15 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 I've been u

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.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    "There's absolutely no evidence for this" "yes there was, here's what to look for" "downvote". HN.txt. Top level menus full by Word 95. Office 97 added command bars. Nested menus and toolbars full by Office 2000. Office XP added Task panes, full of features by Office 2003. "the Task Pane was the last attempt to find a way to scale old-style UI to programs as full-featured as Office. Although it was a successful stop-gap measure, it ran its course in only two versions." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/new-rectangles-to-the-rescue-why-the-ui-part-4-2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/new-r... > "The downside [of nested dropdown menus], however, was clear and eventually terminal: increased complexity. It's much more difficult for people to form a scanning strategy with hierarchical menus: you have to keep track at each moment which levels you've visited and which you've haven't. What was once a simple structure to visualize was now a more complicated, branching structure." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ye-olde-museum-of-office-past-why-the-ui-part-2-2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ye-ol... > "As we watched more people use the prototypes, we started to understand more the scanning process that was taking place. Later on, we did eye-tracking studies to watch how people scanned the Ribbon" > "I was reading a blog entry of someone who was kind of critical and dismissive about what we're doing and our designs. One of his criticisms was "how bad the usability of the Ribbon would be because it's got icons scattered all over of various sizes." What we've learned is actually the opposite. People can scan disparate patterns more easily than homogenous patterns. When we use more toolbar-like layouts--a bunch of equally-spaced, equally-sized buttons, people scan them less quickly than when each chunk has a memorable layout. So we actually try explicitly to vary the layouts between chunks--it helps people find the thing they're looking for more quickly. That's something we wouldn't have known if we didn't have a commitment to watch people work." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/be-willing-to-be-wrong https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/be-wi... > "One of the concepts behind the Ribbon is that it's the one and only place to look for functionality in the product. If you want to look through Word 2003 to find an unfamiliar command, you need to look through 3 levels of hierarchical menus, open up 31 toolbars and peruse about 20 Task Panes. It's hard to formulate a "hunting" strategy to find the thing you're looking for because there's no logical path through all of the UI. > Office "12" consolidates all of the entry points into one place: the Ribbon. So if you're trying to find a feature and don't know where it is, the scope of your search is drastically reduced. Click on the leftmost tab, and click across the tabs until you reach the end. That it. It's either there or it's not--there are no other "rocks" to look under, no other places we've hidden functionality. We've found in early tests that people find it easier to discover how to do new things in the Ribbon, and they're more apt to explore the UI looking for better ways to get things done." Testing showed that people found the Ribbon easier, found more things, and were more willing to explore it. - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/enter-the-ribbon https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/enter... > "* Back in the olden days of designing software at Microsoft (say, pre-2003), design decisions were mostly supported by guesswork. [...] How much data have we collected? [in the Customer Experience opt-in program] About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.) [...] one of the biggest reasons that we decided to do the new user interface for Office 12 is simply that, for the first time, we have the data we need to make intelligent decisions.*" - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/inside-deep-thought-why-the-ui-part-6-2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/insid... And that's not even from the design blog, which appears to be offline and not in the wayback machine. Totally wrong about people finding menus easier, totally wrong about there being no evidence based design behind the ribbon.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > 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. I think you hit on something here with the irregular size of the buttons, probably moreso than the icons. The arrangement makes it difficult to just read through all the options left to right, because they're all jumbled. A common/recommended design pattern for older Mac apps is to have a top toolbar of large icons, which is actually quite similar to the Ribbon in some ways. But there, the options appear in a single horizontal row. https://i.ibb.co/wd6MR9c/Screen-Shot-2020-07-10-at-11-58-37-AM.png https://i.ibb.co/wd6MR9c/Screen-Shot-2020-07-10-at-11-58-37-...
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    Not only are they jumbled, but they also change size/shape depending on the width of the window. A large button when full-screened becomes a small button when in a smaller window. A large button in a smaller window gets expanded to show all sub-options when maximized. There is no visual consistency for the same button.
    - ModernMech 6y ago
      That was a feature designed to fit more options on smaller screens. I personally like it and find it helpful.
