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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.
by 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 agoRibbons 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 agoPower users are using the keyboard and probably hide the ribbons.
- cjbgkagh 5y agoThat’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....