16 ms·

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 c

by 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 AutoCAD hasn't really changed its interface but it got superceded in areas by new applications that break people's workflows in a lot of cases.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.
- Tijdreiziger 6y ago
  So what's kept Bob from committing the ribbon interface to memory in the past 17 years?
  - XorNot 6y ago
    The ribbon interface removed customizability, and inflated the size of all the common commands (and also made it impossible to get them back without 3rd party extensions). Pre-Ribbon I could have the menus, file operations, font and paragraph settings, and the reviewing tool bar at the top of my screen. I could have the object and image editing at the bottom. Post-ribbon the exact same amount of space is does a third as much. Reviewing for some reason is now on a separate tab. The menus are less commonly used functions are non-existent, stuck somewhere under "File" which now takes over the whole screen when I open it. It is not just "different" it's worse. It removes the basic ability to prioritize my interface to the types of tasks I'm doing, in favor of some vaguely defined every-user who is not actually a real user.
    - sp332 6y ago
      Just to be clear, the ability to customize existing tabs, and make new ones with whatever commands you want on them, is insufficient? Or is this only a complaint about the defaults?
      - Someone 6y ago
        For those who don’t know: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-ribbon-in-office-00f24ca7-6021-48d3-9514-a31a460ecb31 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-rib...: “What you can customize: You can personalize your ribbon to arrange tabs and commands in the order you want them, hide or unhide your ribbon, and hide those commands you use less often. Also, you can export or import a customized ribbon.”
        kayodelycaon 6y ago
osrec 6y ago
As an ex trader, I can confirm that the new ribbon interface, when it first came out, caused me and my colleagues a world of pain. We knew all the shortcuts keys in the old version. The ribbon UI meant that a big chunk of the previous shortcuts didn't work anymore. Killed our productivity for a good few months.
- sxg 6y ago
  Had the ribbon interface been the original UI and the traditional menu-based interface the new UI, it sounds like you and your colleagues would have still faced the same frustrations. To me, it sounds like your issue is with change rather than the effectiveness of either type of UI.
  - osrec 6y ago
    No, not really. Some 1 or 2 key shortcuts became 5 key shortcuts with the new ribbon UI. It was a real nightmare! Especially when the old shortcuts were also remapped to a completely different function, and your moving s so fast you don't realise where your data has gone!
    - ModernMech 6y ago
      The ribbon allows you to add your most common used commands to a quick shortcut list that are only 2 keys.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    For me, that's the point. For a program as ubiquitous as Word (and as complicated as Word), unless there were clear benefits from the new interface, it shouldn't have been changed. The change itself was the problem. Your comment is getting at an important, fundamental UX principle: all conceptual change is inherently painful, and every time you ask a user to re-learn something you are always wasting their time, even if the new design is better. Sometimes a UX designer looks at two interfaces as completely separate, and thinks their job is just to pick the best one. The reality is that usually UX decisions can't be separated from the current state of the app. UX design is more like surgery, and the invasiveness of the operation has to be a consideration. Having said that, I'm mildly skeptical that the interface didn't need to be changed. The old interface for Word was extremely user-unfriendly. If you go through a few of the interviews about Ribbon[0], there was some really interesting thought put into the new approach around discoverability, and while I'm not sure I agree with all of the theory they used to justify it[1], the changes did seem to be addressing a real problem. But I think it's debatable whether or not the discoverability benefits were worth the pain, and I think there may have been better ways to roll out the changes. [0]: sorry, too lazy to hunt them down and link them [1]: I am mildly skeptical of contextual menus/toolbars. They're not wrong, they just have drawbacks that people don't always consider. Sometimes it's useful to tell people what is disabled, and to give them grounded, unchanging "landmarks" in the UX that they can use orient themselves while using a program.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
> The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. Came here for this. The first version of Office for windows (which is what most people are familiar with in terms of UI) is from 1998, so the non-ribbon interface has been around for 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface.
- Macha 6y ago
  Office 95 doesn't look that functionally different from Office 2003: Office 95: https://i0.wp.com/isoriver.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/06-MS-Excel-95-Office-95.gif?w=920&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/isoriver.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/06... Office 2003: https://imag.malavida.com/mvimgbig/download-fs/office-2003-sp1-265-2.jpg https://imag.malavida.com/mvimgbig/download-fs/office-2003-s... Honestly even Excel 3.0 (1990) doesn't look that disimilar (https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/about-excel.png https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/about-excel....) So that's 17 years for toolbars vs 13 for ribbon
  - Someone 6y ago
    Still, I guess more MS Office users will have used the new interface for longer than the old one than vice versa (I googled for data, but couldn’t find numbers) It even wouldn’t fully surprise me if, a few years from now, there were more MS Office users who never used the pre-ribbon interface than who had used it.
