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The article also fails to mention the toolbar gore that was easily possible with Word: https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-thousand-icons/

The article also fails to mention the toolbar gore that was easily possible with Word: https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-thousand-icons/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-th... That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.

dingaling 3y ago
I can't see how the Ribbon is any better than hunt-and-peck menus. If you can't see what you want on the current Ribbon view you have to click along the various arbitrary Ribbontabs until you find it. But wait, some of them have subsidiary Ribbontabtabs!
- kiawe_fire 3y ago
  One of the many paradoxes that I’ve found (but never figured a reason for) is why I’m able to quickly memorize and find my way to common functions via text-based toolbar menus, but to this day, I STILL have to click through each ribbon menu multiple times, study each icon and struggle to read each label, before finding what I want. Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I think this has to do with the varying designs of each ribbon. Menus and their submenus are more like an index, closely following a particular pattern. Ribbons are more like grocery store layouts with variations that shift around and sometimes seem to not follow any rhyme or reason. It's not too surprising that the former of the two is more easily memorized.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    Toolbars have text labels. Ribbons have a bunch of small shitty icons on a flat UI background. I can memorize toolbars because it's a set of motions, words, and visual cues. With a Ribbon UI it's a mad search for what I want, hovering over dumb icons to see a label, and repeating that process until I find something. The damn search and rescue process totally blows away my working memory and I won't remember where the button is next time I need it.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    One possibility is Mnemonics. You were memorizing the important letters in a text-based menu. Possibly even the keyboard shortcut mnemonics themselves. That's said to be one of the biggest losses in Windows user experience that keyboard mnemonics used to be highlighted at all times with an underline in text menus and then Windows UX switched to only highlighting them when Alt was pressed. It's something I think about a lot with the Ribbon because it has some really good keyboard mnemonics in Office applications, but mostly only Power Users think to press the Alt button to let them "bubble in" on the Ribbon. The keyboard mnemonic bubbles make great landmarks, and I think that remains one of the reasons I rather like the Ribbon (as a power user) that a lot of people never discover. (In part because I was there a million years ago when Word first lost the underlines and was used to even then pressing Alt on its own just to see them so that behavior carried over to the Ribbon just fine for me, luckily enough.)
  - syntheweave 3y ago
    Motion patterns in toolbars are strict: you have to start at the top and drill down. This seems like a hindrance, but it means that the motions develop into stronger muscle memory. If you know the names of what you are looking for, you can usually develop the entire shortcut pattern through everyday use, without setting aside practice time(as in a setup like vim or emacs, where you aren't given sufficient prompting to discover and train new interactions automatically). Ribbons surface more elements to browse in a freeform context, which is correct if you need to discover features...but also conflicts with the goal of a toolbar to be a thin layer over the shortcuts.
  - lmm 3y ago
    Text is more usable than icons. That's one of the few clear-cut results from scientific UX research.
  - wolpoli 3y ago
    One reason could be that the ribbon resizes/hides/collapses buttons depending on the size of the Window. I resizes my word/excel window as I work and it's an ordeal to find the option I want.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    I'm on the same boat. This and the hidden ribbons completely ruin the thing for me. But I do tend to like megamenus on other applications, so the problem is probably office, not the ribbons.
- zamalek 3y ago
  The primary ribbon is supposed to be equivalent to the original default toolbar set, showing the most common options for the current context. The remaining tabs contain what would have been in menus and toolbars. This means that you would have been hunting down options in menus and submenus anyway. In that regard it's no worse than before. There is a really robust search area, at least as implemented in Office. It will show you where the button is on which ribbontab (at least last I used Office, which was years ago). So we have: * Is actually no worse than the existing solution. * Contains a tool to address limitations carried over from the existing solution. Correctly implemented ribbons are strictly superior to prior interfaces (ignoring any styling approaches, such as flat UI). The only issue with them is that cheese has been moved, and people are upset about that.
