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It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundamental computer knowledge like learning to type. I still have the same keyboard layout as back then but MS Office now has some janky "ribbon interface" which bears no resemblance to how it used to be. Although it should be criminal for public schools to teach proprietary software, we can forget about that for a minute and instead consider how futile it is to teach things that are not open standards or at least free software. You have absolutely no assurance that this knowledge will still be applicable even just a few years later. My hope is that free software projects will attempt to preserve old interfaces (making them accessible via initial configuration) when they make updates. Besides, you shouldn't be replacing your GUI if your architecture hasn't got a clear separation between presentation and core logic.

HeckFeck 6y ago
Recently, I installed Office 97 onto Wine just for curiosity. I could still do much with it. The only feature I really missed from Word was academic references. I could create documents indistinguishable from modern Word using the old drawing features combined with modern fonts. The drop down menus, combined with the floating toolbars were much more intuitive than clicking up and down some "ribbon". The drop down menus map directly to the logical path of a task in my mind, eg "Insert -> Image -> From File". Having a small toolbar at the bottom with basic graphical tools is much more convenient than clicking back and forth from tab to tab. It's a shame MS couldn't accept that what they had until Office 07 was a workflow polished near to perfection, perfected after years of refinement and familiarity.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >perfected after years of refinement and familiarity That can be a problem though. One person's familiar tool with its well-known quirks and peculiarities is a newcomer's inscrutable and illogical interface.
  - fsloth 6y ago
    Generally, though, you shouldn't optimize GUI:s for new users but for intermediate users. [0] Cooper, "About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design"
    - HeckFeck 6y ago
      That should be a tenant of UI design, especially for any kind of productivity software. Think of the Blender, GIMP or Sony Vegas GUIs. Daunting the first time you open them, but after you've successfully finished a few creations you'll begin to appreciate their power. For any serious work, overly-simplified GUIs are quickly exhausted. They may get a pass for IM or social media apps, but I can't think of many other useful applications.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    You're thinking like an SV webdev who's largest concern is to onboard as many new users as possible so you can flip your startup. Office is a professional productivity tool that's been around for decades and is used by millions of people for their entire workday, every day. Learning to use a new tool takes a tiny fraction of the time you're going to be using that tool. One should make the tool best at actually doing what it's going to be used to do.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I'm neither in SV nor a webdev. I just remember how many ordinary users hated the ribbon when it first came out. Presumably they adapted over time; I can't really speak to whether Microsoft would have been better evolving the existing menu system. Personally, I could take it or leave it--and at least intellectually the arguments for the ribbon made sense to me.
      - _jal 6y ago
        Ordinary users hate change. They always do, regardless of how successful (or not) the changes are later judged to be. This doesn't argue against change so much as argue that the costs need to be worth the disruption - you don't move houses over a carpet stain, and you don't rebuild your UI lightly, either.
- angus-prune 6y ago
  > eg "Insert -> Image -> From File". In the latest version of word the progression is: "Insert > Pictures > From This device"
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    So, it's catering to tablet and smartphone users rather than desktop users, who have many "devices" on their system. :-(
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Answerawake 6y ago
  I went through a recent experiment like this as well. Instead I installed Office 2003(The last of the old toolbar offices) on a clean Windows 10 system. I was looking to validate my theory about the speed and bloat of the new versions of Office. I just had this nagging feeling that the software wasn't as fast as old versions. It was confirmed. Using the old Office just felt so pleasant with how fast it loaded and simple it is in terms of cognitive load.
bluGill 6y ago
Your school was wrong to teach any program. Ui follows fads and always will. Thus you need to learn how to use any ui that might come.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  I agree with this, but it was far less clear in the 90s. I think a lot of people (myself included) were expecting/hoping that UIs in productivity software were converging on some sort of finished design or standard that there wouldn't be much reason to monkey around with. MS Office programs - and many other proprietary software titles - were taught not only in many schools, but also in various vocational programs. You could get 'certified' in having 'mastered' a particular UI, and you expected that knowledge to continue to be useful for years. Seems quaint now, but there were some nice things about it. A carpenter doesn't expect their saws & hammers to radically morph every product cycle.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    In the 90s word was still trying to take the crown from word perfect. Everyone knew guis were the future, but the F Keys in word perfect were important to know.
- tester34 6y ago
  I don't think so, but I also don't think that it's going to be popular opinion around foss/computer people MS Office software is used around shittton of workplaces and from time to time in day-to-day life, so making people somewhat proficent at it is good for everybody except MS competitors. I'm not sure what do you mean by teaching "UI" - they teach how to get things done with given software.
- acomjean 6y ago
  It’s hard. I learned a lot of programs (some that don’t exist) autocad and lotus 123. Some of the principals of spreadsheets and vector programs I remember to this day. But having hands on with the software certainly helped learn it.
jl6 6y ago
I used to feel that way about the ribbon, but I quickly got used to it and now consider it an improvement. What I’ve never got used to is the flattening of the UI in versions 2013+.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I never loved the ribbon and I suspect that Microsoft underestimated how disruptive the change was for a lot of people. However, I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft. ADDED: Ah, this is probably it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4 (That said, MS Office in general had been loaded with so many functions that 1% of users used but that were absolutely essential to some 1% that it's something of a mess anyway. It's one reason I prefer the relative simplicity of GSuite these days.)
  - zeveb 6y ago
    > I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft. I have also seen well-intentioned arguments for why Clippy was a good idea … but he wasn't. To this day I miss the Word 5.1 on Macintosh System 7. That was more-or-less the Platonic ideal of a word processor; it's been all downhill since.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      Clippy was literally the precursor of things like Alexa and Siri today. The technology wasn't there to back it, but the idea of an anthropomorphic assistant has literally come around to the mainstream today.
Jonnax 6y ago