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  > The first version of Office for windows [...] is from 1998. [...] 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface. You are not even close to right. Excel for Windows is from 1987 (20 years with non-ribbon menus), Word for Windows is from 1989 (18 years with non-ribbon menus). And of course the menu bar paradigm itself is older still.
- listenallyall 6y ago
  you came here to be wrong?
Angostura 6y ago
> What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. That keep changing and moving about. I use Word on Mac. It has the ribbon. 90% of the time I use the old style menu bar at the top of the screen.
- Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
  Word for Mac is almost the perfect evolution of the UI. It has the menu bar, which every Mac app has since it's a fixed and global UI element. It has the ribbon which is good for many users and makes many tasks easily accessible. I'm not sure how you'd make this compromise on Windows without making a mess of things, but on the Mac it works very well.
kgwxd 6y ago
I've used office daily for 20 years but rarely have to use the ribbon menu at all and, if I do, it's rarely off whatever is up there by default. But every time it is, it's way more painful to explore compared to a plain text menu and after I find what I'm looking for, it's hard to get back to the default.
edoloughlin 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 I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I switch to the other ribbons (tabs?) I find myself hunting, wondering if I've got the right tab. There's something about the spatial layout that seems to impose an extra cognitive load. I know menus are spatial too, but it seemed easier to remember them. Perhaps, because each menu occupied its own area of the window when expanded. With the ribbons, the same area is reused when you switch tabs. With Word and Outlook, I've got slightly better retention. However, with Excel, where I seem to have a wide distribution of seldom-used functionality, it's an exercise in frustration. I know something exists, but it takes ages to find it because the last time I used it was probably a few weeks ago.
- shawxe 6y ago
  I agree with this completely. It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category than it is for me to scan through a bunch of irregularly sized tiles for the icon and description of the configuration I need. For me, all of the pictures just lower the density of the information and cause it to take longer to parse every single time. I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. I would think that it would be easiest for new users (as it is easiest for myself) to have options sorted into neat menus with uniformly sized elements where information is laid out in a vertical list (which is how lists are written in basically all left-to-right and right-to-left languages) so that it is easier to parse quickly.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    > “I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point.” Uh, yeah there was? Go dig through the wayback machine for Jensen Harris’s blogpost series about the design of the ribbon, or watch his MIX08 talk on it; he was the design team lead for the change, and the reason they did it was because the old UI was failing their users. There were usability studies done during the ribbon design which fedback into, and changed, how it worked to adjust to ordinary people’s expectations and needs. > “I would think that it would be easiest for new users to have options sorted into neat menus” Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point.
Pxtl 6y ago
I don't think anybody is bemoaning the loss of the old Office buttons. The buttons were always kinda bad. The problem is that the ribbon also killed the menu bar. Menu bars are a standard, known quantity across every application, which clean easy semantics for keyboard access. On some OSes they even augment the menus with searchability, celebrating the power of plain text.
- henrikeh 6y ago
  Alt-key shortcuts work on the ribbon and search is build in as alt+Q (at least in Excel and Word). I use both daily.
conception 6y ago
Oh it’s bad to learn where just to click, I recently learned that’s how most people do it. You might find this interesting - https://www.truity.com/blog/intuitives-guide-getting-along-sensors https://www.truity.com/blog/intuitives-guide-getting-along-s... There was a discussion on HN about this a while back but most people learn computers by “if I want x I do y.” And guards just how they learn. Changing UI for them is catastrophic because they literally have to relearn -everything-. Op is probably a sensor and finds that stability tremendously useful. This really helped me be less frustrated in seeing how people can’t just figure out technology on their own and how I can just mess with it until I figure out the ”language” the app is using to have users interact with it. Most people can’t do that.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "There was a discussion on HN about this a while back but most people learn computers by “if I want x I do y.” And guards just how they learn. Changing UI for them is catastrophic because they literally have to relearn -everything-." Yes, but it's surprising to see a large contingent of them on HN and other technical forums. The rapid change of software technologies all but mandates adaptability and willingness to learn.
Spooky23 6y ago
There is a population of people who just hate the ribbon. In my experience, they are usually attorneys talking about word. It's the same argument that their attorney ancestors made about Wordperfect 5.1 keystroke commands. Personally, I don't see the big ribbon issue. It's easy to search for arcane features in the help menu. IMO, they really need a Mac where you get the top menu bar and a ribbon-like thing. Or some sort of gnarly keyboard mode that would become emacs for lawyers.
- pseingatl 6y ago
  Attorney ancestors?
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > Attorney ancestors? GP probably meant something like "forerunners" or "predecessors"; some form of "those who came before" that doesn't necessarily imply a familial relationship.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    It's just a cutesy way of saying a long time ago when all the lawyers used Wordperfect. (A word processing program that I hated almost as much as Wordstar.)
