Comment by asdajksah2123
9 days ago
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.