Can I Legally Use the “Fluent UI” or Ribbon Design? | Hacker News Reader

Can I Legally Use the “Fluent UI” or Ribbon Design?

infoq.com

72 pointsluu54 comments

A number of quibbles about things semi-confused in this article here:

1) Fluent UI is not Ribbon UI; I'm not sure why Fluent is mentioned in the article headline, other than an implication there might be unspoken patents in the Fluent Design System, and that's an indirect spook from the topic at hand.

2) Corel's violations of the Office Ribbon UI licensing terms clearly happened during the time in which the Office Ribbon UI licensing was enforced (that is, prior to the most general release/retiring from those terms in 2016).

3) The article author seems to have a hard time finding resources regarding the historic Office Ribbon licensing terms, but even just using Jensen's blog heavily linked in the article you can find a relatively detailed FAQ: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/11/21/licensin...

4) The key violation of Corel for the licensing terms should be very obvious from Jensen's FAQ:

> There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.

"Fluent" was the official name for the new Office UI system introduced with Office 2007 (which included not only the ribbon, but other stuff like the new context menus/floating toolbar, new keyboard shortcut system, etc.) The name didn't really catch on and I think Microsoft stopped using it after a short time, but I guess they eventually reused it for the new design concept introduced with Windows Redstone.

Fluent UI is probably mentioned because "Microsoft Office Fluent user interface (UI)" (short: Fluent UI) used to mean Ribbon UI, long before the Fluent Design System existed.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff461922(v=offic...

Ribbon was the name of just one element of the Office 2007 UI system. Fluent was supposed to be the name of the whole system.

The real question one should ask is: should you use a ribbon design?

Ribbon UI is very discoverable. I bet most people would have a better chance of picking up a feature-rich program such as AutoCAD nowadays than back in the time of menus and toolbars.

CAD packages are a good example, really. They tend to have tons of features, which are fairly easy to find with a ribbon, but also have lots of configurability (hideable toolbars) and speed features (radial menus) for power users. But the balance is hard to strike - if anything they tend to have too many ways of doing things, and not good enough defaults.

The current incarnation of Microsoft Office products' UI is a mess too. Buttons and search bars all over the chrome of the windows (what used to be the title bar), most of the old Alt+letter codes still working, and ribbon 'tabs' that bring up full-page menus (the File menu). My answer to your probably-rhetorical question is yes, you should use a ribbon design in a windowed app, to provide a baseline level of making the features easy-to-find. The difficult part is adding more powerful power-user features or most-used features without turning the interface into a big mess.

Oddly enough, I find the Mac versions of Office much easier to use because they still have a menu system where everything sits still and behaves itself.

If the UI of an application involves a huge deeply nested menu of actions that directly modify the visual look of the data being worked on, then a Ribbon might be the right paradigm.

The Ribbon UI was a huge improvement to Excel and Word. I'm kind of mixed on how it has been used in other places.

> If the UI of an application involves a huge deeply nested menu of actions that directly modify the visual look of the data being worked on, then a Ribbon might be the right paradigm.

I would add to this 'and your user base already has a well-established set of paradigms in mind when using your product.' Part of the reason that the Ribbon works for MS products is that they had to make their UI backwards compatible with decades of user intuition, which required carrying forward a lot of baggage. The Ribbon is necessary because they not only have to include a huge array of functionality, they also have to include dozens of ways to accomplish the same task presented so that they feel familiar to an enormous and diverse user base. If you could design Word/Excel from the ground up to optimize for efficiency and usability, but with zero prior user expectations, the UI would probably be radically different.

> If you could design Word/Excel from the ground up to optimize for efficiency and usability, but with zero prior user expectations, the UI would probably be radically different.

Word and Excel have so many options, I am not sure if there is an intuitive way to design the UI.

At some point, software of a certain complexity is going to have a learning curve. Making it so that things are placed naturally along that curve is probably the best that can be done.

Excel also needs to be optimized for power users, and those power user optimizations align with much different UX goals than making something easy to use and discover. There is this weird cliff in the middle of Excel use, where doing basic things is pretty simple thanks to the ribbon, doing slightly harder things is frustrating, and then doing all this super cool advanced stuff really fast is actually pretty damn easy if you watch a couple hours of youtube tutorial videos, but there is no chance of figuring it out on your own!

Yes. As soon as it came out all of the non-computer people I know said, “wow, this is awesome”. No matter what you think about purity or other concepts of how things “should” be, the fact is it made using these programs far more accessible to the average user than they were before, and that’s really the point of computing.

Honestly I don't mind the ribbon UI. It might not be the best approach for all applications, but I think it's appropriate or at least not harmful in MS Office. It's not much different than a menu, functionally, but the persistence and contextual responsiveness I think adds something.

As much as I'm against software patents, I do love the idea of companies like Microsoft using them on GUIs.

Bad GUI design will eventually literally be against the law.

