Comment by rkagerer
6 years ago
Me too! With the exception of Outlook, I stick with Office 2003. I'm so much faster and more productive with it.
The problem with the ribbon is I find myself constantly having to click back and forth between different tabs. It's annoying, and takes twice as many clicks to get things done. Microsoft lost sight of the purpose of a toolbar: to make commonly used functions ONE click away.
When the rest of the industry followed suit and emulated them, the result was a tragic loss of precious vertical pixel space for the content I actually cared about: whatever I was working on.
I also miss the elegant discoverability of classic menu bars. I loved being able to open a program and quickly become familiar with what tools are available.
They did a great job surfacing keyboard shortcuts. Hints were right there beside the menu items, subtly advertised every time you clicked them. You naturally learned the ones you used most. I worked alongside a younger guy for a few months who was blown away by how quickly I navigated around my PC and got work done, for many sequences using like 90% keyboard and 10% mouse.
Exactly. Modern UX seems to split everything into two categories: things that happen automatically, and things that take ten times as many inputs as they did two decades ago. For example, it's nice that modern Windows automatically switches between wifi networks. It's not nice that instead of being a checkbox on a settings menu, turning off the superfluous Lock Screen requires creating registry keys.
Menu bars are still alive and well on the Mac, but only as a design holdover from a previous era. Really appreciate how the menu bars on the Mac centralize all application functionality, while also surfacing keyboard shortcuts.
Would love to see menu bars make a return to the iPad and mobile, such as in this concept. You can really get a sense for how quickly a touch-based UI can be navigated using menus and toolbars: https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/12339911770803609...
> It's annoying, and takes twice as many clicks to get things done.
It's very strange that Microsoft does not care about this. It's very annoying to me as well.
I don't mind much the vertical space of the Ribbon, but the stupid back and forth between tabs is really annoying.