  - sirsinsalot 3y ago
    I'm not sure your last claim is true, or at least there's no citations. I never used Word until recently, or any wysiwyg Word processor really. The ribbon is just confusing. It so happens many of the functions I use are not surfaced, so I have to remember which tiny expando angle to click and that a function I use often is demoted in a ribbon to a smaller icon. It is pain. Some functions are more visible and surfaced at the expense of added friction in the others. Which functions are surfaced is guess work and statistics. Outliers suffer. The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level. I could customise the ribbon, but then when I Google how to do something, my menus don't match the examples! Madness
    - zamalek 3y ago
      > The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level. The ribbon is nothing more than a menu laid out in a grid, rather than a list. The tool I'm referring to is the search box. It should be on the window chrome, alongside the ribbon tabs. You can find verification of that claim in your copy of Word, or basically any screenshot of it. The source is that it exists.
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
- tiltowait 3y ago
  It's been a long time since I used Office, but what drove me nuts about the ribbon of that era (not sure if it's still a thing; hopefully not!) is that the "home" ribbon elements weren't replicated in their respective logical tabs (i.e. the home ribbon wasn't just a shortcut palette). Drove me nuts trying to find something when I didn't realize some designer at Microsoft thought the function I was looking for was "essential" and thus deserved to be enshrined in the home tab.
  - sirsinsalot 3y ago
    Sadly it is still a thing and only gets worse with each iteration. Why is insert cross reference smaller than inserting a bookmark or hyperlink? Who knows!
jwells89 3y ago
I'd argue that toolbar gore is only really a problem if the user is stretching the intended use of toolbars, which is to elevate a handful of more important or frequently used functions to the top level of the UI. Of course they're going to break down if the user puts everything on them. I think the best fix for this problem is to have different sets of toolbars for different tasks, a sort of modality. Ribbons achieve this, but but they also bring odd bits of seemingly arbitrary UI design that can't be changed, like the gigantic paste button in Word's Home ribbon which can't be removed without removing the whole control group. The more uniform/standardized nature of the old toolbars is preferable in my eyes.
dmccarty 3y ago
That was one of the ostensible reasons, although the real driver likely had more to do with commercial than technical reasons. There were probably some AOL types who accidentally opened toolbars and couldn't figure out how to close them. But no one who knew how to use Word launched two dozen toolbars as in that infamous image. Keep in mind toolbars (plural) arose from a single bar of tools that was limited with the width of the screen. Someone who knows more than me may want to comment, but my guess was that product groups didn't like seeing their features buried in three layers of flyout menus and used by no one. (Tools...Options...) At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started. The best explanation of the ribbon I can remember comes from Jensen Harris's old blog[1]. Unfortunately much of his goals and designs were dropped to make the original ship date, leaving the ribbon the mess that it was, and not much better today imho. The biggest loss was for keyboard users, for whom correctly chorded toolbar mnemonics (win32 parlance: accelerator keys) were dropped for nonsensical ribbon chords where the keyboard letter had almost nothing to do with the desired feature. And to add insult to injury, menu operations that used to happen in milliseconds took nearly full seconds to do the same thing on capable machines of the time (and even today). [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ (unfortunately as with all old blogs, sans images. Raymond Chen was right once again)
- toast0 3y ago
  > At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started. I'm pretty sure Office had customizable toolbars, so yes, every menu item should be a toolbar item, but it's unlikely that anyone actually wants them all enabled. And yeah, customizing toolbars is pretty far up the learning curve; so I understand the motivation for the Ribbon, but I managed to stop using office before I had to experience it, so I don't know how well it actually worked.
housemusicfan 3y ago
> That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons. The ribbon is, and continues to be, garbage. Most days I have to resort to the "Search" function in Office to locate a feature for which I clearly remember the exact menu location from 25 years ago, yet I'll be god damned if I could find it in the ribbon after over 10 minutes of searching.
izacus 3y ago
Yeah, customizability of toolbars to YOUR comfort is also something the modern UX "experts" cannot even fathom. Why would ANYONE of billion of worlds people have different preferences than what they served?!

