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Comment by linopolus | Hacker News Reader

And still it has a UI like in the nineties. Thousands of buttons, adding more and more, without thinking about it, making it harder and harder with every version for new users to learn using it.

Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use.

Microsoft has done it, and while initially it was hard for everyone familiar with the old concept, I know nobody who prefers that now, after familiarizing themselves with ribbons.

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Raises hand As a power user of Office before and after that change - the menu bar was massively better. Now you know someone.

Seriously, who apart from utter novices would ever want to use a UI where the keyboard shortcuts are non-obvious, the buttons take up half the screen, and discoverability is non-existent (and not even Google can help half the time because things jump around from version to version).

If there was an option to switch back from ribbons, I'd do it every time.

Me too.

Office for Mac has the original menus _and_ ribbon. Just the old toolbars disappeared.

Best of both worlds.

If you are a power user, does the graphical UI even matter to you? Aren't you all keyboard, all the time?

I didn't like the ribbon interface for a long time. Then I watched a video of Joel Spolsky doing some stuff in Excel and it was the first time I really saw somebody that knew what they were doing using the ribbon. That converted me.

> Aren't you all keyboard, all the time?

No. Keyboard for the things i know by heart and use every few seconds, mouse for the things that happen from time to time, and explorability for everything else.

Also, link to that video?

Edit: I think you mean this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Very first thing i notice is he rides hard on the "Paste as Values" option being the one you want to use most of the time. However since he has the ribbon on top he has a gigantic paste button and needs to use the drop down every time to call it.

With normal toolbars you'd just add a "Paste as Values" button next to the normal paste button and skip the error-prone, slow dropdown process.

(I also note he has no keyboard shortcut for it.)

New ribbon has very discoverable keyboard shortcuts, opposed to the old layout

Paste as values: alt h v v

He never uses that in the video. The video also doesn't show the availability of it. Also a sequence like that for something that he uses all the time is not very good huffman coding.

But he also starts the video saying this is at a basic to intermediate level. Plus, picking things from the tool bar rather than just using keystrokes is a little more video-friendly.

This is getting into tea leaves reading, but i am fairly certain that he isn't aware of or simply never uses a shortcut for it and clicks through the cumbersome dropdown every time. My evidence being that he's happy to show off multiple access modes for "fill down", but does not do that for "fill by values". Possibly he might also be aware of the keyboard chain to reach it, but doesn't mention it because it's fairly cumbersome itself too.

Can you really call yourself a power user if you haven’t adjusted to the new UI in over eleven (11) years?

I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that doscoverability is nonexistent... everything is there, except now everything has icons, is in logical groups, and has a keyboard shortcut (exposed through alt key). If you hover over any option you get a tooltip that often includes an illustration along with text. Much of the UI is wired up with live hover preview so you can see the effects before you commit.

When office 2007 came out, there were a lot of people who thought they added a ton of new features. Aside from live previews, hover tooltip, smartart, contextual grammar, and the new formats, there was practically nothing new. The UI made things so discoverable that people just thought there were thousands of new features.

> the menu bar was massively better. Now you know someone.

And someone else here too. We moved about a year ago to the 'the ribbon' and I detest it. They have hidden much of the functionality and it's a more laborious process to get to any feature which isn't immediately available.

Another little annoyance I have is in Outlook. Pre Ribbon you could right click on your mailbox root and select Advanced Search. This control was set up to search everything in your mailbox. The Advanced Search option has gone from the right click, I've added an icon on the Quick Access toolbar and it's also available as Ctrl-Shift-F.

What's wrong with that you think! The problem is it's no longer configured to search your entire mailbox (presumably as it's not got the context of the right-click), just your Inbox. I now need to do Browse, tick the Root using the mouse, then tick "search subfolders" using the mouse, and then OK back to the Advanced Find control. A complete PITA and step backwards in functionality.

