Microsoft Ribbon....general concensus?

httpete

So what is the general consensus on using the Ribbon in a Windows application user interface? I like it myself but before I put it in one of my own applications I would like to know do other people like, hate it, or are indifferent to it.

Malice

There's not really much point asking developers what they think of it. Given that devs are generally far more adept at using computers than the average person at whom the ribbon is aimed, you're probably just going to get a chorus of dislike.

For the record I don't like it .

httpete

Malice wrote: »

There's not really much point asking developers what they think of it. Given that devs are generally far more adept at using computers than the average person at whom the ribbon is aimed, you're probably just going to get a chorus of dislike.

For the record I don't like it .

Hehe, only developers here alright but maybe some of them have an idea of how the Ribbon has gone down with the general public.

Colonel Panic

A lot of our users find them confusing but the market we develop for isnt known for being tech savvy. They seem to be here to stay though, with each version of Windows introducing a ribbon for yet another component.

yenoah

In terms of usability and interaction design, the ribbon fails. It fails basic theory such as Normans heuristics, Fitz law etc. In terms of every day use and common sense, it also fails.

I have been forcing myself to use the MS Office Ribbons for four years now. I still cannot navigate my applications properly and sometime spend 5 minutes trying to figure out where or how to do something before resorting to google over the MS help system.

For every reason in the book, ribbons are a bad idea!

conor.hogan.2

It may be bad but people are used to it, which is a big deal.

fenris

its rubbish, I see users who are almost tech illiterate trying to memorise hotkeys rather than faffing about throught all the dross on the ribbon

yenoah

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

It may be bad but people are used to it, which is a big deal.

As a usability person, I have to report that people are "using" it, but almost no one is "used" to it. People are using it because they more or less have to.

fenris

it was change for changes sake, prob a pet project of some PHBs idiot child. you lose screen real estate for no goain in usability, I have seen people prefering to struggle on with old laptops rather than get a new one as there will be the "new" ribon version of office onboard.

httpete

yenoah wrote: »

As a usability person, I have to report that people are "using" it, but almost no one is "used" to it. People are using it because they more or less have to.

Yea from what Ive read it seems alot of people are either indifferent to it or they really dislike it. Doesnt seem to be many people who love it.

fenris wrote: »

it was change for changes sake, prob a pet project of some PHBs idiot child. you lose screen real estate for no goain in usability, I have seen people prefering to struggle on with old laptops rather than get a new one as there will be the "new" ribon version of office onboard.

What I like about the Ribbon is that all the command buttons come with a text description so you know what everything does at a glance. I remember before the Ribbon you would would have toolbars jammed with little buttons with no text description so you didnt know what they did (without hovering over them). So you would end up just using the commands from the dropdown menus from the menubar.

I like Microsoft's Network Monitor application's UI, text descriptons beside all the commands without a big eyesore ribbon. I think this might be the route I take.

Malice

fenris wrote: »

its rubbish, I see users who are almost tech illiterate trying to memorise hotkeys rather than faffing about throught all the dross on the ribbon

I might be misunderstanding your point but isn't memorising hotkeys a good idea?

fenris

Hotkeys are great when you know what you are at, but the fact that even casual users feel forced to use them because the primary GUI is so badly borked as to be practically unusable. When you hear comments like "this reminds me of Wordperfect, except this is slower and harder to use" (wordperfect from the pre-mouse era), you get the message that all is not good!

The main achievement of the ribbon is that people don't seem to get used to it, they just get increasingly irritated by it, ribbon is the rebecca black of the GUI world!

stevenmu

It looks like I'm very much in the minority here, but I love the ribbon. And I think it's a massive improvement on the old menu/toolbar systems.

In my experience, most of the people I've come across who didn't like it, sisn't like it simply because they don't like change. They knew where the tools they needed were in Office, and while for the most part they understood very little of what they were doing, they had memorised a series of clicks and button presses that would do what they want. Suddenly that had changed and they didn't want to memorise a new set of clicks and button presses.

But, with a little encouragement to explore the ribbon and try it out, I've found most people take to it quite well. It's far more intuitive to use, and much easier to discover new features and functionality. People using it understand what they're doing much better, they look for options/features in areas/groups dedicated to related funtionality, rather than memorising to pick the 3rd one, then the 2nd one, then the 4th one. It's far quicker to use, it's much easier to find what you want, and with the most commonly used items being larger and to the left. It's vastly superior for giving context sensitive options. In particular for a new application which people are not used to, it's much much easier to discover what's available, compared to having to search through layers of hierarchical menus.

