Microsoft Ribbon....general concensus?

yenoah

If I remember correctly, been a few years now but I'll try (getting old you understand), some of the conclusions we came to were as follows...

Microsoft do not (or did not) use end users at early prototyping stages. That is not to say that they do not use end users, indeed they have usability labs and all the bells and whistles but not using end users while prototyping is a major concern.

Also, the fact that they arrived at a situstion where they need to spend so much time and resources trying (over many years) to re-design the user interfaces is as a direct result of feature point (FP) marketing. This is basically a race to the bottom...."our latest version has 1000 dfeatures, 60% more than the nearest competitor"!!! - whereas Most people want to type a letter, format it, save it and print it.

Which leads to another usability staple, that of complexity hiding. Having a product that is friendly, intuitive and minimalist to newcomers but also has the ability to meet the demands of expert users. Here Microsoft feel the need to show all features to all users because they are worried that "people are not using all the great features of our products".

So yes, they do deploy some great design theories, but at the same time disregard others. One could argue that if Microsoft were truly user centric rather than market centric in their developement of Office, there might be two distinct flavours of Office, one simple productivity based platform for the 90% of users that use 10% of its features and are happy with that, and another complex version to suit the expert user whjo wants to pivot all over the shop, make html pages and write VB code.

p

yenoah wrote: »

One could argue that if Microsoft were truly user centric rather than market centric in their developement of Office, there might be two distinct flavours of Office, one simple productivity based platform for the 90% of users that use 10% of its features and are happy with that, and another complex version to suit the expert user whjo wants to pivot all over the shop, make html pages and write VB code.

If you read the blog, you'll find that your assumption is only partially true. Yes, most people only use 10% of Word (or Excel etc...) but that everyone uses a different 10%. The notion that there could be a 'basic' and 'pro' of Word is a myth.

yenoah

p wrote: »

If you read the blog, you'll find that your assumption is only partially true. Yes, most people only use 10% of Word (or Excel etc...) but that everyone uses a different 10%. The notion that there could be a 'basic' and 'pro' of Word is a myth.

While readng that blog is somewhat useful; When it comes to design appraisal, some might consider the value of independant sources.

fenris

A blog full of excuses by people who have gotten things so badly wrong is of little relevance except perhaps as a means of screening out their CVs. I don't know if it is pure denial in the form of cries of "nobody understands my genius" or just ass covering to attempt to justify their position.

Would you give them a job and if you did how long would yours last afterwards?

httpete

Can someone explain to me what is so elegant about the traditional way of doing user intefaces - having to click through multi level drop down menus for commands. And having toolbars stuffed full of little icons with no text description (excluding hovering for tooltips which is a pain in the hole). People complaining that novice users cant find things on the ribbon - at least with a Ribbon every command has a text description, seems like an easier learning curve than rows of little icons without descriptions.

I can see valid points in the criticism of the Ribbon but the traditional method was no masterpiece of UI design either.

I have visual studio 2010 open here at the moment and I have the default four toolbars showing. The only button I ever press out of all of them is the green triangle for Start Debugging. Maybe there are lots of commands on these toolbars that would save me having to use dropdowns but I'll never know because I am not bothered hoving over all of them trying to find commands, I just go with what I know and that is clicking a dropdown menu and navigating to a command. As I mentioned I have the default four toolbars open, there are actually about another 30+ toolbars available for display, all with zero visible text descriptions. How is that good UI?

Thats why I think toolbars are generally a waste of time - you have dozens of commands on display but you only know and use the obvious ones like Debug in VS and font-size/bold/font-color in Word.

I never really had an opinion on the Ribbon one way or another for the last few years until I used MS Access for the first time which meant learning an entirely new interface. And then I found that the Ribbon was a massive improvement in speeding up the time it takes to learn an application. It was just so efficient being able to see what every button does at a glance.

The only real downside to I see is the amount of space it takes up.

Malice

Httpete: Try pressing F5, then you won't have to click that green triangle at all .

BostonB

httpete wrote: »

Can someone explain to me what is so elegant about the traditional way of doing user intefaces - having to click through multi level drop down menus for commands. And having toolbars stuffed full of little icons with no text description (excluding hovering for tooltips which is a pain in the hole). People complaining that novice users cant find things on the ribbon - at least with a Ribbon every command has a text description, seems like an easier learning curve than rows of little icons without descriptions....

If I look at word there's still a whole bunch of icons with no labels. Usually the least used ones. The most obvious ones like paste have a text label. I truly wonder how many need to read that label.

If you like reading the text and buttons are meaningless then isn't that the same thing as a text menu. One click to get the menu, one click to get the ribbon.

Aswerty

I'm a big fan of the ribbon myself. It's not perfect but compared to the previous menu I must say I find it delightful. I'm looking at the ribbon at the minute and the only icons I see that don't have both a picture and text are on the home tab and that's the stuff you use most of the time (e.g. bolding, font size, etc). I also find the ribbon much more seamless to browse through than menus. You just have to move the mouse onto the ribbon and scroll to the tab you want and since the tabs and ribbon content are in parallel scanning through them is much handier. Also a lot of tasks are easier to do now because you can just go to the tab (e.g. Review or Design) and now your working with all the tools you need to do the job at hand as opposed to having to go back into a drop down menu for each thing you want to do.

The main benefit of it I find is that nested menus have been eliminated from the toolbar. I find them a complete nightmare and I still mess up (i.e. not move perpendicular enough and the menu collapses) using them opening programs from the start menu. Though the ribbon's biggest problem is when you move from the home tab (or whatever one you regularly use) to another tab you then have to move back when you're done. I'd agree that there quite a lot of the improvements made could have also just been made to the drop down menus. An example being properly modularising the menus so that functionality is grouped intuitively.

Also I primarily do software development and I use office products the whole time. How are most software devs not Office users also?

BostonB

I don't see how clicking once to get a different tab is different to clicking once to get a menu. They I'll happily concede that if all you need is on the ribbon, then that would be easier then having to keep going to a menu. But if I was doing something that often I'd add a toolbar for it. Or at least I used to.

BTW for all word users. Learn how to use Styles properly its the key to using word properly.

BostonB

Aswerty wrote: »

...Also I primarily do software development and I use office products the whole time. How are most software devs not Office users also?

I used office more in business analyst roles. In development I'm rarely working with office documents, probably email/outlook is the one I use most often. Even then I'm just managing email rather than projects, or schedules. For Word, Excel or Access I might use a lot more functionality than the average user. But only for very small periods of time. I could go a week or two without opening any of them.

It probably depends on how your company is organised. We have other people to work on scheduling. A separate helpdesk\bug fixing tracking application. I'd say the main use of Office apps for developers where I am is as conversion tools, or temp storage of data, or simply to test something.

Ludo

Aswerty wrote: »

Also I primarily do software development and I use office products the whole time. How are most software devs not Office users also?

As a developer I mainly use it for reading docs rather then editing them. All the docs I now write are done in Google Docs...so much better for team collaboration (obviously not suitable for all documents though for various reasons).