3 ms·

> 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. Almos

> 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).

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).