The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X" and be able to do that as quick as possible. Of course with specialised tools that's a different story. AutoCAD hasn't really changed its interface but it got superceded in areas by new applications that break people's workflows in a lot of cases. It's just a word processor. The knowledge you should have gained when being taught was the concepts of what you can do with one. That should allow you to adapt to different software. Once you've used a word processor you don't need to read the help page for Google Docs. It's not like switching from Maya to Blender. I don't agree on the free software projects point. Often they're made by volunteers. And anything too "daring" would be shouted down by the community.
- jellicle 6y ago
  > It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. That is literally the entire and sole purpose of a user interface.
- red_admiral 6y ago
  I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doesn't matter so much to him whether it takes a bit longer to learn the command (after about the 150th time he'll have got used to it), but it matters a lot how fast he can do it once he's learnt it. Bob literally becomes more productive by having an interface which he can operate by muscle memory, in a way that more than pays off the initial training costs. Think of keyboard shortcuts for example: they're completely unintuitive to a newcomer, but with experience, Control+Z and Control+C, Control+V and the like save time, and time is money. My favourite word trick in this category, incidentally, is Control+Space "remove formatting" for text you've pasted in from elsewhere; it doesn't work all of the time though. You used to be able to do Control+Shift+V for "paste as plain text", I don't know which version removed that again but I consider it a great loss. Paste -> Keep Text Only takes just longer enough to be annoying.
syberspace 6y ago
With teaching UI you breed the class of people who will shout the loudest when something changes. Teaching your parents that "the internet" is the blue icon in the taskbar will teach them to call you when microsoft decides to install chromium-edge on their machine because "the internet is gone". Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. And with that anyone will be able to transfer that knowledge to a slightly different looking UI without much of a problem.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. With all due respect, good luck with that. A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon.
  - u801e 6y ago
    > A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon. That's like saying people aren't interested in learning how to use a phonebook or how to call directory assistance. They just want to know who to talk to so they can order what they want from Sears.
    - sidlls 6y ago
      How so? I don't understand this analogy at all. UI/UX design changes frequently involves changing the appearance and possibly location and even functionality of familiar things. If we changed the lettering in a phonebook, or even merely on the cover, to be, say, klingon font, we shouldn't expect the typical user to reach for that phonebook, yet essentially what the GP is suggesting is that it's sufficient for a user to understand the "phonebook concept" and users can learn the implementation details trivially based on that.
      - u801e 6y ago
spystath 6y ago
It's common occurrence having software dismissed as second rate because it's "ugly" or non-conforming to current design trends. Although form and function should enhance each other we've now reached a point where changes to form actively harm function. Toolbars are gone, menus are gone, icons are abstract outlines of what they represent, discoverability in GUI applications is hampered. I can find quite a few examples of applications both mobile and desktop that have become increasingly frustrating to use for no benefit whatsoever. "Where has this button gone? I'm sure it was here before"; "Oh I need to click the nondescript three-bullet button, then tap actions and there it is!"; "But the colours are now nice". Especially in a productivity tool I'd rather not have the interface change every other release because it's "ugly" by some abstract metric. Although I believe the ribbon turned out to be a decent design I'm fairly certain that wouldn't have been the case if Microsoft had changed again to something completely different within a release. So, yeah... Please give me ugly but predictable interfaces.
solarkraft 6y ago
While I somewhat get what you mean (and hate ribbbons), the Office UI is just way less crappy than LibreOffice's. It has smooth scrolling, some animated state, and they're at least trying to get rid of some visual and semantic cruft, so it's a lot less of a pain to use than LibreOffice. Of course progress sometimes means breaking changes, software in general and especially LibreOffice is nowhere near a point at which we can afford to stop improving. It's not about changing things for the sake of changing things, it's about making things less painful (and hopefully ultimately delightful) to use.
setzer22 6y ago
I think this problem is not at all exclusive to propietary software. Take blender, for example. I spent quite a bit of time learning all the bits of the interface 5+ years ago. When I tried to go back, the software UI had changed so much that basically most of my knowledge and muscle memory is now worthless, having to google how to do every tiny operation. And this is not yhe first "huge overhaul" of the UI and keybindings they've made. And it's not like you can easily get an old version of blender and make it work just because it's free software. Leaving aside the fact that I'd be missing out on newer features, system libraries get updated and at some point the old version stops working with a random crash. Then you need to start compiling from source and basically maintaining your own fork. IMO this is what happens with large enough pieces of software where the devs care more about increasing adoption in spite of any happy existing users. Sorry for the blender micro-rant, they are doing a great job. But still I felt it was the perfect example of microsoft-y behaviour in free software land
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Meanwhile, I’m a prospective Blender user, and I hear it’s waaaaay better from 2.80, so that for various things where I might have used another program or given up and used nothing I would now be very likely to use Blender. It’s always a balancing act: satisfying existing users, against genuine improvement that will make it better for new users and existing users that put in the effort to learn the new way.
  - dpwm 6y ago
    Blender is way better since 2.80 imho. I have been an a blender user since about 2005. I find 2.80 improved the UI considerably. For me it was well worth the little effort I had to put in.
- baddox 6y ago
  I just don’t think the specific way to do each operation in the UI is an essential part of Blender. Anyone using it professionally or even as a serious hobby will pick up on UI changes quickly. The real work you do on Blender is the actual art, not just manipulating menus and buttons.
stefankeys 6y ago
Just use LaTex with Vim for documents if the org you work at allows it.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
  I find Emacs with AUCTeX to be the ideal TeX environment, but at least Vim is a sane environment. Word processors in general I find a very user-hostile environment for creation.
goto11 6y ago
The ribbon interface it not just a "fad", it is a clear UI improvement since it removes a level of indirection. If you wanted to see how a font looked in the classic Word UI, you highlighted a text and selected a font from the dropdown. When the dropdown was changed to show the actual font, it was the first step towards the ribbon, where the UI generally shows the actual effect of the options. Programmers does not understand this difference, since they are used to work on abstraction levels removed from the actual output. So the ribbon seem like a fad just like the mouse and icons was seen as a fad by many developers back in the day. ("Why don't people just learn LaTeX?")