dingaling 3y ago

I can't see how the Ribbon is any better than hunt-and-peck menus. If you can't see what you want on the current Ribbon view you have to click along the various arbitrary Ribbontabs until you find it. But wait, some of them have subsidiary Ribbontabtabs!

kiawe_fire 3y ago
One of the many paradoxes that I’ve found (but never figured a reason for) is why I’m able to quickly memorize and find my way to common functions via text-based toolbar menus, but to this day, I STILL have to click through each ribbon menu multiple times, study each icon and struggle to read each label, before finding what I want. Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I think this has to do with the varying designs of each ribbon. Menus and their submenus are more like an index, closely following a particular pattern. Ribbons are more like grocery store layouts with variations that shift around and sometimes seem to not follow any rhyme or reason. It's not too surprising that the former of the two is more easily memorized.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Toolbars have text labels. Ribbons have a bunch of small shitty icons on a flat UI background. I can memorize toolbars because it's a set of motions, words, and visual cues. With a Ribbon UI it's a mad search for what I want, hovering over dumb icons to see a label, and repeating that process until I find something. The damn search and rescue process totally blows away my working memory and I won't remember where the button is next time I need it.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  One possibility is Mnemonics. You were memorizing the important letters in a text-based menu. Possibly even the keyboard shortcut mnemonics themselves. That's said to be one of the biggest losses in Windows user experience that keyboard mnemonics used to be highlighted at all times with an underline in text menus and then Windows UX switched to only highlighting them when Alt was pressed. It's something I think about a lot with the Ribbon because it has some really good keyboard mnemonics in Office applications, but mostly only Power Users think to press the Alt button to let them "bubble in" on the Ribbon. The keyboard mnemonic bubbles make great landmarks, and I think that remains one of the reasons I rather like the Ribbon (as a power user) that a lot of people never discover. (In part because I was there a million years ago when Word first lost the underlines and was used to even then pressing Alt on its own just to see them so that behavior carried over to the Ribbon just fine for me, luckily enough.)
- syntheweave 3y ago
  Motion patterns in toolbars are strict: you have to start at the top and drill down. This seems like a hindrance, but it means that the motions develop into stronger muscle memory. If you know the names of what you are looking for, you can usually develop the entire shortcut pattern through everyday use, without setting aside practice time(as in a setup like vim or emacs, where you aren't given sufficient prompting to discover and train new interactions automatically). Ribbons surface more elements to browse in a freeform context, which is correct if you need to discover features...but also conflicts with the goal of a toolbar to be a thin layer over the shortcuts.
- lmm 3y ago
  Text is more usable than icons. That's one of the few clear-cut results from scientific UX research.
- wolpoli 3y ago
  One reason could be that the ribbon resizes/hides/collapses buttons depending on the size of the Window. I resizes my word/excel window as I work and it's an ordeal to find the option I want.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  I'm on the same boat. This and the hidden ribbons completely ruin the thing for me. But I do tend to like megamenus on other applications, so the problem is probably office, not the ribbons.
zamalek 3y ago
The primary ribbon is supposed to be equivalent to the original default toolbar set, showing the most common options for the current context. The remaining tabs contain what would have been in menus and toolbars. This means that you would have been hunting down options in menus and submenus anyway. In that regard it's no worse than before. There is a really robust search area, at least as implemented in Office. It will show you where the button is on which ribbontab (at least last I used Office, which was years ago). So we have: * Is actually no worse than the existing solution. * Contains a tool to address limitations carried over from the existing solution. Correctly implemented ribbons are strictly superior to prior interfaces (ignoring any styling approaches, such as flat UI). The only issue with them is that cheese has been moved, and people are upset about that.
- sirsinsalot 3y ago
  I'm not sure your last claim is true, or at least there's no citations. I never used Word until recently, or any wysiwyg Word processor really. The ribbon is just confusing. It so happens many of the functions I use are not surfaced, so I have to remember which tiny expando angle to click and that a function I use often is demoted in a ribbon to a smaller icon. It is pain. Some functions are more visible and surfaced at the expense of added friction in the others. Which functions are surfaced is guess work and statistics. Outliers suffer. The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level. I could customise the ribbon, but then when I Google how to do something, my menus don't match the examples! Madness
  - zamalek 3y ago
    > The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level. The ribbon is nothing more than a menu laid out in a grid, rather than a list. The tool I'm referring to is the search box. It should be on the window chrome, alongside the ribbon tabs. You can find verification of that claim in your copy of Word, or basically any screenshot of it. The source is that it exists.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
tiltowait 3y ago
It's been a long time since I used Office, but what drove me nuts about the ribbon of that era (not sure if it's still a thing; hopefully not!) is that the "home" ribbon elements weren't replicated in their respective logical tabs (i.e. the home ribbon wasn't just a shortcut palette). Drove me nuts trying to find something when I didn't realize some designer at Microsoft thought the function I was looking for was "essential" and thus deserved to be enshrined in the home tab.
- sirsinsalot 3y ago
  Sadly it is still a thing and only gets worse with each iteration. Why is insert cross reference smaller than inserting a bookmark or hyperlink? Who knows!