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      In some places, not so long ago :)
      - ghaff 6y ago
        I imagine a lot of big law offices still have computers with WordPerfect on them so they can read old files if necessary.
        slavik81 6y ago
        WordPerfect is still maintained by Corel. The most recent release was in May. They also maintain PaintShop Pro, WinDVD, and WinZip. I think they're running a retirement home for distinguished software products.
_jal 6y ago
I haven't used Word much at all since the ribbon interface. Like others, for whatever reason the ribbon makes doesn't work for me, neither cognitively or via muscle-memory. The categorization doesn't help me predict where to find something (fails "new user" ease of use), nor does repeated use make it easier or faster. And of course I don't use it (or windows) much, so I don't think in Microsoft(tm) English, adding a minor layer of translation for some jargon. I have to use Excel enough that I've finally rote-memorized where frequently used things are. But when I have to find some tool I don't know where is, it is faster to google for instructions than hunt around the application itself, so I do that first. I'm sure it is fine if you live in MS-land. I don't, and it fails for this casual user both for discoverability and streamlined use.
Forge36 6y ago
The ribbon changed again in office 365.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  In looks only. Functionally and layout-wise, it's pretty much identical.
rdiddly 6y ago
AutoCAD went along a similar trajectory actually - from menus to toolbars to a ribbon. The difference is, you can still turn each of those modes on and off, including using two or all of them at once. Whereas Microsoft just kind of went "Okay y'all are gonna use a ribbon now." Edit: Forgot the AutoCAD command line. You can still turn that on too, and type commands like it's the 80s. It's actually kind of a paragon of a mature product that maintains all its older interfaces.
- sbuk 6y ago
  Haven't used AutoCAD in anger for a while, but my default rest position on the keyboard is still fingers over Esc, thumb over space. I always preferred using the command line. Not out of some 'power user' power trip, but more for screen space and efficiency. Being able to use AutoLISP was pretty neat too.
  - rdiddly 6y ago
    I came in during the "toolbar" era, but ended up using the command line quite a bit. It was custom ACAD macros, and then AutoLISP, that got me back into programming after a long hiatus.
subhro 6y ago
> It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. A combat pilot would respectfully disagree. :) Source: Diving pulling 5Gs canopy side down.
billfor 6y ago
I think the old style menus were more functional for technical people and other experts, but the ribbon might be easier for new users. MSFT seems to have understood that trade off. It's interesting that the Metro design, which seems closer to the ribbon, didn't take off the same way. But from functional perspective I do like the old interface better, and especially that I can pullright to get at things without having to make multiple clicks.
domador 6y ago
Yes, the ribbon interface was initially pushed on the world in 2007, and it's still as bad as ever.
sbuk 6y ago
AutoCAD went ribbon around 2010...
tw04 6y ago
The ribbon was one of the worst things to ever hit Office. I remember it was met with universal horror when it first came out, but they were fully committed (apparently not having done ANY user testing) and insisted people would get used to it and prefer it because: we paid someone a ton of money who told us it's better. Like many others, I STILL to this day have to google to figure out where things are with the ribbon interface, probably the least intuitive interface I've ever used.
- henrikeh 6y ago
  > but they were fully committed (apparently having done ANY user testing) It is a little hard to parse what you mean, but Microsoft did a quite substantial amount of research leading up to the ribbon. A quick search on the net will lead you to summaries of it.
  - tw04 6y ago
    Sorry, I left out a *not. I vehemently disagree, in 2007 NOBODY liked the ribbon. My wife's company refused to upgrade until absolutely forced to because it was such an atrocity. The most glowing reviews I ever saw were "I guess I'll get used to it eventually" and/or someone who used office once a year and found navigation easier when the extent of their workflow was changing font sizes. https://www.zdnet.com/article/oh-the-horror-why-is-microsoft-pushing-the-hated-windows-ribbon-for-officemac/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/oh-the-horror-why-is-microsoft... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/turn-off-ribbon-in-2010/f16527ed-4a2f-472c-a860-6d80e125f118 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/turn-... https://www.infoworld.com/article/2651076/microsoft-s-ribbon-interface-draws-frowns--smiles.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2651076/microsoft-s-ribbon...
    - Biganon 6y ago
      People hate change, that's not a reliable indicator. You could increase the quality immensely, most users would still feel attacked because they have to spend an extra effort to adapt.
black_puppydog 6y ago
At the risk of starting a fire here, I'd say a much better approach to that was unity's HUD. You could simply fuzzy-search through all the menu items. It made using GIMP delightful. :)
- veddox 6y ago
  That is the one thing I miss most about Unity! It was such a sweet feature. (Also, Unity minimised on the vertical space it used, which was great for small laptop screens.) The new GNOME versions are much improved compared to a few years ago, but I do wish Canonical had stuck with Unity...
einpoklum 6y ago
> The most common operations are descriptive buttons. The most common operation is trying to decide which ribbon something is supposed to be on. And it's difficult to get straight even after more than a decade, if you're just an occasional MS-Office user.
wolco 6y ago
I curse the ribbon. I still haven't found all of the 2003 features.