- TheChaplain 6y ago
  I disagree. The number of times I had to use "Tell me what you want to do"-field is on a stupid level compared to the rich toolbar and extensive menus that existed pre-2007.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    I mean ironically that's actually a much better solution - I love Jetbrains "search everywhere" field in Idea to find specific commands quickly. So why in the heck the ribbon even needs to exist is baffling - just make a command search/command line input, and then if it's literally on a toolbar on screen, highlight it for me (configurably) so I as a new user know what to click on next time. The ribbon is just somehow, always exactly wrong.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      Great news. Now we have a search bar slapped into the middle of the title bar like an albatross. Nicely wedged in between all the other nonstandard title bar chrome.
- red_admiral 6y ago
  I don't think the ribbon itself is a bad idea, but I absolutely hate the following two things: 1. Latency. When you click a dropdown, the whole interface can freeze for several seconds while Word presumably renders the menu or something. I can just about understand that for the fonts menu, but for the "bullets and enumerations" dropdown it's just plain bad. 2. Things moving around in the ribbon because Microsoft decided to push an auto-update to include some new search with bing or "data insights" feature.
baddox 6y ago
What’s so undesirable about teaching some technology in school and that technology changing over the years? Heck, I took computer hardware vocational classes in high school, and we learned about ISA, ATA, and PCMCIA. I would never bemoan either learning those things or those things changing. It’s not like that learning was made useless when the technology changed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
maple3142 6y ago
I think it is simply whether you are used to them only. My first time using Office is Offline 2007, the first Office with ribbons. When I want to use "old" UI in Office 2003 or LibreOffice(turning off ribbon), I also have problem finding the feature I want.
u801e 6y ago
> I still have the same keyboard layout as back then but MS Office now has some janky "ribbon interface" which bears no resemblance to how it used to be. This is a general pattern for GUIs as of late. It changes every so often until the point where if you haven't used the software in a while, you no longer know how to access a particular function via the GUI interface. For example, web browsers used to have the standard drop down menus (file, edit, etc). If I want to view page source, the option would probably be under the view option and titled appropriately. These days, I have no idea where to find it, but at least I still know the keyboard shortcut to do the same thing and that hasn't changed at least.
- int_19h 6y ago
  Speaking of which, if you want a browser that still provides (opt-in) a classic menu bar with all the usual categories you'd expect, check out Vivaldi. Made by the guys who did the original Opera (before it went down the drain), so of course everything is configurable, stuff like vertical tabs is there out of the box etc.
kumarvvr 6y ago
The ribbon interface is one of the best things to happen to office. It was horrible to use before that. For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Not to mention context specific menu tabs. Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.
- andyjohnson0 6y ago
  > For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. With some reluctance, I agree with you. But it does bother me that I rarely use much of that complexity, while still being required to engage with a UI that seems mostly designed around hiding things that I don't need anyway. I wish there was a way to use the Office apps with a simplified feature set. Of course, I understand why not: everyone's essential features are different. So I carry on poking at ribbons looking for things.
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    That is a by-product, and a testament, to the complexity of the software. Take Word. It has millions of users around the world. And everyone of them uses at most a different 20% set of the full features 80% of the time. But, it's only one software. It has to satisfy everyone. So you end up with a reasonably complex UI that everyone has to bear. However, you can customize it, and I wish there was more documentation and more effort put into customization of the menus. I mean, let there be a menu customization system that is fully drag and drop, rather than the clunky stuff presently there. It would be a game changer.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > The ribbon interface is one of the best things to happen to office. It was horrible to use before that. Says who? Do you have any UI/UX study to back up that claim? Most of us on this page seem to believe the opposite is true. > For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Exactly the opposite. That is, a ribbon _may_ be relevant to a feature-poor application, but much less so to a feature-rich application. > my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it. You're conflating context-sensitive UI changes with the use of ribbons. That's a different argument. Also remember that if a Table toolbar or sidebar appears, you can have the same effect - better perhaps - without ribbons. For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Not to mention context specific menu tabs. Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.
signal11 6y ago
> Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Almost anything could be described as a fad. Interactive computers were seen as a fad once. Punched cards were good enough! The command line was good enough! For complex applications (roughly defined as, lots of nested menus), the ribbon UI is an improvement as it surfaces more features. In itself it's an evolution of the customized toolbar approach - there's plenty of UX research that showed that most people only had the standard toolbars. (Office still does offer a context sensitive "toolbar"). > we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundamental computer knowledge like learning to type. I'm hoping this didn't mandate a particular program, but even assuming it did -- Microsoft Word's basic shortcuts all still work exactly like in 1995. The common toolbar buttons (bold, italic, lists, etc) are in the same place. Even the original keyboard shortcuts for deeply nested menus (e.g. Alt D F F, in Excel, for showing the filter UI, i.e., the old 'autofilter' command) still work. So where is the problem exactly?
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  >Almost anything could be described as a fad. // I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?). There's stuff you want to do that punch cards don't allow, eg duplicate a program virtually; but there's not stuff people wanted to do that menu based wordprocessor UI prevented. Ribbons fine, but no advance for me over menus, on balance I prefer menus but that might just be familiarity and age.
  - signal11 6y ago
    > I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?). That's a very narrow view of what people need. Children at home these days "type" essays into Word by dictating as a first-party feature. This is a pretty recent step forward -- in the past it used to be a very expensive third-party add-on with much less accuracy. Good, scalable multi-user document editing has changed the way students and even workers take notes in classrooms and workshops. Again, a fairly recent phenomenon (although Word still isn't as good as Google Docs here -- c'mon Microsoft, keep up).
analog31 6y ago