> wants "bad UI" outlawed

> implies Ribbon is "good UI"

o_O

I'm not saying traditional menus are the end-all-be-all of GUIs, but from there to assuming the ribbon is "good" there is quite a jump. I personally find it very difficult to locate anything on Ribbon bars.

Edit: hey, HN banning emojis?

Nope, not banning emojis. You got the parent post backward and made fun of the completely-wrong thing you thought it was saying. I'm pretty sure that's what got you the downvotes.

What they actually meant: Ribbons are bad UI, so if Microsoft hold a patent covering them and enforce it aggressively then (one variety of) bad UI will be unavailable or at least expensive.

(Incidentally, I did not downvote your comment; I am guessing at the reasons others likely had.)

^_^ If something is patented, it will become illegal to use. Hopefully /all/ proprietary patterns become patented, and then perhaps only good patterns will be left :P

Each to their own I guess. I find the Ribbon UI intuitive.

> implies Ribbon is "good UI"

Where was that implied?

I am a 3ds Max User, and I hate the ribbon.

I use this software predominantly because of it’s superior user experience design, which involves a GUI that some would say is dated but most still agree it is great. I love everything about the GUI except the ribbon. Updating the GUI with Qt has not helped the ribbon’s case one bit.

It seems a typical side effect of ribbon application is extraneous options at ribbon’s reach which could very well be be tucked away in a preferences pane, and controls that could be more readily exposed tucked away in the ribbon. And, all of them are therefor now hard to find if not in daily use.

3ds Max users learned it serves one part of what we do decently, which is low level poly modeling where you keep switching between tools which have no great categorization and you know each of these tools like the back of your hand. Even then, most have abandoned the ribbon. And Explorer has nothing even slightly similar. The inconsistent widget display, interactivity, and functionality is a real issue.

>The real question one should ask is: should you use a ribbon design?

Though not an headline, Batteridge Law applies nonetheless:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

even in the more blunt form:

WHY would anyone (outside Microsoft) actually want to use the ribbon interface?

This reminds me that one day I want to post something headlined "Does Betteridge's Law of Headlines Apply to This Headline?" in hopes of causing brain explosions in people who needlessly spam a Betteridge's Law comment into every discussion thread.

Betteridge's Law of Betteridge's Law of Headlines: if you find yourself wondering whether you should mention Betteridge's Law of Headlines in a thread, the answer is "no."

If a user interface element can’t be reused, it defeats any usability you might gain from using it. It simply won’t be familiar - at least, not as familiar as it could/should be.

The followup on the page: https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/02/Ribbon-2

(TL;DR: Yes, using one of this set of frameworks)

Actually the TL;DR should be "Yes, using one of this set of frameworks, and we won't tell you if any other framework can use it" since Microsoft declined to comment.

It's almost as if there is complete disregard for "prior art" when it comes to software patents. It's a bit ridiculous really. Microsoft shouldn't have gotten the patent and they shouldn't have won this case.

Microsoft shouldn't have gotten the patent and they shouldn't have won this case.

Why not? What prior art are you thinking of, specifically?

Legal systems vary, but patents typically require something along the lines of an original and non-obvious invention. Desktop software has been using palette-style UIs with an arranged mix of controls, toolbars along the sides of a main display area, tabbed controls, and context-dependent controls and information for about as long as GUIs have existed, with countless examples of each of these things going back decades before Microsoft introduced the Ribbon branding, all of which seem to constitute prior art. So in what way is a ribbon-style UI either original or non-obvious enough to merit patent protection? What distinct new thing have Microsoft really invented here?

I honestly thought this was famous as a patent where there was prior art - surprised the parent is downmodded and anyone else who knows what 'ribbon' means doesn't know about it being done before Microsoft patented it.

- HotDog

- Macromedia HomeSite

- Dreamweaver

- Borland Delphi

all used ribbon UIs before Microsoft patented it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Homesite-2.5.png

Then again, I'm getting old so maybe people didn't use a lot of these apps.

Dreamweaver shot: http://www.projectseven.com/tutorials/dreamweaver/insert-bar...

All of those programs have context-sensitive ribbons?

We've had tabbed UIs for a while now. Ribbon is literally just a tab UI displaying options...

Ribbon is literally just a tab UI

That's incorrect. TFA has links to information about why that's incorrect.

In brief, however, the Ribbon is context-sensitive. Whether that deserves a patent, and whether any software should be patentable, IANAL.

Context sensitive UI's are for example very common in games. Some also included tabs.

So, context sensitivity is not in it's self novel.

Often patents cover the combination of multiple non-patent-able things. E.g. the fan, heating element, and the concept of blowing hot air were not novel in 1931, but that didn't stop the hair dryer being patented.

I meant that for example JRPG's have both context sensitivity and tab based menu systems.

EX: Only showing spells after the character learns them, or disabling Magic menu for non magic characters.

Now if they want a narrow patent that covers say hair dryers but not floor heaters that's not as hard to defend. But narrow patents are also less useful.

Not-so-novel things in combination can be rather novel.