by Jonnax 6y ago

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.

Tijdreiziger 6y ago
So what's kept Bob from committing the ribbon interface to memory in the past 17 years?
- XorNot 6y ago
  The ribbon interface removed customizability, and inflated the size of all the common commands (and also made it impossible to get them back without 3rd party extensions). Pre-Ribbon I could have the menus, file operations, font and paragraph settings, and the reviewing tool bar at the top of my screen. I could have the object and image editing at the bottom. Post-ribbon the exact same amount of space is does a third as much. Reviewing for some reason is now on a separate tab. The menus are less commonly used functions are non-existent, stuck somewhere under "File" which now takes over the whole screen when I open it. It is not just "different" it's worse. It removes the basic ability to prioritize my interface to the types of tasks I'm doing, in favor of some vaguely defined every-user who is not actually a real user.
  - sp332 6y ago
    Just to be clear, the ability to customize existing tabs, and make new ones with whatever commands you want on them, is insufficient? Or is this only a complaint about the defaults?
    - Someone 6y ago
      For those who don’t know: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-ribbon-in-office-00f24ca7-6021-48d3-9514-a31a460ecb31 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-rib...: “What you can customize: You can personalize your ribbon to arrange tabs and commands in the order you want them, hide or unhide your ribbon, and hide those commands you use less often. Also, you can export or import a customized ribbon.”
      - kayodelycaon 6y ago

osrec 6y ago

As an ex trader, I can confirm that the new ribbon interface, when it first came out, caused me and my colleagues a world of pain. We knew all the shortcuts keys in the old version. The ribbon UI meant that a big chunk of the previous shortcuts didn't work anymore. Killed our productivity for a good few months.