My kids are recent high school graduates. When they were in grade school, they learned MS Office. They easily picked up the newer stuff as it has come along, and at the same time, the schools have gotten a lot more flexible. It just wasn't a problem. Today they use Google Docs or whatever. At my workplace, I see gradually declining use of any kind of word processing. Folks just edit in the e-mail or chat editor. One colleague makes video blogs. Word processing seems to remain, largely for documents that will never be read, such as HR announcements and dissertations. ;-) I've written lengthy documents in the chat editor, and have discovered to my great surprise and pleasure, that people actually read them. One thing that seems to be important is for people to be able to read things easily on their phones.
ubermonkey 6y ago
MSFT had reason to believe that the Ribbon was more accessible and discoverable to users than the old menu structure. I was dubious at the time, but since the shift I have come to believe that they are correct. I think the Ribbon is better for the vast majority of users. Interfaces shouldn't be changed for no good reason -- and MSFT is certainly guilty of chasing fads or tweaks without a clear benefit, too, in other areas -- but neither should an interface be frozen in amber if a better idea comes along. (Also remember that mass market software isn't designed for people who post on HN.)
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > MSFT had reason to believe that the Ribbon was more accessible and discoverable to users than the old menu structure. I was dubious at the time, but since the shift I have come to believe that they are correct. I think the Ribbon is better for the vast majority of users. Microsoft also removed the start menu on Windows once and everybody hated it. Sometimes, MSFT is wrong.
  - ubermonkey 6y ago
    I would absolutely never dispute this, but I also don't think it has anything to do with my statement.
bane 6y ago
Next thing you know they'll start insist on adding lowercase characters to the character set and forcing us to use color displays and Arabic numerals instead of good old fashioned Roman ones!
CivBase 6y ago
I believe schools are mostly wrong in their computer education approach. The purpose and functions of MS Word (and most word processors for that matter) have not changed significantly in the last couple decades, despite the change of paint. Schools should be focused on teaching people what common applications are for and what they are capable of - not which buttons to press to perform specific tasks.
criddell 6y ago
> It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. You might be interested in checking out the work of Donald Norman. He makes a great case that attractive things work better. Old isn't necessarily a problem, but ugly is. https://jnd.org/emotion_design_attractive_things_work_better/ https://jnd.org/emotion_design_attractive_things_work_better...
- Andrex 6y ago
  This seems intuitive enough to me but years on HN have let me know it's a rare opinion, at least among developers.
agumonkey 6y ago
I 99% agree with you, except that I believe LibreOffice is not just old, it's subtly bad. I didn't notice it before but it's too adhoc, just too laggy, just too crummy at times. It lack tastes, consistency and responsiveness that you got even in office 2003. I wish LO to improve everything, they came from far and did a lot. But it's not enough.. kinda like blender 2.7 to 2.8.
- zucker42 6y ago
  Isn't Blender 2.7 to 2.8 widely considered a successful redesign? Blender is experiencing continuing and dramatic industry support. I've heard Blender is comparable to the proprietary alternatives. I've not used Blender much though.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Oh sorry, bad phrasing, I meant right now LO is stuck at blender 2.7 and needs a 2.8-like push.
- this_user 6y ago
  It's not just slow, but just the subtle things in how it behaves. For instance, try navigating a spreadsheet in LO with only the keyboard. It's super annoying. Then try the same thing in, say, Google Sheets, and it does exactly what you think it should do. And that is a huge difference in terms of UX and productivity.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    yes, UX is stuck in 90s way but not the best part of it. I wonder what's the state of the codebase and if it could handle a significant UX redesign.
wwright 6y ago
I wonder what people who have spent their adult life studying and implementing UI/UX think about it.
INGELRII 6y ago
If there is one thing I would suggest for all large open source projects, it's separating the functionality, data model etc. from UI as much as possible. It should be possible to have two separate open source projects. One is just extensive framework library with good API and the another is user interface. This would allow multiple separate UI's, web interface, command line, mobile, tablet, etc.
whytaka 6y ago
> Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Consider consistency across applications though. People like conformity.
pwthornton 6y ago
A good interface should not need to be learned. Everyday new people are born that have never used a bad interface before. There is no justification for keeping bad interfaces around just because you can learn them. Interfaces that are hard to learn are also hard to recall. These lead to mistakes.
jklinger410 6y ago
The only thing I want LibreOffice's UI to do is get the fuck out of my way.
1123581321 6y ago
I also took a pre-ribbon exam for Word in high school, and I’ve had no trouble applying those concepts to successive versions, even though I’ve never been a heavy user. I dare say most software doesn’t change quickly enough for intensive early use to become totally irrelevant.
deleted 6y ago
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helixhelix 6y ago
That wasn't to make you memorise a GUI but to make you understand the connections between visual indication and concealed action. Without "fad chasing" (which is a sunk cost, a week every few years of pro graphics design), without even copying microsoft office's layout, you are losing out on new users. Why would anyone use libre office because it's open source rather than being a better functioning product that is more pleasurable to use (and look at)?
rsa25519 6y ago
> Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. I think there is something even deeper than this. The usability of UI is directly proportional to quality of users' mental model of what the application's doing. Minimalism can be helpful for removing the "magic." I like the way Google Docs has evolved their UI. They started matching the feature set of desktop applications. Slowly, they have removed and simplified features, leading to a beautifully minimal yet powerful interface for typesetting and writing documents.
zzo38computer 6y ago
While Microsoft has changed a lot of stuff, the keyboard commands in Windows and MS Office have remained mostly consistent in my experience, so when trying to work on someone else's computer, some things I could still figure out easily enough even though the system seems different. This could be done just as well in free software projects too (some of which already do, I think). (However, for my own stuff, and on my own computer, I use neither MS Office nor LibreOffice nor other similar software, since I do not need them; I can use plain text, I can use TeX, I can use PostScript code (with Ghostscript), and whatever.)
glitcher 6y ago
In high school they taught us Lotus 123 spreadsheets, oh my do I feel old! Never used those again afterwards. I agree about the proprietary software gripe, but it could have been worse.
Pewtas 6y ago
This "once you learn the complicated non intuitive user interface it becomes good" mentality is the reason why a lot of people don't like Linux (in my opinion). The whole Linux world just has such a poor UI/UX design that you don't want to interact with it in the first place - not all but most of it anyways.

