Comment by raggi
9 days ago
I think it ended at the first "ribbon" UI, which was in the 2003 era, but not all products ate the dirt at once.
9 days ago
I think it ended at the first "ribbon" UI, which was in the 2003 era, but not all products ate the dirt at once.
Yeah the ribbon drove me to LibreOffice and Google Docs and I haven’t been back.
Windows 2000 Pro was the peak of the Windows UX. They could not leave well enough alone.
The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.
The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
Especially after they added the ability to minimize, expand on hover, or keep expanded (originally this was the only option), the ribbon has been a great addition.
But then they also had to go ahead and dump it in places where it had no reason to be, such as Windows Explorer.
> The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
To me this is the exact use case where it fails. I find it way harder to parse as it's visually intense (tons of icons, buttons of various sizes, those little arrows that are sometimes in group corners...).
Office 2003 had menus that were at most 20-25 entries long with icons that were just the right size to hint what the entries are about, yet not get in the way. The ribbon in Office 2007 (Word, for example) has several tabs full of icons stretching the entire window width or even more. Mnemonics were also made impractical as they dynamically bind to the buttons of the currently visible tab instead of the actions themselves.
> The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.
This is also what I hear about GNOME. "OK, yes, GNOME 3.x was bad, but by GNOME 40 it's fine."
No, it's not. None of my core objections have been fixed.
Both ribbons and GNOME are every bit as bad as they were in the first release, nearly 20 years ago.
I know nothing of your objections, so this is more about how I think of mine and how they relate to these kinds of changes.
Being a power users is difficult, I think the best way to do software is to make it APL complicated and only educate one guy in it. The way power users in Excel/Emacs/Accounting software out perform user friendly stuff is amazing. But somethings are meant for the masses, e.g. opening a file.
Dumbing down or magification of interfaces was needed for many other reasons. Gnome and Ribbon were necessary changes IMO, what we had was never going to improve. Of course I wish there was elements that could be reused elsewhere, but that is a pipedream of Smalltalk proportions.
I am now stuck with windows at work, and it is a horrible experience. Everything is so needlessly complicated. In the same way Linux is. I do believe Gnome did manage to improve things, at least when I look at children using Mac, Linux and Windows as power users. My view is that the complexity of Linux is still a little bit easier to understand, but that is just because of a long history and easy abstractions.
I think core objections are often not compatible with products that need to fit and be produced for many people. I do software that is used once by many this has changed my view if GUIs for ever, especially in regards to desktops.
Close to 20 years later, people still complain about the ribbon. (1)
I think that says something about it.
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1. And not just "grumble, grumble... get off my lawn..." Many of its controls are at best obscure. It hides many of them away. It makes them awkward to reach.
Many new users seem as clueless, or even more so, than pre-existing customers who experienced the rug pull. At least pre-ribbon users knew there was certain functionality that they just wanted to find.
(And I still remember how MS concurrently f-cked with Excel shortcut keys. Or seemed to have, when I next picked Excel up after a couple year hiatus from being a power user.)
> The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.
It is a terrible choice. Always have to search for items.
For me peak UX was before Ribbon. Just menus and customizable toolbars. Didn't need nothing more to be productive enough. Nowadays I can hardly use Office suite, its feature discoverability essentially zero for me.
I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
> I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
1. I don't need to find stuff.
I knew where stuff is.
2. I read text. I only need menus. I don't need toolbars etc. and so I turn them all off.
I cannot read icons. I have to guess. It's like searching for 3 things I need in an unfamiliar supermarket.
3. Menus are very space efficient.
Ribbons hog precious vertical space. This is doubly disastrous on widescreens.
4. I am a keyboard user.
I use keys to navigate menus. It's much faster than aiming at targets with the mouse and I don't need to look. The navigation keys don't work any more.
Ribbons help those who don't know what they are doing and do not care about speed and efficiency.
They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
> They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
The problem is, most users are utterly braindead, they barely manage to type at speed instead of pecking at single keys. The astonishment I've gotten in some places for literally nothing more than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is more than enough proof.
That's also IMHO a large portion of why Linux never really took off on desktop. UX/UI people are rare enough to begin with, most of them don't work on FOSS in their free time, and so development is primarily done by nerds for nerds. That's great if you already know something about the application - but usually the learning curve is so steep that most users frustratedly give up. And documentation is either not existing, incomplete or horribly outdated, and StackOverflow etc. are even worse.
The exception is Blender. They got some serious money IIRC, cleaned up their act, and now there's a headline of some movie or game using Blender every few weeks.
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Just hide the ribbon.
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My big problem with it is that it’s stateful. A menu or toolbar admits muscle memory - since you get used to where a certain button or option is and you can find it easily. With ribbons you need to know if you’re in the right submenu first.
Though personally, I’m increasingly delighted by the quicksilver - style palette / action tools that vscode and IntelliJ use for infrequently used options. Just hit the hotkey and type, and the option you want appears under the enter key.
It's not easily customizable and it takes more space, not much to understand
I'm not sure it takes more space than a menu and toolbar, but regardless, monitors are a LOT larger now than in 2003 so...
Frankly, I'm motivated sure customizing is a win either. I fo a lot of remote support and it's nice to have a consistent interface.
Personally I find it faster than menus, and easier to find things I seldom use.
But I appreciate it's a personal taste thing, and some older folks prefer older interfaces.
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Those of us working in jobs use the same couple of functions in our office products. We don't really go and find features.
> I think it ended at the first "ribbon" UI, which was in the 2003 era,
Nah. 2007 era.
Office 2007 introduced the ribbon to the main apps: Word, Excel, I think Powerpoint. The next version it was added to Outlook and Access, IIRC.
I still use Word 2003 because it's the last pre-Ribbon version.
I don't know quite when it started to happen, but changing and/or eliminating the default Office keyboard shortcuts in the last few iterations has really irked me.