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The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that a

The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore. This was not obvious to me until I saw people getting used to iOS programs where menus don't exist. The menubar is good at showing you a soup of options but is really bad at contextualizing it. The problem shows up in MacOS programs where they stuff all the contents of every context menu into the menubar just so they can say that it's usable with one mouse button. Well if you do that, the context behind all these actions and the locality of information goes away! Even in simple programs like the finder there is global application state that can cause some menu items to arbitrarily become inactive. The action itself might be discoverable, but the state that it relies on isn't discoverable at all. Take a more complex application with massive 50-item-long menus and it gets ridiculous. The menu doesn't communicate at all what an action means or when it should be used. In that situation the only thing the menus realistically exist for anymore is a learning tool to help memorize keyboard shortcuts. Side note: I didn't think I would be approving of Microsoft designers on something like this, but I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus.

the_other 7y ago
> The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore. I do it, almost without planning to, with most new software I encounter. Perhaps because I learned computing in the WIMP days. To say "no-one" does it, is false. The overall argument you're trying to counter is that the menubar doesn't aid usability and thus discounts itself from arguments of iOS vs Mac usability. This is also ridiculous. Everyone uses menubar all the time - sometimes they're more icon-y, sometimes more text-y... but they're everywhere and to say people don't look across them is to deny the existence of vision.
ivanhoe 7y ago
> I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus. When you discuss UX you always have to be aware that you have two very distinctive populations with very different expectations: new users and old users. Everyone I've ever seen trying to find something in new Office apps (myself included) was bitching about ribbon menus and how much they suck. It's 100% biased because we all were used to the old UI, but since I use Office and Windows only occasionally, to this day I still didn't get used to it fully. For new users who grew up on Win10 and this type of UI I'm sure it works great.
- hhas01 7y ago
  The Ribbon’s terrible because there’s no regularity in its structure. The eye can’t scan quickly: sometimes controls go horizontally, then they go vertically, then they run horizontally again. Old-school Apple menubar; yeah, that’s not exactly cutting-edge UX any more. Scrubbing through fixed hierarchical menus spatially disconnected from the data they operate on is crude and pretty tedious. And Apple’s never really made much effort on the (adaptive) contextual menu front; macOS has them, but they’re more like a resentful afterthought. Alas, blue-sky R&D into new, novel, cutting-edge UI/UX hasn’t been a thing at Apple for over a decade. Well, except maybe Siri, but even that was bought off the shelf and they’ve hardly put their backs into making it any more than mediocre. Amazon and Google care more(!).
  - coribuci 7y ago
    > The Ribbon’s terrible because there’s no regularity in its structure. The eye can’t scan quickly: sometimes controls go horizontally, then they go vertically, then they run horizontally again. Also some things are hidden in a dialog box which becomes available when you press the little arrow in the corner of the ribbon element. Good luck!
  - ivanhoe 7y ago
    I've started more and more using help to find items in big menus quickly, it's actually pretty neat macOS feature...
  - int_19h 7y ago
    Menubar isn't meant to be the primary way to invoke the command - just a way to advertise it, and the associated shortcut.

the_other 7y ago

> The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore. I do it, almost without planning to, with most new software I encounter. Perhaps because I learned computing in the WIMP days. To say "no-one" does it, is false. The overall argument you're trying to counter is that the menubar doesn't aid usability and thus discounts itself from arguments of iOS vs Mac usability. This is also ridiculous. Everyone uses menubar all the time - sometimes they're more icon-y, sometimes more text-y... but they're everywhere and to say people don't look across them is to deny the existence of vision.

ivanhoe 7y ago

> I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus. When you discuss UX you always have to be aware that you have two very distinctive populations with very different expectations: new users and old users. Everyone I've ever seen trying to find something in new Office apps (myself included) was bitching about ribbon menus and how much they suck. It's 100% biased because we all were used to the old UI, but since I use Office and Windows only occasionally, to this day I still didn't get used to it fully. For new users who grew up on Win10 and this type of UI I'm sure it works great.

hhas01 7y ago
The Ribbon’s terrible because there’s no regularity in its structure. The eye can’t scan quickly: sometimes controls go horizontally, then they go vertically, then they run horizontally again. Old-school Apple menubar; yeah, that’s not exactly cutting-edge UX any more. Scrubbing through fixed hierarchical menus spatially disconnected from the data they operate on is crude and pretty tedious. And Apple’s never really made much effort on the (adaptive) contextual menu front; macOS has them, but they’re more like a resentful afterthought. Alas, blue-sky R&D into new, novel, cutting-edge UI/UX hasn’t been a thing at Apple for over a decade. Well, except maybe Siri, but even that was bought off the shelf and they’ve hardly put their backs into making it any more than mediocre. Amazon and Google care more(!).
- coribuci 7y ago
  > The Ribbon’s terrible because there’s no regularity in its structure. The eye can’t scan quickly: sometimes controls go horizontally, then they go vertically, then they run horizontally again. Also some things are hidden in a dialog box which becomes available when you press the little arrow in the corner of the ribbon element. Good luck!
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  I've started more and more using help to find items in big menus quickly, it's actually pretty neat macOS feature...
- int_19h 7y ago
  Menubar isn't meant to be the primary way to invoke the command - just a way to advertise it, and the associated shortcut.