HeckFeck 6y ago

Recently, I installed Office 97 onto Wine just for curiosity. I could still do much with it. The only feature I really missed from Word was academic references. I could create documents indistinguishable from modern Word using the old drawing features combined with modern fonts. The drop down menus, combined with the floating toolbars were much more intuitive than clicking up and down some "ribbon". The drop down menus map directly to the logical path of a task in my mind, eg "Insert -> Image -> From File". Having a small toolbar at the bottom with basic graphical tools is much more convenient than clicking back and forth from tab to tab. It's a shame MS couldn't accept that what they had until Office 07 was a workflow polished near to perfection, perfected after years of refinement and familiarity.

ghaff 6y ago
>perfected after years of refinement and familiarity That can be a problem though. One person's familiar tool with its well-known quirks and peculiarities is a newcomer's inscrutable and illogical interface.
- fsloth 6y ago
  Generally, though, you shouldn't optimize GUI:s for new users but for intermediate users. [0] Cooper, "About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design"
  - HeckFeck 6y ago
    That should be a tenant of UI design, especially for any kind of productivity software. Think of the Blender, GIMP or Sony Vegas GUIs. Daunting the first time you open them, but after you've successfully finished a few creations you'll begin to appreciate their power. For any serious work, overly-simplified GUIs are quickly exhausted. They may get a pass for IM or social media apps, but I can't think of many other useful applications.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  You're thinking like an SV webdev who's largest concern is to onboard as many new users as possible so you can flip your startup. Office is a professional productivity tool that's been around for decades and is used by millions of people for their entire workday, every day. Learning to use a new tool takes a tiny fraction of the time you're going to be using that tool. One should make the tool best at actually doing what it's going to be used to do.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm neither in SV nor a webdev. I just remember how many ordinary users hated the ribbon when it first came out. Presumably they adapted over time; I can't really speak to whether Microsoft would have been better evolving the existing menu system. Personally, I could take it or leave it--and at least intellectually the arguments for the ribbon made sense to me.
    - _jal 6y ago
      Ordinary users hate change. They always do, regardless of how successful (or not) the changes are later judged to be. This doesn't argue against change so much as argue that the costs need to be worth the disruption - you don't move houses over a carpet stain, and you don't rebuild your UI lightly, either.
angus-prune 6y ago
> eg "Insert -> Image -> From File". In the latest version of word the progression is: "Insert > Pictures > From This device"
- einpoklum 6y ago
  So, it's catering to tablet and smartphone users rather than desktop users, who have many "devices" on their system. :-(
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Answerawake 6y ago
I went through a recent experiment like this as well. Instead I installed Office 2003(The last of the old toolbar offices) on a clean Windows 10 system. I was looking to validate my theory about the speed and bloat of the new versions of Office. I just had this nagging feeling that the software wasn't as fast as old versions. It was confirmed. Using the old Office just felt so pleasant with how fast it loaded and simple it is in terms of cognitive load.

bluGill 6y ago

Your school was wrong to teach any program. Ui follows fads and always will. Thus you need to learn how to use any ui that might come.

slfnflctd 6y ago
I agree with this, but it was far less clear in the 90s. I think a lot of people (myself included) were expecting/hoping that UIs in productivity software were converging on some sort of finished design or standard that there wouldn't be much reason to monkey around with. MS Office programs - and many other proprietary software titles - were taught not only in many schools, but also in various vocational programs. You could get 'certified' in having 'mastered' a particular UI, and you expected that knowledge to continue to be useful for years. Seems quaint now, but there were some nice things about it. A carpenter doesn't expect their saws & hammers to radically morph every product cycle.
- bluGill 6y ago
  In the 90s word was still trying to take the crown from word perfect. Everyone knew guis were the future, but the F Keys in word perfect were important to know.
tester34 6y ago
I don't think so, but I also don't think that it's going to be popular opinion around foss/computer people MS Office software is used around shittton of workplaces and from time to time in day-to-day life, so making people somewhat proficent at it is good for everybody except MS competitors. I'm not sure what do you mean by teaching "UI" - they teach how to get things done with given software.
acomjean 6y ago
It’s hard. I learned a lot of programs (some that don’t exist) autocad and lotus 123. Some of the principals of spreadsheets and vector programs I remember to this day. But having hands on with the software certainly helped learn it.

jl6 6y ago

I used to feel that way about the ribbon, but I quickly got used to it and now consider it an improvement. What I’ve never got used to is the flattening of the UI in versions 2013+.

ghaff 6y ago
I never loved the ribbon and I suspect that Microsoft underestimated how disruptive the change was for a lot of people. However, I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft. ADDED: Ah, this is probably it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4 (That said, MS Office in general had been loaded with so many functions that 1% of users used but that were absolutely essential to some 1% that it's something of a mess anyway. It's one reason I prefer the relative simplicity of GSuite these days.)
- zeveb 6y ago
  > I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft. I have also seen well-intentioned arguments for why Clippy was a good idea … but he wasn't. To this day I miss the Word 5.1 on Macintosh System 7. That was more-or-less the Platonic ideal of a word processor; it's been all downhill since.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Clippy was literally the precursor of things like Alexa and Siri today. The technology wasn't there to back it, but the idea of an anthropomorphic assistant has literally come around to the mainstream today.