sxg 6y ago
Had the ribbon interface been the original UI and the traditional menu-based interface the new UI, it sounds like you and your colleagues would have still faced the same frustrations. To me, it sounds like your issue is with change rather than the effectiveness of either type of UI.
- osrec 6y ago
  No, not really. Some 1 or 2 key shortcuts became 5 key shortcuts with the new ribbon UI. It was a real nightmare! Especially when the old shortcuts were also remapped to a completely different function, and your moving s so fast you don't realise where your data has gone!
  - ModernMech 6y ago
    The ribbon allows you to add your most common used commands to a quick shortcut list that are only 2 keys.
- danShumway 6y ago
  For me, that's the point. For a program as ubiquitous as Word (and as complicated as Word), unless there were clear benefits from the new interface, it shouldn't have been changed. The change itself was the problem. Your comment is getting at an important, fundamental UX principle: all conceptual change is inherently painful, and every time you ask a user to re-learn something you are always wasting their time, even if the new design is better. Sometimes a UX designer looks at two interfaces as completely separate, and thinks their job is just to pick the best one. The reality is that usually UX decisions can't be separated from the current state of the app. UX design is more like surgery, and the invasiveness of the operation has to be a consideration. Having said that, I'm mildly skeptical that the interface didn't need to be changed. The old interface for Word was extremely user-unfriendly. If you go through a few of the interviews about Ribbon[0], there was some really interesting thought put into the new approach around discoverability, and while I'm not sure I agree with all of the theory they used to justify it[1], the changes did seem to be addressing a real problem. But I think it's debatable whether or not the discoverability benefits were worth the pain, and I think there may have been better ways to roll out the changes. [0]: sorry, too lazy to hunt them down and link them [1]: I am mildly skeptical of contextual menus/toolbars. They're not wrong, they just have drawbacks that people don't always consider. Sometimes it's useful to tell people what is disabled, and to give them grounded, unchanging "landmarks" in the UX that they can use orient themselves while using a program.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

> The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. Came here for this. The first version of Office for windows (which is what most people are familiar with in terms of UI) is from 1998, so the non-ribbon interface has been around for 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface.

Macha 6y ago
Office 95 doesn't look that functionally different from Office 2003: Office 95: https://i0.wp.com/isoriver.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/06-MS-Excel-95-Office-95.gif?w=920&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/isoriver.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/06... Office 2003: https://imag.malavida.com/mvimgbig/download-fs/office-2003-sp1-265-2.jpg https://imag.malavida.com/mvimgbig/download-fs/office-2003-s... Honestly even Excel 3.0 (1990) doesn't look that disimilar (https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/about-excel.png https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/about-excel....) So that's 17 years for toolbars vs 13 for ribbon
- Someone 6y ago
  Still, I guess more MS Office users will have used the new interface for longer than the old one than vice versa (I googled for data, but couldn’t find numbers) It even wouldn’t fully surprise me if, a few years from now, there were more MS Office users who never used the pre-ribbon interface than who had used it.
MagnumOpus 6y ago
> The first version of Office for windows [...] is from 1998. [...] 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface. You are not even close to right. Excel for Windows is from 1987 (20 years with non-ribbon menus), Word for Windows is from 1989 (18 years with non-ribbon menus). And of course the menu bar paradigm itself is older still.
listenallyall 6y ago
you came here to be wrong?

Angostura 6y ago

> What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. That keep changing and moving about. I use Word on Mac. It has the ribbon. 90% of the time I use the old style menu bar at the top of the screen.

Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
Word for Mac is almost the perfect evolution of the UI. It has the menu bar, which every Mac app has since it's a fixed and global UI element. It has the ribbon which is good for many users and makes many tasks easily accessible. I'm not sure how you'd make this compromise on Windows without making a mess of things, but on the Mac it works very well.

kgwxd 6y ago

I've used office daily for 20 years but rarely have to use the ribbon menu at all and, if I do, it's rarely off whatever is up there by default. But every time it is, it's way more painful to explore compared to a plain text menu and after I find what I'm looking for, it's hard to get back to the default.

edoloughlin 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 I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I switch to the other ribbons (tabs?) I find myself hunting, wondering if I've got the right tab. There's something about the spatial layout that seems to impose an extra cognitive load. I know menus are spatial too, but it seemed easier to remember them. Perhaps, because each menu occupied its own area of the window when expanded. With the ribbons, the same area is reused when you switch tabs. With Word and Outlook, I've got slightly better retention. However, with Excel, where I seem to have a wide distribution of seldom-used functionality, it's an exercise in frustration. I know something exists, but it takes ages to find it because the last time I used it was probably a few weeks ago.

