4 ms·

> 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 ribbo

> 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).

WorldMaker 7y ago
On that last point, it sounds like the Fluent Design team is working hard to merge all the Ribbon implementations. That ongoing effort is interesting to watch because it is going to move everyone's cheese again soon in Word and Excel (and PowerPoint), as the modern Fluent control is the "Simplified Ribbon" control that OneNote today uses (and Outlook optionally; and all the Word/Excel/PowerPoint web apps that people don't pay attention to). (As the Fluent design team decided 2D ribbon layouts were too complex both for implementers and users; the 2007 Office implementations had a ton of work put into UX testing the 2D flows and basically no other Ribbon implementation did.) It feels ironic/iconic that the Simplified Ribbon just looks like a menu bar and single command bar again, but with the years of insight that "tabs" instead of "menus" gives people a better sense of "space" than traditional pull down menus used to.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  Merge all implementations or have all of their programs use the same implementation? I find the former a little weird since there is, e.g., an MFC implementation and then a Win32 implementation (available as a COM object) and AFAIK those two are completely separate (i think the MFC predates the Win32 one and was made by some external company) and "modern apps" use XAML which is completely different from the MFC/Win32 stuff.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Bit of both, I believe. On the one hand, Office as the first Ribbon adopter has to maintain a lot of backwards compatibility (especially for add-ins), and so likely can't move all of its ribbons to a single implementation (though OneNote supposedly is using the WinRT/XAML control). Plus the React Native for Web control (Fabric UI) will always have to be a different from platform-specific implementations. But the impression I have is that "soon" the MFC/Win32 one and the WPF/XAML ribbon implementations will both be marked deprecated and developers encouraged to use the WinRT/UWP/XAML one (which OneNote supposedly will continue to share moving forward), with Win32 (and WPF) developers expected to use XAML Islands. (Where "soon" is some release milestone I'm fully not sure about. WinUI 3.0 General Availability, presumably? I think that's still scheduled for "second half 2020".)
orev 7y ago
> It shouldn't be surprising that people who hadn't any prior experience Non-IT people are very definitely NOT people without prior experience — they are the actual Business users of these applications. I would be very surprised to find an IT person who uses Excel and Word more than a business person does. They’re the ones who would have a bigger issue with the ribbon (if there were one), but I’ve never heard a Business user complain about it.

WorldMaker 7y ago

On that last point, it sounds like the Fluent Design team is working hard to merge all the Ribbon implementations. That ongoing effort is interesting to watch because it is going to move everyone's cheese again soon in Word and Excel (and PowerPoint), as the modern Fluent control is the "Simplified Ribbon" control that OneNote today uses (and Outlook optionally; and all the Word/Excel/PowerPoint web apps that people don't pay attention to). (As the Fluent design team decided 2D ribbon layouts were too complex both for implementers and users; the 2007 Office implementations had a ton of work put into UX testing the 2D flows and basically no other Ribbon implementation did.) It feels ironic/iconic that the Simplified Ribbon just looks like a menu bar and single command bar again, but with the years of insight that "tabs" instead of "menus" gives people a better sense of "space" than traditional pull down menus used to.

badsectoracula 7y ago
Merge all implementations or have all of their programs use the same implementation? I find the former a little weird since there is, e.g., an MFC implementation and then a Win32 implementation (available as a COM object) and AFAIK those two are completely separate (i think the MFC predates the Win32 one and was made by some external company) and "modern apps" use XAML which is completely different from the MFC/Win32 stuff.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Bit of both, I believe. On the one hand, Office as the first Ribbon adopter has to maintain a lot of backwards compatibility (especially for add-ins), and so likely can't move all of its ribbons to a single implementation (though OneNote supposedly is using the WinRT/XAML control). Plus the React Native for Web control (Fabric UI) will always have to be a different from platform-specific implementations. But the impression I have is that "soon" the MFC/Win32 one and the WPF/XAML ribbon implementations will both be marked deprecated and developers encouraged to use the WinRT/UWP/XAML one (which OneNote supposedly will continue to share moving forward), with Win32 (and WPF) developers expected to use XAML Islands. (Where "soon" is some release milestone I'm fully not sure about. WinUI 3.0 General Availability, presumably? I think that's still scheduled for "second half 2020".)

orev 7y ago

> It shouldn't be surprising that people who hadn't any prior experience Non-IT people are very definitely NOT people without prior experience — they are the actual Business users of these applications. I would be very surprised to find an IT person who uses Excel and Word more than a business person does. They’re the ones who would have a bigger issue with the ribbon (if there were one), but I’ve never heard a Business user complain about it.