> who apart from utter novices would ever want to use a UI where the keyboard shortcuts are non-obvious

How are keyboard shortcuts worse than in old Office? I still have the common shortcuts and everything is accessible vie accessible Alt+... access keys (easily discoverable if you press Alt once). True, you cannot add custom shortcuts. Is that it?

> the buttons take up half the screen

On a decent-sized screen that extra size doesn't matter much, and not just novices benefit from applying Fitt's law.

> discoverability is non-existent

Could you elaborate? I don't have data but I would guess that making common options larger and/or putting them on the home tab makes them more discoverable.

> I don't have data but I would guess that making common options larger and/or putting them on the home tab makes them more discoverable.

At the expense of non common options, which become undiscoverable.

When I open a software for the first time I'll often scan all the menus once, to get an idea of supported features and their categorization. I'll randomly rescan the menu from time to time when I feel like learning something new/want to further my expertise.

That's an interesting approach but it seems invalid for Office. The have thousands (!) of features. Going through the old menus wasn't much help. More than that, they're actually exposing more functionality through the Ribbon. For the truly hidden commands, they have the Options menu, under the Office icon.

Add me to that list too. I hate the ribbons, they just eat so much real estate and as I age, it's slower for me to scan, differentiate and spot the icons for the commands I want to perform.

Not age, just harder. A list of text is far easier to interpret than a zillion icons.

Jesus add me to this list too.

Trying to find a little used feature is a minefield of hovering for tooltips and clicking endless drop down button menus...

I don't think they haven't thought about it, but:

* what Microsoft did was a major change with many, many thousands of man-hours invested into it; and many of those hours were UI/UX research, usability studies, analysis for the data phoned home by Office; does any of this sound like your typical Open Source project work? :)

* the Ribbon concept is patented by Microsoft; so not Open Source friendly, which leads us to...

* the LibreOffice developers would have to come up with a novel concept for a GUI, which is superior to the existing menus; and one that doesn't fall into the traps that Microsoft Office already went through (see Harris Jensen's blog series called "The Why of the New UI"); I'm a big fan of Open Source, but unless it comes from academia (Office products are not known to be the main focus of academic research right now) or from startups (good luck taking down Microsoft Office! :) ), most of the user friendly GUI stuff in Open Source-landia is copy-cat stuff

Edit: I just saw bryanlarsen's comment. Glad to hear that they're trying. However quite a few of those attempts fit into stuff Microsoft already tried. But they might still prove superior to the current interface, so kudos to the LibreOffice devs for that ;)

>what Microsoft did was a major change with many, many thousands of man-hours invested into it; and many of those hours were UI/UX research, usability studies, analysis for the data phoned home by Office; does any of this sound like your typical Open Source project work? :)

No, and that's a problem!

Tell me LibreOffice isn't a MASSIVE project with thousands of man-hours invested in developing its under-the-hood features. How about finally recognizing UX design as a vital part of that effort? Or rather, its biggest flaw?

It's not as esoteric as copying "ribbons" or "reinventing the GUI". How about having buttons where the text isn't sticking 1 pixel to the left, some proper spacing to group elements belonging together and boxes that are aligned at all angles, so your eyes don't get tired after 5 seconds of reading the captions? How about sending 3 people into a real-life office environment where LibreOffice is used for a week and make detailed notes and interviews on which features are used most, are most annoying to use or most desperately missed and then rearranging the hierarchy accordingly?

I see such a massive amount of goodwill and idealism in the open source community but as soon as it's facing mainstream users it fails to recognize UX as an integral part of providing a viable alternative to commercial products. Microsoft absolutely needs competition in the Office space, I swear at them nearly every day for doing the simplest things they manage to make complicated. They can be beat. But it's not via features, it's via interface design.

> Tell me LibreOffice isn't a MASSIVE project with thousands of man-hours invested in developing its under-the-hood features. How about finally recognizing UX design as a vital part of that effort? Or rather, its biggest flaw?

Please don't misrepresent something you have not studied. UX is absolutely recognized as vital in LibreOffice. The point is, companies invest in development commissioned by their clients. So far there has been no client wanting to spearhead massive under-the-hood improvements to the UI system (yes, this would be very relevant to further work). The work done is incremental and admittedly not advancing quickly enough.