I was pointing out you see them both used in the same context somewhere else.

JRPG's had both context sensitivity and nested tabable menus.

If they have some very narrow definition that's allowed, but a wide scope invites a wider range of prior art.

So keep in mind that what is patented is in the claims. Here's the first claim from one of the MS patents on the Ribbon UI:

----------------

1. A method for providing functionality from a software application by displaying an improved user interface at a display device, the method comprising:

organizing a plurality of software functionalities according to tasks to be performed by the software application, the tasks being identified textually by user interface tabs;

upon receiving an indication of a selection of a first user interface tab, providing a plurality of selectable controls associated with a first task, each selectable control being presented by a graphic representation and a textual representation;

grouping the plurality of selectable controls into logical groupings of the plurality of selectable controls, wherein each of the logical groupings combine a subset of functionalities associated with the selected first user interface tab;

dynamically adjusting a layout of at least one of the logical groupings to accommodate the user interface, wherein dynamically adjusting the layout of the at least one logical grouping comprises reducing a size of the graphical representation of at least one selectable control within the logical grouping eliminating the textual representation of at least one selectable control associated with the at least one logical grouping, and preserving the graphical representation associated with the at least one selectable control associated with the at least one logical grouping;

upon receiving an indication of a selection of a second user interface tab, providing in the user interface a plurality of additional selectable controls for selecting functionalities organized under a second task associated with the second user interface tab;

after providing in the user interface the plurality of additional selectable controls for selecting functionalities organized under the second task, receiving an indication of a selection of one of the additional selectable controls organized under the second task;

applying functionality associated with the selected additional selectable control to a selected object; and

when the second user interface tab is not selected in the user interface, providing in the user interface the plurality of selectable controls organized under the first task associated with the selected first user interface tab.

----------------

Does this exactly exist in the prior art? You can be sure that Corel looked. That is a, frankly, very narrow claim. It protects a rather well defined implementation, not a general idea of tab-based navigation. This is probably why they were only awarded ~$270k in damages. In patent litigation terms, that's a pittance. It doesn't even come close to paying for their attorneys to work on the case, i.e., MS lost money here. So the courts are definitely recognizing the very narrow nature of what is protected by their patents.

Source: https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/US_8255828_B2

Edit: also keep in mind that wilfulness was found, which means treble damages. I'm a little unclear if the reported $278k number is factoring that in or not, but if it is, that means the actual damages found were 1/3 of that. Which is well into mere nuisance territory for just about any corporation. Heck, that's into efficient infringement territory for Corel, if they think that redesigning would cost more than that (aside from the wilfulness aspect). I guess what I'm getting at here is that this is not something to be up in arms about.

Also, check out what Corel actually did here.[1] That's a pretty obvious clone of MS Word if I ever saw it. Say what you will about patents, but this is egregious copying and I don't think it's wrong of MS to defend themselves here.

1: https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/review-...

> That's a pretty obvious clone of MS Word if I ever saw it. Say what you will about patents, but this is egregious copying and I don't think it's wrong of MS to defend themselves here.

If you think this shouldn't be allowed then MS office should have never existed either. Excel is an egregious theft of VisiCalc. Microsoft Word is blasphemous copying of MacWrite. Windows's main UI concepts were entirely stolen from other OSes.

LibreOffice 6 has an optional ribbon-like UI, and I assume they checked that it wouldn't infringe on anything, when they decided to add it.

Isn’t it also FOSS, which indicates that the legal issue of profit from Microsoft’s design is null and void?

So Microsoft is a patent troll, just like Apple (who decided to sue Samsung for the 'slide to unlock'). On the bright side, I think most people don't like the 'ribbon' (I don't understand the difference with a normal tabbed UI anyway) pattern anyway.

Not a fan of patents at all, but is not a troll someone who does not invent and sell products? Both Microsoft does.

They are playing the hard game with patents, but IMHO not troll style.

You're right, 'patent troll' is not accurate here, but I couldn't find a better word.

So you're just denigrating the entire concept of patents? O.K.

Of patenting obvious things and aggresively defending them. Although I think you could make a strong case against the whole concept of a patent as well.

Microsoft's "Ribbon" thing is very distinctive, it's not "obvious"... although whether it's "good" is debatable.

You admit that you don’t understand the difference between the ribbon UI and tabbed layouts, yet assert that the ribbon design is “obvious”?

As far as I can see the 'ribbon' style is a tabbed layout which uses big buttons with pictures. So with the prior art of tabbed layout and of buttons with pictures, the ribbon style brings nothing new to the table.

A ribbon UI essentially is a tabbed layout, isn't it?

It is, essentially, with the addition of context-sensitive controls and elements. Or at least that's my very layman's interpretation of the patents.

Are there links to the actual patents in question? And how does this affect the LibreOffice notetabbar?

Here's some of the utility patents:

https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/US_8255828_B2

https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/US_7703036_B2

Source: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/02/13/93710/id=93710/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com