      - gmueckl 6y ago
        It messes up any attempt to recollect of the locations of certain features in the bar. Some iterations of the ribbon even fold groups into menus under single buttons, so the exact path to feature then depends on the width of the window. This turns the ribbon into a pretty inconsistent user experience.
        ModernMech 6y ago
        I don't recollect the location of features by their spacial location, I recollect them by their place in a hierarchical ordering. The exact path to a function is always preserved, as the keyboard shortcut for that item is defined by that path.
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  Vertical lists can also work better with the wider aspect ratios of modern monitors. There's tons of empty space on the left and right in a typical Word document, but MS decided to suck up limited vertical space instead
- cat199 6y ago
  > It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category this also creates a fixed 'path' cognitively since you are reading/naming the intermediate nodes on the way to any given task, and the intermediate nodes are consistently located in the same place spatially and in terms of the path. This is not the same as 'funky star button 2/3 of the way to the right and 1/3 down of the sub-scrolling subpanel of the customizable ribbon'
- oblio 6y ago
  > Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. Microsoft did massive amounts of user testing, just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not there. This is a good starting point if you have about 20 spare hours: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ They also backed their tests with a ton of data and metrics.
  - wolco 6y ago
    Testing and metrics can be wrong like in this case. A ton of data can be too much where we find patterns to reenforce what we want.
    - oblio 6y ago
      I'm not saying that you're wrong, but what Microsoft was doing is closer to science than what HN does every time an article somewhat related to the Ribbon is posted. I'd bet on Microsoft's approach over these rants, every day of the week.
      - wolco 6y ago
        Each person who voices an opinion is a real value and a real data point. What Microsoft is doing may look like a science but they are not asking the right questions so they get misleading results. Reminds me of when facebook pushed autoplaying ads. A/B metrics when through the roof. Sales never saw so much engagement. Every slapping each other on the back. Ask a user they didn't understand what was happening, there was a fear that was introduced around scrolling your own feed. Science is great but only attempts to answers the questions you give it.
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        I recall the first time I used the new windows 8 UI. It was absolutely horrifying. There were 2 different control panels with different settings sometimes overlapping. The traditional UI in which you could start apps by clicking on desktop shortcuts and manage traditional windows but certain apps including the start menu put you seemingly randomly in the weirdo new app experience where the window took up the whole screen. This was also true of clicking a url link in a different app. It was bar none the worst desktop interface that anyone has ever released for a computer. You have asserted without evidence that MS's UI is driven by science and you are assuming that Microsoft's research is in fact any good. Based on consistently mediocre results I have reason to doubt that. To support your position I suggest you actually cite some research instead of assuming it has been done competently.
ako 6y ago
The key question is: would somebody who learned to use office after 2007 with the ribbon interface appreciate moving back to the pre-2007 interface? My guess is that more people learned to use office after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no problems using the ribbon. I still yearn for ms-word on dos, and oracle forms on terminal interfaces, once you learned the keyboard shortcuts, nothing was faster. Kind of like knowing vi(m).
- edoloughlin 6y ago
  My guess is that more people learned to use office after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no problems using the ribbon. Or, perhaps they are just used to a lower level of productivity? I've had 13 years to adapt, and I still find it frustrating.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    On the other hand I found it instantly more productive, even right after it was introduced. No longer did I have to remember which menu an option was in. It was all right there.
    - puszczyk 6y ago
      Not sure why this got downvoted — a personal anecdote as a reply to personal anecdote. On the subject — I’ve learned the “classic” office but really like the ribbon. I’m not a power user though — just a doc or a spreadsheet every now and then.
    - ptx 6y ago
      It's not all right there - some things are under another ribbon tab, which doesn't seem all that different from putting things in a collection of menus. (Except that visually it's now a jumbled mess instead of a clean and easy-to-scan linear list.)
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        > Except that visually it's now a jumbled mess instead of a clean and easy-to-scan linear list I think I find the "jumbled mess" easier to scan because my memory is visual, and the items are visually distinct. On the other hand, with a list I actually have to read every item.
rbg246 6y ago
I am also the same, I have a complete block on how to find things, they just aren't where I remember even though as others have pointed out its 12 years since the ribbon appeared.