I can't think of a single way in which menu/toolbars were better. Tbh I suspect even techies who don't like it feel that way out of a resistance to change.

In terms of usability and interaction design, the ribbon fails. It fails basic theory such as Normans heuristics, Fitz law etc. In terms of every day use and common sense, it also fails.

I'd be interested to hear specific ways you think it fails those principles?

yenoah

Assuming you are familiar with usability theory, I'll recount some real world experiences that I have encountered

Recognition rather than recall
A lecturer of mine spent 10 minutes trying to figure out where the print setup dialog had gone in Word. Envoking the above principle and common sense, most people assume its under the view tab. I think they have improved this in the 2010 version.

Flexibility and efficiency of use
I still cant figure how to view/filter by "unread" mail in Outlook

Recognition rather than recall
I did google how to view/filter by "unread" mail in Outlook but have since forgotten and the ribbon does not help me remember

efficiency of use
Incredible amount of screen real estate taken by ribbons, especially on poor productibvity screen resolutions such as many 15" laptops these days

Fittz law
(basically measures the time taken to get a pointer from A to a target given factors such as distance, size of target etc)
Look at the format icons under Home tab in word

I have read a few papers that list better examples, Im just thinking on the hoof here.

fenris

stevenmu wrote: »

But, with a little encouragement to explore the ribbon and try it out, I've found most people take to it quite well. It's far more intuitive to use, and much easier to discover new features and functionality. People using it understand what they're doing much better, they look for options/features in areas/groups dedicated to related funtionality, rather than memorising to pick the 3rd one, then the 2nd one, then the 4th one. It's far quicker to use, it's much easier to find what you want, and with the most commonly used items being larger and to the left. It's vastly superior for giving context sensitive options. In particular for a new application which people are not used to, it's much much easier to discover what's available, compared to having to search through layers of hierarchical menus.

lol - sounds like you have put a bit of ego on the deployment of a ribbon interface and need validation of the decision or are a very new MS employee.

People use systems to do a job not for the love the system, GUIs are tools no more no less.
What ribbon has done is take a tool that fulfilled its function well in terms of enabling people to carry out their tasks and replaced it with a tool that has to be circumvented in order to approach the effectiveness and efficiency of the previous tool.
It is like taking away a soup spoon and giving back a fisher price fork all the pointy bits rounded off. Yes you can still drink your soup, it just takes longer and is increasingly irritating as you know a spoon exists and the time spent messing could be better spent doing something productive.

Ribbon was simply MS attempt to avoid the Morris Minor effect on a mature product, driving "upgrades" and training.

"Ribbon Rage" seems to be most prevalant among laptop excel users where the number of clicks needed for even basic common tasks is excessive and the screen clutter is frustrating to say the least.

The fact that there is a thriving market in addons to fix the MS office interface is very telling.

p

Man - there's a lot of rubbish being spoken about on this thread. To the original poster, the Ribbon is by and large a good UI model. It's great for Office, and apps that are very large and complex with a lot of tasks. What it's not good for is smaller apps with less tasks. An example of a a dubious use of the Ribbon is in the version of Wordpad that shipped with Windows 7. So, it's not a catchall solution by any means.

Most people who complain about the Ribbon a) have no clue what designing software the size of MS Office is like and b) do not understand the constraints and unique problems that microsoft were trying to solve.

For anyone who's interested in actually reading about the rationale behind te Ribbon, read this series of articles.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_3f00_/default.aspx

yenoah wrote: »

In terms of usability and interaction design, the ribbon fails. It fails basic theory such as Normans heuristics, Fitz law etc. In terms of every day use and common sense, it also fails.

To be honest, it's hard for me to take your opinion seriously, when you don't even know how to spell Fitts's law correctly. The Ribbon doesn't fail those heuristics at all. The Ribbon is far from perfect, but most designers say it's a good solution to an incredibly difficult problem.

fenris wrote: »

it was change for changes sake, prob a pet project of some PHBs idiot child. you lose screen real estate for no goain in usability, I have seen people prefering to struggle on with old laptops rather than get a new one as there will be the "new" ribon version of office onboard.