shawxe 6y ago
I agree with this completely. It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category than it is for me to scan through a bunch of irregularly sized tiles for the icon and description of the configuration I need. For me, all of the pictures just lower the density of the information and cause it to take longer to parse every single time. I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. I would think that it would be easiest for new users (as it is easiest for myself) to have options sorted into neat menus with uniformly sized elements where information is laid out in a vertical list (which is how lists are written in basically all left-to-right and right-to-left languages) so that it is easier to parse quickly.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  > “I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point.” Uh, yeah there was? Go dig through the wayback machine for Jensen Harris’s blogpost series about the design of the ribbon, or watch his MIX08 talk on it; he was the design team lead for the change, and the reason they did it was because the old UI was failing their users. There were usability studies done during the ribbon design which fedback into, and changed, how it worked to adjust to ordinary people’s expectations and needs. > “I would think that it would be easiest for new users to have options sorted into neat menus” Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point.

Pxtl 6y ago

I don't think anybody is bemoaning the loss of the old Office buttons. The buttons were always kinda bad. The problem is that the ribbon also killed the menu bar. Menu bars are a standard, known quantity across every application, which clean easy semantics for keyboard access. On some OSes they even augment the menus with searchability, celebrating the power of plain text.

henrikeh 6y ago
Alt-key shortcuts work on the ribbon and search is build in as alt+Q (at least in Excel and Word). I use both daily.

conception 6y ago

Oh it’s bad to learn where just to click, I recently learned that’s how most people do it. You might find this interesting - https://www.truity.com/blog/intuitives-guide-getting-along-sensors https://www.truity.com/blog/intuitives-guide-getting-along-s... There was a discussion on HN about this a while back but most people learn computers by “if I want x I do y.” And guards just how they learn. Changing UI for them is catastrophic because they literally have to relearn -everything-. Op is probably a sensor and finds that stability tremendously useful. This really helped me be less frustrated in seeing how people can’t just figure out technology on their own and how I can just mess with it until I figure out the ”language” the app is using to have users interact with it. Most people can’t do that.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "There was a discussion on HN about this a while back but most people learn computers by “if I want x I do y.” And guards just how they learn. Changing UI for them is catastrophic because they literally have to relearn -everything-." Yes, but it's surprising to see a large contingent of them on HN and other technical forums. The rapid change of software technologies all but mandates adaptability and willingness to learn.

Spooky23 6y ago

There is a population of people who just hate the ribbon. In my experience, they are usually attorneys talking about word. It's the same argument that their attorney ancestors made about Wordperfect 5.1 keystroke commands. Personally, I don't see the big ribbon issue. It's easy to search for arcane features in the help menu. IMO, they really need a Mac where you get the top menu bar and a ribbon-like thing. Or some sort of gnarly keyboard mode that would become emacs for lawyers.

pseingatl 6y ago
Attorney ancestors?
- webmaven 6y ago
  > Attorney ancestors? GP probably meant something like "forerunners" or "predecessors"; some form of "those who came before" that doesn't necessarily imply a familial relationship.
- ghaff 6y ago
  It's just a cutesy way of saying a long time ago when all the lawyers used Wordperfect. (A word processing program that I hated almost as much as Wordstar.)
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    In some places, not so long ago :)
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I imagine a lot of big law offices still have computers with WordPerfect on them so they can read old files if necessary.
      - slavik81 6y ago
        WordPerfect is still maintained by Corel. The most recent release was in May. They also maintain PaintShop Pro, WinDVD, and WinZip. I think they're running a retirement home for distinguished software products.

_jal 6y ago

I haven't used Word much at all since the ribbon interface. Like others, for whatever reason the ribbon makes doesn't work for me, neither cognitively or via muscle-memory. The categorization doesn't help me predict where to find something (fails "new user" ease of use), nor does repeated use make it easier or faster. And of course I don't use it (or windows) much, so I don't think in Microsoft(tm) English, adding a minor layer of translation for some jargon. I have to use Excel enough that I've finally rote-memorized where frequently used things are. But when I have to find some tool I don't know where is, it is faster to google for instructions than hunt around the application itself, so I do that first. I'm sure it is fine if you live in MS-land. I don't, and it fails for this casual user both for discoverability and streamlined use.