- nxc18 6y ago
  In 2020 there is a search feature (similar to VS Code) so there's really no need to have to find anything anyway.
  - rbg246 6y ago
    Oh nice that will probably solve my dilemma on knowing what I want but not knowing where it is!
lallysingh 6y ago
It sounds like the issue is that the layout isn't spatial. There isn't a 1:1 mapping between place and object. The same place can have multiple objects depending on what tab's selected.
- zoomablemind 6y ago
  Adding to this is the ribbon content is just too busy. It fused icons with labels and stuffed it in some uneven grid. The regular toolbar was more or less even grid, well, a row. The usual menu is also structured on quite uniform grid. It's mentally easier to follow straight lines, we read in straight lines, scroll in straight lines, well, typing too. Yet when it comes to ribbon, the adjustable grid layout makes one adopt an adjustable scan pattern. I find this pattern quite distracting. Always feels like I'm staring at the old-time toolbar customization dialog, as if someone spilled buttons out of a toolbox onto the screen, and to make it more fun, also mixed them with labels... Anyone remembers the initial requirement for the ribbon to use the specific font, as it was used for positioning and could not be customized? Not sure if it's still the case. I wish MS promoted a style-based workflow/mindset more than the free-hand formatting. Perhaps, this would by itself eliminate the need for the busy toolbars, if only during style design.
agumonkey 6y ago
Interesting, maybe old menus had some trivial adequate nature for most users and ribbon, even with all its worth doesn't tap into that. Personally I'm still incapable of deciding.. because I hated nested menus (too deep, too adhoc) but the ribbon is a bit less easy to remember than I'd hope. That said it's a good step toward keyboard shortcut memorizing.
- int_19h 6y ago
  One thing about the old menus is that they were extremely configurable. Like, you could not just hide or reorder items, but reorganize the hierarchy if you wanted. People mostly used that for toolbars, but Office menus are technically a kind of toolbar. Some of that still lives on in Visual Studio, where it is even extended to context menus: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-customize-menus-and-toolbars-in-visual-studio?view=vs-2019 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-cus...
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Were Office toolbars customizable to that extent ? Also I don't think it applies to most users .. they were rote learners (because never had the time or context to learn to use the computer as an aid but as a protocol to respect)
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    The ribbon is also extremely configurable. You can move or remove anything you want. There's usually no reason to, but it's an option. There's also the Quick Access Toolbar, which is exactly like the toolbars of old if you pin it below the ribbon (not in the titlebar).
coliveira 6y ago
Yes, the ribbon is a futile exercise. I'm pretty sure 90% of the people don't know how to use it, and the ones who know don't remember where things are. In this sense, menus are much more successful interface, at least you know where things might be. And in fact, when I use MS Word I first try to find things in the menu, and only reach for the ribbon for items I already know from previous experience.
- ModernMech 6y ago
  I don't understand this criticism. The layout seems logical to me. If you want to insert something, go to the "Insert" tab. If you want page design options, go to the "Design" tab. What's so inscrutable?
  - coliveira 6y ago
    There are plenty of problems. In the Mac, for example, menus are discoverable because you can go to "help->seach" and type what you're looking for. This cannot be easily done with the ribbon. Moreover, once you have a clue that you're looking for an "insert" option, you still need to search around in the ribbon, since there is no logic for where the option might be hiding. A menu you can read from top to bottom, but a ribbon you need to scan from left to right and top to bottom, making it much harder to use.
    - ModernMech 6y ago
      "In the Mac, for example, menus are discoverable because you can go to "help->seach" and type what you're looking for. This cannot be easily done with the ribbon." I can't speak to the Mac version, but on Windows there is a search box at the top that returns a result for whatever you want. "A menu you can read from top to bottom, but a ribbon you need to scan from left to right and top to bottom, making it much harder to use." No, menus are 2D as well. There's 1 vertical dimension, and then there's the hidden second dimension where you have to hover over each item to see what's inside. For example, in Google Docs under the Insert menu there is an item for "Headers and Footers", which opens a menu with two items: "headers" and "footers". The ribbon flattens this and just lays both out in the tab. "making it much harder to use." "Much" harder? Really? Honestly, I've used both interfaces extensively over the years and I've gotten plenty of work done in both. I just don't see what the big deal is about this little war that's been going on for 13 years, and claims of one being "much" harder than the other seem greatly exaggerated. Like... oh, you had to scan in two dimensions to find functions. Okay, how much does that really impact your productivity? How much of your time is really spent scanning a menu? Once you found it.... you can make a shortcut for it. I've got a shortcut for all the common tasks I use, and it's really no different than a custom toolbar from the pre-ribbon era.