Jonnax 6y ago

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X" and be able to do that as quick as possible. Of course with specialised tools that's a different story. AutoCAD hasn't really changed its interface but it got superceded in areas by new applications that break people's workflows in a lot of cases. It's just a word processor. The knowledge you should have gained when being taught was the concepts of what you can do with one. That should allow you to adapt to different software. Once you've used a word processor you don't need to read the help page for Google Docs. It's not like switching from Maya to Blender. I don't agree on the free software projects point. Often they're made by volunteers. And anything too "daring" would be shouted down by the community.

jellicle 6y ago
> It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. That is literally the entire and sole purpose of a user interface.
red_admiral 6y ago
I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doesn't matter so much to him whether it takes a bit longer to learn the command (after about the 150th time he'll have got used to it), but it matters a lot how fast he can do it once he's learnt it. Bob literally becomes more productive by having an interface which he can operate by muscle memory, in a way that more than pays off the initial training costs. Think of keyboard shortcuts for example: they're completely unintuitive to a newcomer, but with experience, Control+Z and Control+C, Control+V and the like save time, and time is money. My favourite word trick in this category, incidentally, is Control+Space "remove formatting" for text you've pasted in from elsewhere; it doesn't work all of the time though. You used to be able to do Control+Shift+V for "paste as plain text", I don't know which version removed that again but I consider it a great loss. Paste -> Keep Text Only takes just longer enough to be annoying.

syberspace 6y ago

With teaching UI you breed the class of people who will shout the loudest when something changes. Teaching your parents that "the internet" is the blue icon in the taskbar will teach them to call you when microsoft decides to install chromium-edge on their machine because "the internet is gone". Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. And with that anyone will be able to transfer that knowledge to a slightly different looking UI without much of a problem.

ghaff 6y ago
>Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. With all due respect, good luck with that. A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon.
- u801e 6y ago
  > A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon. That's like saying people aren't interested in learning how to use a phonebook or how to call directory assistance. They just want to know who to talk to so they can order what they want from Sears.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    How so? I don't understand this analogy at all. UI/UX design changes frequently involves changing the appearance and possibly location and even functionality of familiar things. If we changed the lettering in a phonebook, or even merely on the cover, to be, say, klingon font, we shouldn't expect the typical user to reach for that phonebook, yet essentially what the GP is suggesting is that it's sufficient for a user to understand the "phonebook concept" and users can learn the implementation details trivially based on that.
    - u801e 6y ago

spystath 6y ago

It's common occurrence having software dismissed as second rate because it's "ugly" or non-conforming to current design trends. Although form and function should enhance each other we've now reached a point where changes to form actively harm function. Toolbars are gone, menus are gone, icons are abstract outlines of what they represent, discoverability in GUI applications is hampered. I can find quite a few examples of applications both mobile and desktop that have become increasingly frustrating to use for no benefit whatsoever. "Where has this button gone? I'm sure it was here before"; "Oh I need to click the nondescript three-bullet button, then tap actions and there it is!"; "But the colours are now nice". Especially in a productivity tool I'd rather not have the interface change every other release because it's "ugly" by some abstract metric. Although I believe the ribbon turned out to be a decent design I'm fairly certain that wouldn't have been the case if Microsoft had changed again to something completely different within a release. So, yeah... Please give me ugly but predictable interfaces.

solarkraft 6y ago

While I somewhat get what you mean (and hate ribbbons), the Office UI is just way less crappy than LibreOffice's. It has smooth scrolling, some animated state, and they're at least trying to get rid of some visual and semantic cruft, so it's a lot less of a pain to use than LibreOffice. Of course progress sometimes means breaking changes, software in general and especially LibreOffice is nowhere near a point at which we can afford to stop improving. It's not about changing things for the sake of changing things, it's about making things less painful (and hopefully ultimately delightful) to use.

setzer22 6y ago

I think this problem is not at all exclusive to propietary software. Take blender, for example. I spent quite a bit of time learning all the bits of the interface 5+ years ago. When I tried to go back, the software UI had changed so much that basically most of my knowledge and muscle memory is now worthless, having to google how to do every tiny operation. And this is not yhe first "huge overhaul" of the UI and keybindings they've made. And it's not like you can easily get an old version of blender and make it work just because it's free software. Leaving aside the fact that I'd be missing out on newer features, system libraries get updated and at some point the old version stops working with a random crash. Then you need to start compiling from source and basically maintaining your own fork. IMO this is what happens with large enough pieces of software where the devs care more about increasing adoption in spite of any happy existing users. Sorry for the blender micro-rant, they are doing a great job. But still I felt it was the perfect example of microsoft-y behaviour in free software land

chrismorgan 6y ago
Meanwhile, I’m a prospective Blender user, and I hear it’s waaaaay better from 2.80, so that for various things where I might have used another program or given up and used nothing I would now be very likely to use Blender. It’s always a balancing act: satisfying existing users, against genuine improvement that will make it better for new users and existing users that put in the effort to learn the new way.
- dpwm 6y ago
  Blender is way better since 2.80 imho. I have been an a blender user since about 2005. I find 2.80 improved the UI considerably. For me it was well worth the little effort I had to put in.
baddox 6y ago
I just don’t think the specific way to do each operation in the UI is an essential part of Blender. Anyone using it professionally or even as a serious hobby will pick up on UI changes quickly. The real work you do on Blender is the actual art, not just manipulating menus and buttons.

stefankeys 6y ago

Just use LaTex with Vim for documents if the org you work at allows it.

_emacsomancer_ 6y ago
I find Emacs with AUCTeX to be the ideal TeX environment, but at least Vim is a sane environment. Word processors in general I find a very user-hostile environment for creation.

goto11 6y ago

The ribbon interface it not just a "fad", it is a clear UI improvement since it removes a level of indirection. If you wanted to see how a font looked in the classic Word UI, you highlighted a text and selected a font from the dropdown. When the dropdown was changed to show the actual font, it was the first step towards the ribbon, where the UI generally shows the actual effect of the options. Programmers does not understand this difference, since they are used to work on abstraction levels removed from the actual output. So the ribbon seem like a fad just like the mouse and icons was seen as a fad by many developers back in the day. ("Why don't people just learn LaTeX?")

