8 ms·

UX at MS is this weird consulting style org. Maximum visibility with minimal accountability. I think the Office 2007 Ribbon was the last new thing they did that

UX at MS is this weird consulting style org. Maximum visibility with minimal accountability. I think the Office 2007 Ribbon was the last new thing they did that I liked, it just needed a search function to quickly refine the buttons. That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. I know devs tend to hate the Ribbon but I thought it was well thought out. UX was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who was adamant that it stay in. I had a good laugh at Win8 when they finally got their chance to remove it and totally messed it up. Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them. I now have a stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not something expected to happen so soon. I still use Windows for legacy reasons but few things would make me happier than deleting my windows partition for good.

jbay808 5y ago
> That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. That's a fascinating dynamic. We can't make our product better, because that would suggest that it isn't already good enough.
gibolt 5y ago
I hated the Ribbons. Nothing was categorized where I expected and none of the icons or sizes match their use or frequency of use. Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan
- megablast 5y ago
  But drop down menus were still there. I thought the ribbon was great, but obviously you had to get used to it.
- zentr1c 5y ago
  Ranting in Gibbons:) Still i wonder how much it effects my productivity decline in Office since i still search sometimes for functionality. In anyway it made me hate office and made Switch to open Office wherever i can. However I attribute it to having kicked of my quest for a plaintext workflow because beeing f*ked over by feature bloat and Designer circle jerking once to many times. Simplicity is king. Maybe its just the age that makes me realize that there are just to many layers of complexity. I feel for the young learners that get thrown into this world and dont even understand the concept of a file system tree anymore. It has been abstracted away. it's not in the cloud! It's in the app with 3 klicks reachable or doesn't exist.
  - stevesimmons 5y ago
    I can't figure out how to reach my files in Windows 11. There are around 6 Documents folders/libraries/whatever in File Explorer, going to a combination of my work OneDrive, my personal OneDrive and my local user folder. There's one weird Documents that goes to the Documents in both OneDrives. There's a My Documents that give an error. I've a work Sharepoint folder that was also named Documents. I tried renaming them, which didn't work, and has just left me even more confused how to find things. If I go to the command line and do "dir C:\Users\<me>\Documents" which of this do I find? And how do I get to the others? And which ones get backed up where? It's a complete mess. I sympathise now with the people who keep every file on the desktop. Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably. How did Microsoft get to this?
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      > It's a complete mess. I sympathise now with the people who keep every file on the desktop. The UI in regards to navigating files in Windows is indeed a mess. A personal gripe that i have with it, that's even worse than some of what you named is the file open/save dialog - there's not just one (that would let you write the file path in the bar and thus allow you to copy paths from Explorer to it), but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying! Add on small annoyances like Windows search by default trying to look into the contents of many files, thus making search needlessly slow and also things like it not supporting mounting remote directories over SFTP (which should get at least a bit of attention) instead of always having to use SMB or whatever, and you have a somewhat problematic daily experience. Of course, there are also things that it does better than some other systems/configurations, like having the whole recycle bin concept, with ctrl+Z allowing you to undo file deletions, file moves or even renaming files, which makes dealing with user error on your part more easy! Just checked on Linux Mint - the recycle bin works as you'd expect, but there is no ctrl+z to restore the last deleted file automatically. > Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably. About this, i'm also somewhat torn. The filesystem structure on most Linux distros also just feels weird, although it's for