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.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  "There's absolutely no evidence for this" "yes there was, here's what to look for" "downvote". HN.txt. Top level menus full by Word 95. Office 97 added command bars. Nested menus and toolbars full by Office 2000. Office XP added Task panes, full of features by Office 2003. "the Task Pane was the last attempt to find a way to scale old-style UI to programs as full-featured as Office. Although it was a successful stop-gap measure, it ran its course in only two versions." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/new-rectangles-to-the-rescue-why-the-ui-part-4-2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/new-r... > "The downside [of nested dropdown menus], however, was clear and eventually terminal: increased complexity. It's much more difficult for people to form a scanning strategy with hierarchical menus: you have to keep track at each moment which levels you've visited and which you've haven't. What was once a simple structure to visualize was now a more complicated, branching structure." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ye-olde-museum-of-office-past-why-the-ui-part-2-2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ye-ol... > "As we watched more people use the prototypes, we started to understand more the scanning process that was taking place. Later on, we did eye-tracking studies to watch how people scanned the Ribbon" > "I was reading a blog entry of someone who was kind of critical and dismissive about what we're doing and our designs. One of his criticisms was "how bad the usability of the Ribbon would be because it's got icons scattered all over of various sizes." What we've learned is actually the opposite. People can scan disparate patterns more easily than homogenous patterns. When we use more toolbar-like layouts--a bunch of equally-spaced, equally-sized buttons, people scan them less quickly than when each chunk has a memorable layout. So we actually try explicitly to vary the layouts between chunks--it helps people find the thing they're looking for more quickly. That's something we wouldn't have known if we didn't have a commitment to watch people work." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/be-willing-to-be-wrong https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/be-wi... > "One of the concepts behind the Ribbon is that it's the one and only place to look for functionality in the product. If you want to look through Word 2003 to find an unfamiliar command, you need to look through 3 levels of hierarchical menus, open up 31 toolbars and peruse about 20 Task Panes. It's hard to formulate a "hunting" strategy to find the thing you're looking for because there's no logical path through all of the UI. > Office "12" consolidates all of the entry points into one place: the Ribbon. So if you're trying to find a feature and don't know where it is, the scope of your search is drastically reduced. Click on the leftmost tab, and click across the tabs until you reach the end. That it. It's either there or it's not--there are no other "rocks" to look under, no other places we've hidden functionality. We've found in early tests that people find it easier to discover how to do new things in the Ribbon, and they're more apt to explore the UI looking for better ways to get things done." Testing showed that people found the Ribbon easier, found more things, and were more willing to explore it. - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/enter-the-ribbon https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/enter... > "* Back in the olden days of designing software at Microsoft (say, pre-2003), design decisions were mostly supported by guesswork. [...] How much data have we collected? [in the Customer Experience opt-in program] About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.) [...] one of the biggest reasons that we decided to do the new user interface for Office 12 is simply that, for the first time, we have the data we need to make intelligent decisions.*" - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/inside-deep-thought-why-the-ui-part-6-2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/insid... And that's not even from the design blog, which appears to be offline and not in the wayback machine. Totally wrong about people finding menus easier, totally wrong about there being no evidence based design behind the ribbon.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> 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. I think you hit on something here with the irregular size of the buttons, probably moreso than the icons. The arrangement makes it difficult to just read through all the options left to right, because they're all jumbled. A common/recommended design pattern for older Mac apps is to have a top toolbar of large icons, which is actually quite similar to the Ribbon in some ways. But there, the options appear in a single horizontal row. https://i.ibb.co/wd6MR9c/Screen-Shot-2020-07-10-at-11-58-37-AM.png https://i.ibb.co/wd6MR9c/Screen-Shot-2020-07-10-at-11-58-37-...
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Not only are they jumbled, but they also change size/shape depending on the width of the window. A large button when full-screened becomes a small button when in a smaller window. A large button in a smaller window gets expanded to show all sub-options when maximized. There is no visual consistency for the same button.
  - ModernMech 6y ago
    That was a feature designed to fit more options on smaller screens. I personally like it and find it helpful.
    - gmueckl 6y ago
      It messes up any attempt to recollect of the locations of certain features in the bar. Some iterations of the ribbon even fold groups into menus under single buttons, so the exact path to feature then depends on the width of the window. This turns the ribbon into a pretty inconsistent user experience.
      - ModernMech 6y ago
        I don't recollect the location of features by their spacial location, I recollect them by their place in a hierarchical ordering. The exact path to a function is always preserved, as the keyboard shortcut for that item is defined by that path.
HideousKojima 6y ago
Vertical lists can also work better with the wider aspect ratios of modern monitors. There's tons of empty space on the left and right in a typical Word document, but MS decided to suck up limited vertical space instead
cat199 6y ago
> It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category this also creates a fixed 'path' cognitively since you are reading/naming the intermediate nodes on the way to any given task, and the intermediate nodes are consistently located in the same place spatially and in terms of the path. This is not the same as 'funky star button 2/3 of the way to the right and 1/3 down of the sub-scrolling subpanel of the customizable ribbon'
oblio 6y ago
> Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. Microsoft did massive amounts of user testing, just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not there. This is a good starting point if you have about 20 spare hours: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ They also backed their tests with a ton of data and metrics.
- wolco 6y ago
  Testing and metrics can be wrong like in this case. A ton of data can be too much where we find patterns to reenforce what we want.
  - oblio 6y ago
    I'm not saying that you're wrong, but what Microsoft was doing is closer to science than what HN does every time an article somewhat related to the Ribbon is posted. I'd bet on Microsoft's approach over these rants, every day of the week.
    - wolco 6y ago
      Each person who voices an opinion is a real value and a real data point. What Microsoft is doing may look like a science but they are not asking the right questions so they get misleading results. Reminds me of when facebook pushed autoplaying ads. A/B metrics when through the roof. Sales never saw so much engagement. Every slapping each other on the back. Ask a user they didn't understand what was happening, there was a fear that was introduced around scrolling your own feed. Science is great but only attempts to answers the questions you give it.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      I recall the first time I used the new windows 8 UI. It was absolutely horrifying. There were 2 different control panels with different settings sometimes overlapping. The traditional UI in which you could start apps by clicking on desktop shortcuts and manage traditional windows but certain apps including the start menu put you seemingly randomly in the weirdo new app experience where the window took up the whole screen. This was also true of clicking a url link in a different app. It was bar none the worst desktop interface that anyone has ever released for a computer. You have asserted without evidence that MS's UI is driven by science and you are assuming that Microsoft's research is in fact any good. Based on consistently mediocre results I have reason to doubt that. To support your position I suggest you actually cite some research instead of assuming it has been done competently.