You don't lose much screen real estate at all. This is a myth:

fenris wrote: »

The fact that there is a thriving market in addons to fix the MS office interface is very telling.

That doesn't really tell us anything. Less than 5% of users change any settings in office at all - so while there may be a market for it, it's small in terms of overall usage of the product.

stevenmu

fenris wrote: »

lol - sounds like you have put a bit of ego on the deployment of a ribbon interface and need validation of the decision or are a very new MS employee.

Lol, neither. I don't work for MS, and I've only used the ribbon in a project once that I can think of. That was an Office 2007 extension project so was destined to use the ribbon from the start so no need to justify it, though I do think the ribbon worked better than toolbars would have.

"Ribbon Rage" seems to be most prevalant among laptop excel users where the number of clicks needed for even basic common tasks is excessive and the screen clutter is frustrating to say the least.

If it's minimised down it takes up pretty much the same amount of screen space as a standard menu (and less than menu + toolbars).

stevenmu

yenoah wrote: »

Assuming you are familiar with usability theory, I'll recount some real world experiences that I have encountered

Recognition rather than recall
A lecturer of mine spent 10 minutes trying to figure out where the print setup dialog had gone in Word. Envoking the above principle and common sense, most people assume its under the view tab. I think they have improved this in the 2010 version.

Flexibility and efficiency of use
I still cant figure how to view/filter by "unread" mail in Outlook

Recognition rather than recall
I did google how to view/filter by "unread" mail in Outlook but have since forgotten and the ribbon does not help me remember

efficiency of use
Incredible amount of screen real estate taken by ribbons, especially on poor productibvity screen resolutions such as many 15" laptops these days

Fittz law
(basically measures the time taken to get a pointer from A to a target given factors such as distance, size of target etc)
Look at the format icons under Home tab in word

I have read a few papers that list better examples, Im just thinking on the hoof here.

I do know a little about usability theory at a basic level, I wouldn't be an expert by any means. But the stuff I do know is partyly why I like the ribbon, I think it looks good, and follows good usability guidelines.

The print functionality was a bit of a disaster by MS, it has 'improved' in 2010, it's now back under "File" which is where people 'remember' it to be. The print options should (IMHO) be available directly on the ribbon, either under a print tab, or prominently on the home tab. It's easily possible to edit the ribbon and make the print functionality more prominent. It could be argued that you shouldn't need to customise the ribbon, but that's getting into arguing more about what specific items are included on the ribbon rather than how good a UI it is. I would point out that they could just as easily put Print in a stupid place with menus and toolbars, and in fact everyone knew it was under "File" through recollection not recognition. As a UI paradigm I'd argue that the ribbon works better, in particular for finding things through recognition rather than recollection. Just they put Print in a stupid place.

The same kind of applies to the unread mail in outlook, it's incorporated into the search functionality (which IMO makes sense, you want to search for all unread mails). The problem is that the search tab is context sensitive only appearing when you click into the search box. Really something as important as search should be visible all of the time (and if it was I'd bet you'd find those unread mails in no time ). Again I think that's a poor decision on what was included by default on the ribbon, rather than a weakness of the ribbon as a paradigm.

The screen real estate issue can be overcome by minimising the ribbon. In general I don't like doing this, it's a backward step IMO making it more old style menu like, but it's handy on smaller screens like laptops/netbooks etc.

And I think Fittz law (Fitts's law?) is an area where the ribbon as a paradigm really shines. First of all it takes all the functionality out from behind drop down menus, which require lots of click-move-click etc, and how often have you tried to pull out a submenu only to click on the wrong one. Compared to standard toolbars I think the ribbon wins out hugely. The ribbon buttons can be different sizes, allowing the most important commonly used funtionality to be large easy to hit buttons. Buttons (and other controls such as drop downs) can be arranged and stacked in any number of different ways. The formatting controls in Word for example put the font, size, bold/italic, colour and effects controls all within a very small area. It's pretty common to select some text, then change the font, size, strenght and colour all in one and now they're arranged in a neat little box all next to each other. It could be argued that they should all be big prominent buttons, and they can be with customisation, but that's really a specific content choice, IMO the ribbon as a paradigm is still sound.