historical compatibility reasons (not quite as bad as Windows having two oddly named Program Files directories, but still). I doubt that we couldn't structure things in a more reasonable manner, than having all of the following for just executables, for example: /bin/ /sbin/ /usr/bin/ /usr/local/bin/ /usr/local/sbin/ In case anyone wants to learn more about these, here's the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard document, which is actually pretty well written: https://www.pathname.com/fhs/ https://www.pathname.com/fhs/ Throw in /opt and /usr/share and whatnot and it's a recipe for different bits of software out there using different configurations because of differing opinions about what would be suitable for their use cases. The same mess actually extends to what's in the /home directory - sure, in most cases you can back it up and restore it, but once again every piece of software will have its own opinions about how to structure its data, be it in a visible/hidden config file, a visible/hidden folder for the application itself, or something else. Of course, Windows also has a similar mess going on with Program Data and AppData folders, as well as Documents and whatnot, so Linux isn't the only problematic system here. In short, i think that all have their advantages and shortcomings, here's hoping that things improve in the following decade!
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan Another commenter mentioned OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/ http://www.openoffice.org/) but i'd also like to suggest LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/) as a capable and reasonably compatible alternative to MS Office, which retain the old look of dropdown menus. If you don't have the need to support very particular features of Office, then it might just be suitable to retain your preferred way of navigating the UI of an office suite app - on my personal computers i have just LibreOffice (with which i finished my bachelor's and master's thesis), whereas on my work computer i have both LibreOffice and Word, for those few exceptions when the latter is necessary. That said, i can understand why many would also find the ribbon UI to be easy to navigate, should they get used to it. That's why some Office clones, like WPS Office (https://www.wps.com/office/linux/ https://www.wps.com/office/linux/) and FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/ https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) seem to copy it with varying degrees of success. That said, personally i like the open source nature of LibreOffice too and the file format itself not being proprietary.
  - jgtrosh 5y ago
    Libre Office also offers an optional ribbon style interface
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      Oh yeah, totally forgot about it! In case anyone would like to try it out, it's under: View > User Interface > (pick one of the Tabbed options, there are quite a few) Now there's one more argument for open software - the developers caring enough to giving us that many options to support the preferences of many people without needlessly deprecating anything!
  - tpxl 5y ago
    If I understand correctly, LibreOffice is a fork/successor of OpenOffice. Here's a comparison on the LibreOffice website: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/ https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffi.... It's a bit disingenuous though since it makes it seem OpenOffice hasn't had a release since 2014, even though last release was October 2021.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  I agree that the grouping doesn't make much sense at all in most programs. It would have been nice to at least be able to reorder things like in classical UIs, which I also find superior from a usability perspective.
- savrajsingh 5y ago
  Windows 11 also got rid of the ribbon in windows file explorer
- addicted 5y ago
  I miss the ribbon every time I use LO. I do think the categorization takes a little getting used to but once you do it’s fairly trivial. It’s also important to recognize the horizontal categorizations within each ribbon, something that can easily be missed until you know about it.
randomsearch 5y ago
No UX designer worth their salt would ever say search wasn’t an essential part of most interfaces. It’s 101. Even I know that. Sounds like you just had bad UX designers, which fits the observed data.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  I've certainly met more bad ones than good ones. A lot of them consider themselves artists and with a focus on appearance. Search is a box you put text into, not much room for expression. Search can be hard to get right and they tend to lose control of it to the devs who can easily screw it up and sink their UX. Even Apple does a terrible job with search.