TheChaplain 6y ago
I disagree. The number of times I had to use "Tell me what you want to do"-field is on a stupid level compared to the rich toolbar and extensive menus that existed pre-2007.
- XorNot 6y ago
  I mean ironically that's actually a much better solution - I love Jetbrains "search everywhere" field in Idea to find specific commands quickly. So why in the heck the ribbon even needs to exist is baffling - just make a command search/command line input, and then if it's literally on a toolbar on screen, highlight it for me (configurably) so I as a new user know what to click on next time. The ribbon is just somehow, always exactly wrong.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Great news. Now we have a search bar slapped into the middle of the title bar like an albatross. Nicely wedged in between all the other nonstandard title bar chrome.
red_admiral 6y ago
I don't think the ribbon itself is a bad idea, but I absolutely hate the following two things: 1. Latency. When you click a dropdown, the whole interface can freeze for several seconds while Word presumably renders the menu or something. I can just about understand that for the fonts menu, but for the "bullets and enumerations" dropdown it's just plain bad. 2. Things moving around in the ribbon because Microsoft decided to push an auto-update to include some new search with bing or "data insights" feature.

baddox 6y ago

What’s so undesirable about teaching some technology in school and that technology changing over the years? Heck, I took computer hardware vocational classes in high school, and we learned about ISA, ATA, and PCMCIA. I would never bemoan either learning those things or those things changing. It’s not like that learning was made useless when the technology changed.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

maple3142 6y ago

I think it is simply whether you are used to them only. My first time using Office is Offline 2007, the first Office with ribbons. When I want to use "old" UI in Office 2003 or LibreOffice(turning off ribbon), I also have problem finding the feature I want.

u801e 6y ago

> I still have the same keyboard layout as back then but MS Office now has some janky "ribbon interface" which bears no resemblance to how it used to be. This is a general pattern for GUIs as of late. It changes every so often until the point where if you haven't used the software in a while, you no longer know how to access a particular function via the GUI interface. For example, web browsers used to have the standard drop down menus (file, edit, etc). If I want to view page source, the option would probably be under the view option and titled appropriately. These days, I have no idea where to find it, but at least I still know the keyboard shortcut to do the same thing and that hasn't changed at least.

int_19h 6y ago
Speaking of which, if you want a browser that still provides (opt-in) a classic menu bar with all the usual categories you'd expect, check out Vivaldi. Made by the guys who did the original Opera (before it went down the drain), so of course everything is configurable, stuff like vertical tabs is there out of the box etc.

kumarvvr 6y ago

The ribbon interface is one of the best things to happen to office. It was horrible to use before that. For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Not to mention context specific menu tabs. Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.

andyjohnson0 6y ago
> For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. With some reluctance, I agree with you. But it does bother me that I rarely use much of that complexity, while still being required to engage with a UI that seems mostly designed around hiding things that I don't need anyway. I wish there was a way to use the Office apps with a simplified feature set. Of course, I understand why not: everyone's essential features are different. So I carry on poking at ribbons looking for things.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  That is a by-product, and a testament, to the complexity of the software. Take Word. It has millions of users around the world. And everyone of them uses at most a different 20% set of the full features 80% of the time. But, it's only one software. It has to satisfy everyone. So you end up with a reasonably complex UI that everyone has to bear. However, you can customize it, and I wish there was more documentation and more effort put into customization of the menus. I mean, let there be a menu customization system that is fully drag and drop, rather than the clunky stuff presently there. It would be a game changer.
einpoklum 6y ago
> The ribbon interface is one of the best things to happen to office. It was horrible to use before that. Says who? Do you have any UI/UX study to back up that claim? Most of us on this page seem to believe the opposite is true. > For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Exactly the opposite. That is, a ribbon _may_ be relevant to a feature-poor application, but much less so to a feature-rich application. > my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it. You're conflating context-sensitive UI changes with the use of ribbons. That's a different argument. Also remember that if a Table toolbar or sidebar appears, you can have the same effect - better perhaps - without ribbons. For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Not to mention context specific menu tabs. Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.

signal11 6y ago

> Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Almost anything could be described as a fad. Interactive computers were seen as a fad once. Punched cards were good enough! The command line was good enough! For complex applications (roughly defined as, lots of nested menus), the ribbon UI is an improvement as it surfaces more features. In itself it's an evolution of the customized toolbar approach - there's plenty of UX research that showed that most people only had the standard toolbars. (Office still does offer a context sensitive "toolbar"). > we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundamental computer knowledge like learning to type. I'm hoping this didn't mandate a particular program, but even assuming it did -- Microsoft Word's basic shortcuts all still work exactly like in 1995. The common toolbar buttons (bold, italic, lists, etc) are in the same place. Even the original keyboard shortcuts for deeply nested menus (e.g. Alt D F F, in Excel, for showing the filter UI, i.e., the old 'autofilter' command) still work. So where is the problem exactly?

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
>Almost anything could be described as a fad. // I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?). There's stuff you want to do that punch cards don't allow, eg duplicate a program virtually; but there's not stuff people wanted to do that menu based wordprocessor UI prevented. Ribbons fine, but no advance for me over menus, on balance I prefer menus but that might just be familiarity and age.
- signal11 6y ago
  > I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?). That's a very narrow view of what people need. Children at home these days "type" essays into Word by dictating as a first-party feature. This is a pretty recent step forward -- in the past it used to be a very expensive third-party add-on with much less accuracy. Good, scalable multi-user document editing has changed the way students and even workers take notes in classrooms and workshops. Again, a fairly recent phenomenon (although Word still isn't as good as Google Docs here -- c'mon Microsoft, keep up).

analog31 6y ago

My kids are recent high school graduates. When they were in grade school, they learned MS Office. They easily picked up the newer stuff as it has come along, and at the same time, the schools have gotten a lot more flexible. It just wasn't a problem. Today they use Google Docs or whatever. At my workplace, I see gradually declining use of any kind of word processing. Folks just edit in the e-mail or chat editor. One colleague makes video blogs. Word processing seems to remain, largely for documents that will never be read, such as HR announcements and dissertations. ;-) I've written lengthy documents in the chat editor, and have discovered to my great surprise and pleasure, that people actually read them. One thing that seems to be important is for people to be able to read things easily on their phones.