jwells89 3y ago

I'd argue that toolbar gore is only really a problem if the user is stretching the intended use of toolbars, which is to elevate a handful of more important or frequently used functions to the top level of the UI. Of course they're going to break down if the user puts everything on them. I think the best fix for this problem is to have different sets of toolbars for different tasks, a sort of modality. Ribbons achieve this, but but they also bring odd bits of seemingly arbitrary UI design that can't be changed, like the gigantic paste button in Word's Home ribbon which can't be removed without removing the whole control group. The more uniform/standardized nature of the old toolbars is preferable in my eyes.

dmccarty 3y ago

That was one of the ostensible reasons, although the real driver likely had more to do with commercial than technical reasons. There were probably some AOL types who accidentally opened toolbars and couldn't figure out how to close them. But no one who knew how to use Word launched two dozen toolbars as in that infamous image. Keep in mind toolbars (plural) arose from a single bar of tools that was limited with the width of the screen. Someone who knows more than me may want to comment, but my guess was that product groups didn't like seeing their features buried in three layers of flyout menus and used by no one. (Tools...Options...) At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started. The best explanation of the ribbon I can remember comes from Jensen Harris's old blog[1]. Unfortunately much of his goals and designs were dropped to make the original ship date, leaving the ribbon the mess that it was, and not much better today imho. The biggest loss was for keyboard users, for whom correctly chorded toolbar mnemonics (win32 parlance: accelerator keys) were dropped for nonsensical ribbon chords where the keyboard letter had almost nothing to do with the desired feature. And to add insult to injury, menu operations that used to happen in milliseconds took nearly full seconds to do the same thing on capable machines of the time (and even today). [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ (unfortunately as with all old blogs, sans images. Raymond Chen was right once again)

toast0 3y ago
> At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started. I'm pretty sure Office had customizable toolbars, so yes, every menu item should be a toolbar item, but it's unlikely that anyone actually wants them all enabled. And yeah, customizing toolbars is pretty far up the learning curve; so I understand the motivation for the Ribbon, but I managed to stop using office before I had to experience it, so I don't know how well it actually worked.

housemusicfan 3y ago

> That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons. The ribbon is, and continues to be, garbage. Most days I have to resort to the "Search" function in Office to locate a feature for which I clearly remember the exact menu location from 25 years ago, yet I'll be god damned if I could find it in the ribbon after over 10 minutes of searching.

izacus 3y ago

Yeah, customizability of toolbars to YOUR comfort is also something the modern UX "experts" cannot even fathom. Why would ANYONE of billion of worlds people have different preferences than what they served?!