BostonB

p wrote: »

... Ribbon is by and large a good UI model. It's great for Office, and apps that are very large and complex with a lot of tasks. What it's not good for is smaller apps with less tasks. ...



That doesn't really tell us anything. Less than 5% of users change any settings in office at all ....

Isn't that the problem right there. Most users use very little of Office. So the ribbon is therefore only optimal for 5% of users.

I'm not really a fan off the ribbon, especially not in 2007 and in 2010 they seem to have reverted back to more of the older UI, while not abandoning the ribbon, its much less uncompromising than the one in 2007. The've replaced the Orb with a good old file menu. If that's not an proof of failure I dunno what is. 2010 is also better because it has better features. So I think the idea that the ribbon is better, is a bit misleading. Its not better. Its been redesigned, much closer to a tradition menu system.

While I'm a developer, and have done large VBA/GUI projects in the past, in general I don't use office that much, I'd only use about 5% of the office functionality, even if I'm aware of much more of it. I can find things much better in 2010 than 2007. When even after a few years using it, I was still hunting for features. I'm more efficient in office 2010 than 2007, but that's mainly because it has better features.

In my experience none of these menu systems are as efficient as an old text based system on a mainframe or vax etc. Once you learn the short-cut keys you fly. Menus slow you down, as does any menu that requires a mouse. Graphical Menu based systems are quicker for inexperienced uses. But only as they learn. Once past that stage they are slower. It depends on the task though. Some elements like tables, grids, margains etc. are visual. So a visual control is optimal. But like wise some things aren't. They don't need a graphical based control/interface.

The other thing is, the new UI (2007 & 2010) is slower compared to the older ones. Even on a fast machine.

p

BostonB wrote: »

Isn't that the problem right there. Most users use very little of Office. So the ribbon is therefore only optimal for 5% of users.

Nope. The Ribbon is a solution to that problem. Do you remember the auto hiding menus they had before? They were just messy. The core concept of the Ribbon is that the tabs are activity centric and contextual, so you only use what's relevant at the time. If you never use references, then you never see those options at all. Previously, options for references were contained in multiple places throughout the UI, so the signal vs noise ratio is too high.


There's a good discussion this general UX concept here:
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/12/the-complexity-of-simplicity.php

fenris

p wrote: »

Most people who complain about the Ribbon a) have no clue what designing software the size of MS Office is like and b) do not understand the constraints and unique problems that microsoft were trying to solve.

Now there is the heart of the problem, most people who complain about ribbon are the people who have to use it on a daily basis in order to do their work.

They couldn't give a monkeys about designing software because that is not their concern, they just need to be able to use the product of that design as a tool to enable their organisation to generate revenue.

As for "the constraints and unique problems that MS have" the understanding is very clear, old product mature but doing the job well, need to drive revenue with some USP that unfortunately breaks the functionality but fortunately can be driven through using the licensing / update regime as most users are not in a position to vote with their feet.

Ribbon is a fad among developers and marketing folk that is increasingly becomming a negative selling point due to the mishandling of the MS office roadmap it is a byword for poor design and ill conceived change.

The measure of a tools value is how well it does its job.

fenris

p wrote: »

You don't lose much screen real estate at all. This is a myth:

The difference is in the value and relevance of what is on the screen along with the ease of access via hotkeys with a reminder of what that key is to start the sequence.

Look at your example, the paste button is six times the size of the cut/ copy icons - does that mean I get six times better pasting or is it just a waste of space that looks "pretty", also you have an additional irrelevant toolbar added in at the bottom on the left - to fill up some space/ plug hole in a weak arguement?

Count the functions that you have direct access to on the left and right and honestly tell me how you really justify that to a user?

Many users customise a toolbar to allow easy access to their most frequently used functions

BostonB

p wrote: »

Nope. The Ribbon is a solution to that problem. Do you remember the auto hiding menus they had before? They were just messy. The core concept of the Ribbon is that the tabs are activity centric and contextual, so you only use what's relevant at the time. If you never use references, then you never see those options at all. Previously, options for references were contained in multiple places throughout the UI, so the signal vs noise ratio is too high....

Can't agree. That solves a problem that doesn't exist. The hidden menus were always a joke, turning that off was the first thing to do. Besides which this improvement does the same thing. You can't click on things you can't find, and you can't find them if they don't appear unless you do a certain thing.