ubermonkey 6y ago

MSFT had reason to believe that the Ribbon was more accessible and discoverable to users than the old menu structure. I was dubious at the time, but since the shift I have come to believe that they are correct. I think the Ribbon is better for the vast majority of users. Interfaces shouldn't be changed for no good reason -- and MSFT is certainly guilty of chasing fads or tweaks without a clear benefit, too, in other areas -- but neither should an interface be frozen in amber if a better idea comes along. (Also remember that mass market software isn't designed for people who post on HN.)

throw_m239339 6y ago
> MSFT had reason to believe that the Ribbon was more accessible and discoverable to users than the old menu structure. I was dubious at the time, but since the shift I have come to believe that they are correct. I think the Ribbon is better for the vast majority of users. Microsoft also removed the start menu on Windows once and everybody hated it. Sometimes, MSFT is wrong.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  I would absolutely never dispute this, but I also don't think it has anything to do with my statement.

bane 6y ago

Next thing you know they'll start insist on adding lowercase characters to the character set and forcing us to use color displays and Arabic numerals instead of good old fashioned Roman ones!

CivBase 6y ago

I believe schools are mostly wrong in their computer education approach. The purpose and functions of MS Word (and most word processors for that matter) have not changed significantly in the last couple decades, despite the change of paint. Schools should be focused on teaching people what common applications are for and what they are capable of - not which buttons to press to perform specific tasks.

criddell 6y ago

> It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. You might be interested in checking out the work of Donald Norman. He makes a great case that attractive things work better. Old isn't necessarily a problem, but ugly is. https://jnd.org/emotion_design_attractive_things_work_better/ https://jnd.org/emotion_design_attractive_things_work_better...

Andrex 6y ago
This seems intuitive enough to me but years on HN have let me know it's a rare opinion, at least among developers.

agumonkey 6y ago

I 99% agree with you, except that I believe LibreOffice is not just old, it's subtly bad. I didn't notice it before but it's too adhoc, just too laggy, just too crummy at times. It lack tastes, consistency and responsiveness that you got even in office 2003. I wish LO to improve everything, they came from far and did a lot. But it's not enough.. kinda like blender 2.7 to 2.8.

zucker42 6y ago
Isn't Blender 2.7 to 2.8 widely considered a successful redesign? Blender is experiencing continuing and dramatic industry support. I've heard Blender is comparable to the proprietary alternatives. I've not used Blender much though.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Oh sorry, bad phrasing, I meant right now LO is stuck at blender 2.7 and needs a 2.8-like push.
this_user 6y ago
It's not just slow, but just the subtle things in how it behaves. For instance, try navigating a spreadsheet in LO with only the keyboard. It's super annoying. Then try the same thing in, say, Google Sheets, and it does exactly what you think it should do. And that is a huge difference in terms of UX and productivity.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  yes, UX is stuck in 90s way but not the best part of it. I wonder what's the state of the codebase and if it could handle a significant UX redesign.

wwright 6y ago

I wonder what people who have spent their adult life studying and implementing UI/UX think about it.

INGELRII 6y ago

If there is one thing I would suggest for all large open source projects, it's separating the functionality, data model etc. from UI as much as possible. It should be possible to have two separate open source projects. One is just extensive framework library with good API and the another is user interface. This would allow multiple separate UI's, web interface, command line, mobile, tablet, etc.

whytaka 6y ago

> Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Consider consistency across applications though. People like conformity.

pwthornton 6y ago

A good interface should not need to be learned. Everyday new people are born that have never used a bad interface before. There is no justification for keeping bad interfaces around just because you can learn them. Interfaces that are hard to learn are also hard to recall. These lead to mistakes.

jklinger410 6y ago

The only thing I want LibreOffice's UI to do is get the fuck out of my way.

1123581321 6y ago

I also took a pre-ribbon exam for Word in high school, and I’ve had no trouble applying those concepts to successive versions, even though I’ve never been a heavy user. I dare say most software doesn’t change quickly enough for intensive early use to become totally irrelevant.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

helixhelix 6y ago

That wasn't to make you memorise a GUI but to make you understand the connections between visual indication and concealed action. Without "fad chasing" (which is a sunk cost, a week every few years of pro graphics design), without even copying microsoft office's layout, you are losing out on new users. Why would anyone use libre office because it's open source rather than being a better functioning product that is more pleasurable to use (and look at)?

rsa25519 6y ago

> Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. I think there is something even deeper than this. The usability of UI is directly proportional to quality of users' mental model of what the application's doing. Minimalism can be helpful for removing the "magic." I like the way Google Docs has evolved their UI. They started matching the feature set of desktop applications. Slowly, they have removed and simplified features, leading to a beautifully minimal yet powerful interface for typesetting and writing documents.

zzo38computer 6y ago

While Microsoft has changed a lot of stuff, the keyboard commands in Windows and MS Office have remained mostly consistent in my experience, so when trying to work on someone else's computer, some things I could still figure out easily enough even though the system seems different. This could be done just as well in free software projects too (some of which already do, I think). (However, for my own stuff, and on my own computer, I use neither MS Office nor LibreOffice nor other similar software, since I do not need them; I can use plain text, I can use TeX, I can use PostScript code (with Ghostscript), and whatever.)

glitcher 6y ago

In high school they taught us Lotus 123 spreadsheets, oh my do I feel old! Never used those again afterwards. I agree about the proprietary software gripe, but it could have been worse.

Pewtas 6y ago

This "once you learn the complicated non intuitive user interface it becomes good" mentality is the reason why a lot of people don't like Linux (in my opinion). The whole Linux world just has such a poor UI/UX design that you don't want to interact with it in the first place - not all but most of it anyways.