socialdemocrat 5y ago
You liked ribbons?! As a Mac user ribbons made me really happy I was not on Windows although they did bring that poison over to the Mac with their office apps. Occasionally I have to use windows and the abandonment of regular drop down menus and introduction of ribbons is really disorienting in my view. MS changes too much core UI. I like that Apple is more conservative and keep stuff that works. Keeping the menu bar but adding a search bar to it was a much better solution in my opinion. It allows us to use a well established UI paradigm while also making it easier to find well hidden entries. Hunting through stuff in the ribbon is not easy.
- isaacremuant 5y ago
  Ribbons were an excellent design pattern for new users. The problem is it disrupted many power users who reacted negatively. I think anything that changes nothing is more willing to have faithful users but changes can be good if done in a utilitarian way considering different types of users.
  - criddell 5y ago
    Power users are using the keyboard and probably hide the ribbons.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  That’s why ribbon search would have helped a lot. Plus if fast enough people could use a shortcut to get to search and then quickly type a few characters to a function e.g. Meta S -> “pa” for paste, much faster than finding a tiny button and easier to remember than a combination of keys. Like the Jump feature in Winamp. If you forget the small subset of characters that give you what you want you can use the longer names. The results list would contain the key combos if you wanted to use that next time instead. While searching the Ribbon UI could show you which tab and button refers the currently selected search result item. It was really needed to bring it all together. And for power uses why not have customizable tool strips....
lozenge 5y ago
Jensen Harris' blog was deleted when Microsoft replaced their dev blogs platform, but it went into great detail on the creation of the Ribbon. As far as I can remember, search couldn't be ready in time for the initial release.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  That rings true. From memory there was a plug-in that added it later, and I asked why we didn’t release it and was told that if users were given the option it would subsume more and more functionality until it became unwieldy and difficult to use. Also since it would be cheap and flexible there would be a push to use search even when not ideal.
madeofpalk 5y ago
> Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them. How is this an indication of UI/UX (where UX is how things should work, but not implementing it) failures? It sounds like this one is purely on the development org for writing someone that has poor performance and/or not prioritising improving it.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  A slow UI is bad UX. UX should have pushed back in releasing a slow UI until the developer fixed it.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Maybe they did?
    - cjbgkagh 5y ago
      UX tends to have more power at MS than devs for exactly this reason so it is unlikely. Additionally it can still be bad UX even if it's not the fault of the UX designer.
mortenlarsen 5y ago
> Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. This reminds me of an experience with Windows 10 a few years ago. I tried to start cmd.exe and nothing happened. Tried a bunch of times more. Still nothing... I was connected to a WiFi network that allowed ping to the entire Internet but not TCP connections. Then I switched to a WiFi network that allowed TCP connections to the Internet and 20+ cmd.exe instances started all at once. I thought: "Wait, that can't be true", but it was reproducible. This makes me wonder if launching programs takes longer on a slow internet connection. I do not know if this still happens as I have only used Windows 10 on a handful of occasions since then.
- staticelf 5y ago
  I was recently on a boat with a bad connection. Searching in windows (11) doesn't seem to work well if that is the case. Even searching for local files, the response is just loading since it appears to wait for some request.
- patmorgan23 5y ago
  That's bonkers. Why wouldn't you write telememary to an on machine log/queue that can trickle out as needed and not impact the performance of the system.
  - mortenlarsen 5y ago
    Maybe because they put their needs before yours?