As a GUI improvement that's meant to bring people to features they are not aware of, its completely flawed. As people won't see those features to be aware of them.

For me the idea of bits of the interface disappearing and appearing, is very odd. Sure have contextual information and reduce on screen clutter but don't hide features. That makes no sense.

Also they don't even follow their own philosophy on this. Quite often the most frequently used buttons are some of the smallest on screen rather than the largest on screen. While some obscure feature, is one of the biggest button.

Office feels like much of Microsoft software. Thousands of developers not all on the same same page when it comes to GUI or indeed, the objective of the software. They seem to want to add features add hoc, and using blunderbuss.

In short MS lacks focus, and its reflected in their software.

stevenmu

Well speaking for myself, I've found it much easier to discover the functionality in Office using the ribbon than I have searching through drop down menus and tiny iconed toolbars. And I've found it to be much more usable than the same.

It's certainly not perfect, but what's the better option? I really don't think that hierarchical drop down menu's with 3 or 4 layers, and undescriptive toolstrips are.

yenoah

I can only apologise for my mispelling of Fittz law. I should be shot. Again thinking on the hoof has been my downfall. I am getting my coat as we speak.:cool:

In all seriousness, I'm enjoying this thread. I think one or two people have hit on the key point. We aren't really the people to be appraising the ribbon. It is best done by end users. Surveys have been done, I've conducted a few myself on this very control. In general, I can report that results were poor. I dont have access to figures anymore, just memory but I'm sure you can look up similar usability surveys online.

But I mispelled the word Fytz. I need to go!:D

stevenmu

yenoah wrote: »

I can only apologise for my mispelling of Fittz law. I should be shot. Again thinking on the hoof has been my downfall. I am getting my coat as we speak.:cool:

In all seriousness, I'm enjoying this thread. I think one or two people have hit on the key point. We aren't really the people to be appraising the ribbon. It is best done by end users. Surveys have been done, I've conducted a few myself on this very control. In general, I can report that results were poor. I dont have access to figures anymore, just memory but I'm sure you can look up similar usability surveys online.

But I mispelled the word Fytz. I need to go!:D

Well you know what they say, if you can't win an argument with logic and reason, pick on their spelling and grammer

It's a good discussion though, UX is something often overlooked by developers, it's probably impossible to get perfect, but talking/arguing about the pros and cons of different systems can at least help us all.

Oh and for people talking about shortcut keys, look at what happens in the ribbon with a single press of the Alt key (in 2010 at least, don't have 2007 here to check but I think it was similar).

BostonB

yenoah wrote: »

I can only apologise for my mispelling of Fittz law. I should be shot....

In fairness you couldn't find the spell checker.

p

I agree, good discussion too.

I'm not going to reply to individual comments here, because to be honest, a lot of it seems to be passionate, but personal opinion or bias. However, I'd be very happy to continue a discussion with someone who has read about the rationale and facts behind the Ribbon as posted earlier: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_3f00_/default.aspx
Here's a video if you prefer watching to reading: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx


Even if you don't agree with it all, it's fascinating reading for anyone interested in usability and UI design, and there's quite a few uncomfortable truths in there, and how you deal with them it's what's of real interest to me anyway.

BostonB

In my experience developers usually make poor UI designers. Mainly because their mindset is very different to most users or even someone interested in efficiency in workflow or information topology.

BostonB

On a basic level I don't see how you can do usability testing on a product of this scale and produce a result where some of the most commonly used buttons are tiny and other less commonly used are huge. Or indeed where they say they've studies to prove something works, then they drop that feature/design in a later version. To me it suggests there something wrong with their testing, or they didn't do it in the first place.

yenoah

p wrote: »

I agree, good discussion too.

I'm not going to reply to individual comments here, because to be honest, a lot of it seems to be passionate, but personal opinion or bias. However, I'd be very happy to continue a discussion with someone who has read about the rationale and facts behind the Ribbon as posted earlier: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_3f00_/default.aspx
Here's a video if you prefer watching to reading: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx


Even if you don't agree with it all, it's fascinating reading for anyone interested in usability and UI design, and there's quite a few uncomfortable truths in there, and how you deal with them it's what's of real interest to me anyway.

Yea Ive seen that video before. I'm convinced that is Michael Stipe!

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).