Volunteer UX/UI designers getting involved in open source is still a new thing, so the size of the UX team has mostly just stayed constant from the OpenOffice.org days.

> UX is absolutely recognized as vital in LibreOffice

you can really tell by the amount of effort they put into it.

Yes, and a lot of it was painstaking backend work. OpenOffice has its own cross-platform widget toolkit, which nobody else uses, and a lot of work in LibreOffice has gone to cleaning up that ancient code. For instance, all dialog boxes had hardcoded sizes and positions; each one was manually converted to a flexible layout in the Glade .ui format, and a backend was written to load these files and instantiate the corresponding widgets. Now that this conversion is mostly finished, it's become easier to modify the interface. But there's still work to be done.

I rarely use MS Office or LibreOffice, but I find it easier to locate stuff in the menus of LibreOffice.

In my experience, technical people are dogs, visual people are cats, would be the most succinct way I can put it.

3 new experimental, flexible UI's were the headline features of LibreOffice 5.3.

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-docu...

I have enabled Ribbon UI and it looks like ribbon ui build in nineties. There is no obvious way to revert the change.

I think you can restore the default from the main menu?

View -> Toolbar Layout -> Default

It was not obvious as the main menu was hidden. There is a button (top-right corner) to show main menu.

This is why it's still an exerimental feature, and the more testing and feedback the design community gets, the better!

Kudos to Microsoft for Ribbon UI. While I myself was supportive from the beginning (and am so glad to see it coming to LibreOffice as well), they saw a lot of backlash for it in early days.

Aside: Only thing I miss from Ribbon UI is being able to make it vertical, putting it on the side of the screen. Monitors are mostly landscape, while documents often portrait, so using space on the sides of the screen should be considered for it. (Putting Windows task bar on the right side was an instant boost to my productivity and ability to focus.)

> Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use.

It's possible to do both! Not everyone in a large open source project works on the same thing. In the FOSS world, people choose what's important for them, so it's hard to say "they should" and make everyone do one specific thing.

But anyway, LibreOffice does have a design community with weekly meetings, blueprints and other activities:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design

They are working on the "Notebookbar" alternative GUI design, so if you're not happy with the design, why not join them and help out? :-)

I prefer my toolbars from the nineties, thank you very much. Now you know one person who prefers that.

Any user who learned to use office between 1990 and 2007 is well served by having a familiar interface. Now sure, there is a case that these user's comfort should be jettisoned for the future of the project. There is also a case that software projects (commercial and open source) regularly 'fix' things that aren't broken because they get bored.

Change is not user friendly; it breaks tutorials, it weakens the support network, it risks good ideas getting lost.

Don't get me wrong, if they do change things I'll probably support it, but if they stick to what worked for 20 years then we should support that too.

With all open/free software updates I care about one thing and one thing only: UI. Not talking "features" or anything, just reworking what's there based on concrete user studies. Never happens. The only example I know of is Firefox (which actually managed to beat Internet Explorer long before Chrome was a thing, that's how powerful usability is).

I want to support free office alternatives so badly, used OpenOffice and Libre Office for years, but recently caved to buy a license of MS Office 2016 because even Microsoft's shitty interface is miles ahead.

The free software community needs interface designers badly. I swear it's the one thing holding them back. All the features are there, but using the damn thing is infuriating.

The old keyboard shortcuts work in the new Office but how do I learn the shortcuts for the Ribbon?

Everything takes me twice as long to a) find it on the ribbon according to the incoherent positioning of items, and b) to navigate the tiny needless dropdown menus.

I have to hunt around by picture and unevenly-spaced icons (every button is a different size to its neighbor) and cannot navigate it by keyboard. The ribbon is truly a giant step backwards in usability.

I utterly detest it and welcome any opportunity to use an old version of Office 2003.

Many of the icons are pretty meaningless so you have to hover to get the text description. Give me menus with text any day.