jbay808 5y ago

> That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. That's a fascinating dynamic. We can't make our product better, because that would suggest that it isn't already good enough.

gibolt 5y ago

I hated the Ribbons. Nothing was categorized where I expected and none of the icons or sizes match their use or frequency of use. Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan

megablast 5y ago
But drop down menus were still there. I thought the ribbon was great, but obviously you had to get used to it.
zentr1c 5y ago
Ranting in Gibbons:) Still i wonder how much it effects my productivity decline in Office since i still search sometimes for functionality. In anyway it made me hate office and made Switch to open Office wherever i can. However I attribute it to having kicked of my quest for a plaintext workflow because beeing f*ked over by feature bloat and Designer circle jerking once to many times. Simplicity is king. Maybe its just the age that makes me realize that there are just to many layers of complexity. I feel for the young learners that get thrown into this world and dont even understand the concept of a file system tree anymore. It has been abstracted away. it's not in the cloud! It's in the app with 3 klicks reachable or doesn't exist.
- stevesimmons 5y ago
  I can't figure out how to reach my files in Windows 11. There are around 6 Documents folders/libraries/whatever in File Explorer, going to a combination of my work OneDrive, my personal OneDrive and my local user folder. There's one weird Documents that goes to the Documents in both OneDrives. There's a My Documents that give an error. I've a work Sharepoint folder that was also named Documents. I tried renaming them, which didn't work, and has just left me even more confused how to find things. If I go to the command line and do "dir C:\Users\<me>\Documents" which of this do I find? And how do I get to the others? And which ones get backed up where? It's a complete mess. I sympathise now with the people who keep every file on the desktop. Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably. How did Microsoft get to this?
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    > It's a complete mess. I sympathise now with the people who keep every file on the desktop. The UI in regards to navigating files in Windows is indeed a mess. A personal gripe that i have with it, that's even worse than some of what you named is the file open/save dialog - there's not just one (that would let you write the file path in the bar and thus allow you to copy paths from Explorer to it), but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying! Add on small annoyances like Windows search by default trying to look into the contents of many files, thus making search needlessly slow and also things like it not supporting mounting remote directories over SFTP (which should get at least a bit of attention) instead of always having to use SMB or whatever, and you have a somewhat problematic daily experience. Of course, there are also things that it does better than some other systems/configurations, like having the whole recycle bin concept, with ctrl+Z allowing you to undo file deletions, file moves or even renaming files, which makes dealing with user error on your part more easy! Just checked on Linux Mint - the recycle bin works as you'd expect, but there is no ctrl+z to restore the last deleted file automatically. > Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably. About this, i'm also somewhat torn. The filesystem structure on most Linux distros also just feels weird, although it's for historical compatibility reasons (not quite as bad as Windows having two oddly named Program Files directories, but still). I doubt that we couldn't structure things in a more reasonable manner, than having all of the following for just executables, for example: /bin/ /sbin/ /usr/bin/ /usr/local/bin/ /usr/local/sbin/ In case anyone wants to learn more about these, here's the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard document, which is actually pretty well written: https://www.pathname.com/fhs/ https://www.pathname.com/fhs/ Throw in /opt and /usr/share and whatnot and it's a recipe for different bits of software out there using different configurations because of differing opinions about what would be suitable for their use cases. The same mess actually extends to what's in the /home directory - sure, in most cases you can back it up and restore it, but once again every piece of software will have its own opinions about how to structure its data, be it in a visible/hidden config file, a visible/hidden folder for the application itself, or something else. Of course, Windows also has a similar mess going on with Program Data and AppData folders, as well as Documents and whatnot, so Linux isn't the only problematic system here. In short, i think that all have their advantages and shortcomings, here's hoping that things improve in the following decade!
KronisLV 5y ago
> Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan Another commenter mentioned OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/ http://www.openoffice.org/) but i'd also like to suggest LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/) as a capable and reasonably compatible alternative to MS Office, which retain the old look of dropdown menus. If you don't have the need to support very particular features of Office, then it might just be suitable to retain your preferred way of navigating the UI of an office suite app - on my personal computers i have just LibreOffice (with which i finished my bachelor's and master's thesis), whereas on my work computer i have both LibreOffice and Word, for those few exceptions when the latter is necessary. That said, i can understand why many would also find the ribbon UI to be easy to navigate, should they get used to it. That's why some Office clones, like WPS Office (https://www.wps.com/office/linux/ https://www.wps.com/office/linux/) and FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/ https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) seem to copy it with varying degrees of success. That said, personally i like the open source nature of LibreOffice too and the file format itself not being proprietary.
- jgtrosh 5y ago
  Libre Office also offers an optional ribbon style interface
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    Oh yeah, totally forgot about it! In case anyone would like to try it out, it's under: View > User Interface > (pick one of the Tabbed options, there are quite a few) Now there's one more argument for open software - the developers caring enough to giving us that many options to support the preferences of many people without needlessly deprecating anything!
- tpxl 5y ago
  If I understand correctly, LibreOffice is a fork/successor of OpenOffice. Here's a comparison on the LibreOffice website: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/ https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffi.... It's a bit disingenuous though since it makes it seem OpenOffice hasn't had a release since 2014, even though last release was October 2021.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I agree that the grouping doesn't make much sense at all in most programs. It would have been nice to at least be able to reorder things like in classical UIs, which I also find superior from a usability perspective.
savrajsingh 5y ago
Windows 11 also got rid of the ribbon in windows file explorer
addicted 5y ago
I miss the ribbon every time I use LO. I do think the categorization takes a little getting used to but once you do it’s fairly trivial. It’s also important to recognize the horizontal categorizations within each ribbon, something that can easily be missed until you know about it.

