edit: it may have been published in 2008, since at least one of the linked pages has that date.