ako 6y ago

The key question is: would somebody who learned to use office after 2007 with the ribbon interface appreciate moving back to the pre-2007 interface? My guess is that more people learned to use office after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no problems using the ribbon. I still yearn for ms-word on dos, and oracle forms on terminal interfaces, once you learned the keyboard shortcuts, nothing was faster. Kind of like knowing vi(m).

edoloughlin 6y ago
My guess is that more people learned to use office after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no problems using the ribbon. Or, perhaps they are just used to a lower level of productivity? I've had 13 years to adapt, and I still find it frustrating.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  On the other hand I found it instantly more productive, even right after it was introduced. No longer did I have to remember which menu an option was in. It was all right there.
  - puszczyk 6y ago
    Not sure why this got downvoted — a personal anecdote as a reply to personal anecdote. On the subject — I’ve learned the “classic” office but really like the ribbon. I’m not a power user though — just a doc or a spreadsheet every now and then.
  - ptx 6y ago
    It's not all right there - some things are under another ribbon tab, which doesn't seem all that different from putting things in a collection of menus. (Except that visually it's now a jumbled mess instead of a clean and easy-to-scan linear list.)
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      > Except that visually it's now a jumbled mess instead of a clean and easy-to-scan linear list I think I find the "jumbled mess" easier to scan because my memory is visual, and the items are visually distinct. On the other hand, with a list I actually have to read every item.

rbg246 6y ago

I am also the same, I have a complete block on how to find things, they just aren't where I remember even though as others have pointed out its 12 years since the ribbon appeared.

nxc18 6y ago
In 2020 there is a search feature (similar to VS Code) so there's really no need to have to find anything anyway.
- rbg246 6y ago
  Oh nice that will probably solve my dilemma on knowing what I want but not knowing where it is!

lallysingh 6y ago

It sounds like the issue is that the layout isn't spatial. There isn't a 1:1 mapping between place and object. The same place can have multiple objects depending on what tab's selected.