Forge36 6y ago

The ribbon changed again in office 365.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
In looks only. Functionally and layout-wise, it's pretty much identical.

rdiddly 6y ago

AutoCAD went along a similar trajectory actually - from menus to toolbars to a ribbon. The difference is, you can still turn each of those modes on and off, including using two or all of them at once. Whereas Microsoft just kind of went "Okay y'all are gonna use a ribbon now." Edit: Forgot the AutoCAD command line. You can still turn that on too, and type commands like it's the 80s. It's actually kind of a paragon of a mature product that maintains all its older interfaces.

sbuk 6y ago
Haven't used AutoCAD in anger for a while, but my default rest position on the keyboard is still fingers over Esc, thumb over space. I always preferred using the command line. Not out of some 'power user' power trip, but more for screen space and efficiency. Being able to use AutoLISP was pretty neat too.
- rdiddly 6y ago
  I came in during the "toolbar" era, but ended up using the command line quite a bit. It was custom ACAD macros, and then AutoLISP, that got me back into programming after a long hiatus.

subhro 6y ago

> It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. A combat pilot would respectfully disagree. :) Source: Diving pulling 5Gs canopy side down.

billfor 6y ago

I think the old style menus were more functional for technical people and other experts, but the ribbon might be easier for new users. MSFT seems to have understood that trade off. It's interesting that the Metro design, which seems closer to the ribbon, didn't take off the same way. But from functional perspective I do like the old interface better, and especially that I can pullright to get at things without having to make multiple clicks.

domador 6y ago

Yes, the ribbon interface was initially pushed on the world in 2007, and it's still as bad as ever.

sbuk 6y ago

AutoCAD went ribbon around 2010...

tw04 6y ago

The ribbon was one of the worst things to ever hit Office. I remember it was met with universal horror when it first came out, but they were fully committed (apparently not having done ANY user testing) and insisted people would get used to it and prefer it because: we paid someone a ton of money who told us it's better. Like many others, I STILL to this day have to google to figure out where things are with the ribbon interface, probably the least intuitive interface I've ever used.

henrikeh 6y ago
> but they were fully committed (apparently having done ANY user testing) It is a little hard to parse what you mean, but Microsoft did a quite substantial amount of research leading up to the ribbon. A quick search on the net will lead you to summaries of it.
- tw04 6y ago
  Sorry, I left out a *not. I vehemently disagree, in 2007 NOBODY liked the ribbon. My wife's company refused to upgrade until absolutely forced to because it was such an atrocity. The most glowing reviews I ever saw were "I guess I'll get used to it eventually" and/or someone who used office once a year and found navigation easier when the extent of their workflow was changing font sizes. https://www.zdnet.com/article/oh-the-horror-why-is-microsoft-pushing-the-hated-windows-ribbon-for-officemac/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/oh-the-horror-why-is-microsoft... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/turn-off-ribbon-in-2010/f16527ed-4a2f-472c-a860-6d80e125f118 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/turn-... https://www.infoworld.com/article/2651076/microsoft-s-ribbon-interface-draws-frowns--smiles.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2651076/microsoft-s-ribbon...
  - Biganon 6y ago
    People hate change, that's not a reliable indicator. You could increase the quality immensely, most users would still feel attacked because they have to spend an extra effort to adapt.

black_puppydog 6y ago

At the risk of starting a fire here, I'd say a much better approach to that was unity's HUD. You could simply fuzzy-search through all the menu items. It made using GIMP delightful. :)

veddox 6y ago
That is the one thing I miss most about Unity! It was such a sweet feature. (Also, Unity minimised on the vertical space it used, which was great for small laptop screens.) The new GNOME versions are much improved compared to a few years ago, but I do wish Canonical had stuck with Unity...

einpoklum 6y ago

> The most common operations are descriptive buttons. The most common operation is trying to decide which ribbon something is supposed to be on. And it's difficult to get straight even after more than a decade, if you're just an occasional MS-Office user.

wolco 6y ago

I curse the ribbon. I still haven't found all of the 2003 features.