If you hover over the button it will tell you what the shortcut is. But this is a weakness of the ribbon over the old menu system. In the old menu you were reminded of the shortcut every time you went to select something. In the ribbon you have to hunt them down.

I've been using the ribbon for ages now and about the only shortcuts I remember are bold and italic. That said, did you know you can tap Alt and get keyboard navigation of the ribbon?

LO comes with a ribbon-like UI called "NoteBook Bar" from atleast an year. It's deployed as an experimental feature in 5.x, but I've found it stable. Perhaps they've made it a mainstream feature now in 6.

https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Using_the_notebook_bar

It would be cool for them to do a study.... have the default set to whichever version of the toolbar people use most in their settings. A real life, long-term usability study. I bet the ribbon loses big-time since it Is such a discoverability nightmare.

Nah, it still requires ticking the "experimental" flag in advanced options. Sad that it's buried so far :(

If it was up to me, I would try to reach 99.999% compatibility with ms word first then do anything else. Both doc and docx formats.

If people see that LibreOffice Writer is as good as MS Word, then they would migrate to it.

Then funding would come and then they would have all the resources to build awesome UIs.

> If people see that LibreOffice Writer is as good as MS Word, then they would migrate to it.

as good as won't be enough for migration, as it's work to migrate, learn a new interface, bear all thats different.

Without a better UI, even better functionality may not be enough to convince people. UI is the first thing one sees..

The problem is that if a user opens a word file and it is different in writer than it is in word (where they created it) they will not even take the time to notice the nice UI, they will dismiss writer entirely as unreliable.

I like the fact that the UI has stayed much the same.

> And still it has a UI like in the nineties.

Want to know what happened, when I suggested folks could join in to drag it out of the nineties? https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u2p7x/tired_of_the_...

Hundreds of people appeared saying "Leave it alone, it's fine!! Don't you dare mess with it!"

No, please. If you want an improved UI, fork the project, do it, and let's see how much people follow you. But don't try to force it down our throats.

It's not necessary to fork the project. LibreOffice already comes with a way of reskinning/replacing the UI. Let's just say one of my priorities for 2018 is taking this further.

It seems like the average contributor to open source projects doesn't have enough interest and skill in the visual design aspect of things.

They tend to be the stereotypical hardcore old-school C developer who is not aesthetically oriented.

Everything from their website, their logo to the UI/UX has an aura of "designed by a C programmer who just wants to code and doesn't really give a shit about how fancy things look as long as it works".

I guess I'm in the minority, but I prefer function over form. On the other hand, for most office suite work (spreadsheets and documents) I'm not doing anything too fancy. There are occasional bouts of "how do I do that again?" But tbh I have that with PowerPoint also.

I can learn a UI, don't mind if it's klunky, but I need the thing to do what I need it to do.

Using LibreOffice feels like the software equivalent of visiting a historical re-enactment village where everyone dresses in costume and pretends it’s still the 90s.

The project feels like a preservation society for a type of software from the past.

Have you tried any of the new UI layouts?

I don't like to criticise anyone's efforts, but yeah and honestly they look like stage makeup on a corpse. The whole thing's just 'off'. It's like a bad illusion, almost like it's trying to con me! I know that's not very logical but that's the gut reaction I have whenever I try to use it. There's probably some psychology in there it'd be interesting to study.

The psychology is "it's not identical to what I'm familiar with." That's what kept me on Windows for years, getting past it just takes dealing with it for a bit while you get accustomed to it.

But I don't feel that when I use for example Pages, Apple's word processing app which has a different user interface to Word. That looks very different, but feels solid, authentic and high quality and I don't get the same feeling.

Except that MS Office functionality hasn't changed much since the 2003 suite, they just adopted the questionable Ribbon UI while continually reskinning it to match the design trends of the day.

I thought this was the nature of open source, UI seems to require a certain ability to dictate changes that private software is able to lead on.

But Audacities latest improvements in UI are very nice which leave hope for foobar and libreOffice etc.

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