zoomablemind 6y ago
Adding to this is the ribbon content is just too busy. It fused icons with labels and stuffed it in some uneven grid. The regular toolbar was more or less even grid, well, a row. The usual menu is also structured on quite uniform grid. It's mentally easier to follow straight lines, we read in straight lines, scroll in straight lines, well, typing too. Yet when it comes to ribbon, the adjustable grid layout makes one adopt an adjustable scan pattern. I find this pattern quite distracting. Always feels like I'm staring at the old-time toolbar customization dialog, as if someone spilled buttons out of a toolbox onto the screen, and to make it more fun, also mixed them with labels... Anyone remembers the initial requirement for the ribbon to use the specific font, as it was used for positioning and could not be customized? Not sure if it's still the case. I wish MS promoted a style-based workflow/mindset more than the free-hand formatting. Perhaps, this would by itself eliminate the need for the busy toolbars, if only during style design.

agumonkey 6y ago

Interesting, maybe old menus had some trivial adequate nature for most users and ribbon, even with all its worth doesn't tap into that. Personally I'm still incapable of deciding.. because I hated nested menus (too deep, too adhoc) but the ribbon is a bit less easy to remember than I'd hope. That said it's a good step toward keyboard shortcut memorizing.

int_19h 6y ago
One thing about the old menus is that they were extremely configurable. Like, you could not just hide or reorder items, but reorganize the hierarchy if you wanted. People mostly used that for toolbars, but Office menus are technically a kind of toolbar. Some of that still lives on in Visual Studio, where it is even extended to context menus: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-customize-menus-and-toolbars-in-visual-studio?view=vs-2019 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-cus...
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Were Office toolbars customizable to that extent ? Also I don't think it applies to most users .. they were rote learners (because never had the time or context to learn to use the computer as an aid but as a protocol to respect)
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  The ribbon is also extremely configurable. You can move or remove anything you want. There's usually no reason to, but it's an option. There's also the Quick Access Toolbar, which is exactly like the toolbars of old if you pin it below the ribbon (not in the titlebar).

coliveira 6y ago

Yes, the ribbon is a futile exercise. I'm pretty sure 90% of the people don't know how to use it, and the ones who know don't remember where things are. In this sense, menus are much more successful interface, at least you know where things might be. And in fact, when I use MS Word I first try to find things in the menu, and only reach for the ribbon for items I already know from previous experience.

ModernMech 6y ago
I don't understand this criticism. The layout seems logical to me. If you want to insert something, go to the "Insert" tab. If you want page design options, go to the "Design" tab. What's so inscrutable?
- coliveira 6y ago
  There are plenty of problems. In the Mac, for example, menus are discoverable because you can go to "help->seach" and type what you're looking for. This cannot be easily done with the ribbon. Moreover, once you have a clue that you're looking for an "insert" option, you still need to search around in the ribbon, since there is no logic for where the option might be hiding. A menu you can read from top to bottom, but a ribbon you need to scan from left to right and top to bottom, making it much harder to use.
  - ModernMech 6y ago
    "In the Mac, for example, menus are discoverable because you can go to "help->seach" and type what you're looking for. This cannot be easily done with the ribbon." I can't speak to the Mac version, but on Windows there is a search box at the top that returns a result for whatever you want. "A menu you can read from top to bottom, but a ribbon you need to scan from left to right and top to bottom, making it much harder to use." No, menus are 2D as well. There's 1 vertical dimension, and then there's the hidden second dimension where you have to hover over each item to see what's inside. For example, in Google Docs under the Insert menu there is an item for "Headers and Footers", which opens a menu with two items: "headers" and "footers". The ribbon flattens this and just lays both out in the tab. "making it much harder to use." "Much" harder? Really? Honestly, I've used both interfaces extensively over the years and I've gotten plenty of work done in both. I just don't see what the big deal is about this little war that's been going on for 13 years, and claims of one being "much" harder than the other seem greatly exaggerated. Like... oh, you had to scan in two dimensions to find functions. Okay, how much does that really impact your productivity? How much of your time is really spent scanning a menu? Once you found it.... you can make a shortcut for it. I've got a shortcut for all the common tasks I use, and it's really no different than a custom toolbar from the pre-ribbon era.