randomsearch 5y ago

No UX designer worth their salt would ever say search wasn’t an essential part of most interfaces. It’s 101. Even I know that. Sounds like you just had bad UX designers, which fits the observed data.

cjbgkagh 5y ago
I've certainly met more bad ones than good ones. A lot of them consider themselves artists and with a focus on appearance. Search is a box you put text into, not much room for expression. Search can be hard to get right and they tend to lose control of it to the devs who can easily screw it up and sink their UX. Even Apple does a terrible job with search.

socialdemocrat 5y ago

You liked ribbons?! As a Mac user ribbons made me really happy I was not on Windows although they did bring that poison over to the Mac with their office apps. Occasionally I have to use windows and the abandonment of regular drop down menus and introduction of ribbons is really disorienting in my view. MS changes too much core UI. I like that Apple is more conservative and keep stuff that works. Keeping the menu bar but adding a search bar to it was a much better solution in my opinion. It allows us to use a well established UI paradigm while also making it easier to find well hidden entries. Hunting through stuff in the ribbon is not easy.

isaacremuant 5y ago
Ribbons were an excellent design pattern for new users. The problem is it disrupted many power users who reacted negatively. I think anything that changes nothing is more willing to have faithful users but changes can be good if done in a utilitarian way considering different types of users.
- criddell 5y ago
  Power users are using the keyboard and probably hide the ribbons.
cjbgkagh 5y ago
That’s why ribbon search would have helped a lot. Plus if fast enough people could use a shortcut to get to search and then quickly type a few characters to a function e.g. Meta S -> “pa” for paste, much faster than finding a tiny button and easier to remember than a combination of keys. Like the Jump feature in Winamp. If you forget the small subset of characters that give you what you want you can use the longer names. The results list would contain the key combos if you wanted to use that next time instead. While searching the Ribbon UI could show you which tab and button refers the currently selected search result item. It was really needed to bring it all together. And for power uses why not have customizable tool strips....

lozenge 5y ago

Jensen Harris' blog was deleted when Microsoft replaced their dev blogs platform, but it went into great detail on the creation of the Ribbon. As far as I can remember, search couldn't be ready in time for the initial release.

cjbgkagh 5y ago
That rings true. From memory there was a plug-in that added it later, and I asked why we didn’t release it and was told that if users were given the option it would subsume more and more functionality until it became unwieldy and difficult to use. Also since it would be cheap and flexible there would be a push to use search even when not ideal.

madeofpalk 5y ago

> Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them. How is this an indication of UI/UX (where UX is how things should work, but not implementing it) failures? It sounds like this one is purely on the development org for writing someone that has poor performance and/or not prioritising improving it.

cjbgkagh 5y ago
A slow UI is bad UX. UX should have pushed back in releasing a slow UI until the developer fixed it.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Maybe they did?
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    UX tends to have more power at MS than devs for exactly this reason so it is unlikely. Additionally it can still be bad UX even if it's not the fault of the UX designer.

mortenlarsen 5y ago

> Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. This reminds me of an experience with Windows 10 a few years ago. I tried to start cmd.exe and nothing happened. Tried a bunch of times more. Still nothing... I was connected to a WiFi network that allowed ping to the entire Internet but not TCP connections. Then I switched to a WiFi network that allowed TCP connections to the Internet and 20+ cmd.exe instances started all at once. I thought: "Wait, that can't be true", but it was reproducible. This makes me wonder if launching programs takes longer on a slow internet connection. I do not know if this still happens as I have only used Windows 10 on a handful of occasions since then.

staticelf 5y ago
I was recently on a boat with a bad connection. Searching in windows (11) doesn't seem to work well if that is the case. Even searching for local files, the response is just loading since it appears to wait for some request.
patmorgan23 5y ago
That's bonkers. Why wouldn't you write telememary to an on machine log/queue that can trickle out as needed and not impact the performance of the system.
- mortenlarsen 5y ago
  Maybe because they put their needs before yours?