Comment by NotTheDr01ds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotTheDr01ds | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was always surprised at the hatred that many (most) "power users" expressed toward the Ribbon design.

To me, the greatest thing about it was that it exposed every Ribbon action with an easily discoverable and repeatable key-sequence. Just hit the Alt key once, and every top level category's hotkey showed up as a hover. Hit that key, and the commands on the ribbon (or next level dropdown) were displayed. "Paste Special", a very common action, became Alt+H+V+S. And you didn't have to do finger twisters like Ctrl+Alt+V (all held down together) to achieve it.

And again, almost EVERY command was available in this way.

Sure, you could create your own hotkeys in versions of Office before this, but the Ribbon brought almost every command within easy reach of those that hate removing their fingers from the keyboard. It wasn't quite VIM (no command mode), but it was a far sight better than anything than had existed before in Office, where most of the advanced UI had been buried away in difficult-to-automate AND navigate (either by keyboard or mouse) modal dialogs.

And by exposing most of the UI to the keyboard, it also enabled easier automation via utilities like AutoHotkey.

All-in-all, it was a power user's dream, but I definitely see how it was harder for a mouse user to develop the muscle memory on the Ribbon vs an icon bar. That, however, I believe is simply a matter of having nearly 100% of the UI be available via the Ribbon, vs. the 20% (or less) of icon bars. The always present trade-off between power and ease-of-use, at least for the mouse user.

FYI, that was how the menus worked in previous versions (Alt-f for the file menu, etc.), so ribbons didn’t expose any new functionality in that regard. In fact, Microsoft bent over backwards to ensure that every old pattern people had used would continue to work exactly the same way.

I thought about mentioning this, but Menus still had a tendency to dead-end into modal dialogs more often than not. A Ribbon command could still end up in a modal, but often times the Ribbon design allowed more functionality to be present in a non-modal way.

I worked for Lotus/IBM when Word Pro was being developed, and they came up with the concept of a non-modal floating property bar (they called it the "Info Bar") that pretty much eliminated modals entirely. While I don't recall whether or not it was very keyboard friendly (I was still a mouse user at the time), it definitely showed me that there was a better way than "modal dialogs everywhere".

When I moved on from IBM and had to use Office, I remember how grating it was every time I ended up in a modal dialog, so this was one more reason I was excited to see the Ribbon come along (more than a decade after Word Pro's Info Bar).

I've never looked to see, but it wouldn't surprise me if some of the MS developers for Office 2007 came from Lotus/IBM, since it was a few years earlier that IBM had really given up the Office Suite fight for good.

I think the hatred wasn't directed at ribbons specifically, but at the tendency of (not only) Microsoft to overhaul the UI of their applications with every major release. Maybe that didn't happen as often with the Office applications (which increased the backlash when it did happen), but with the apps bundled with Windows (e.g. Explorer - not IE, the file manager), you had to find your way again with every new Windows version. That's one of the reasons why under Windows I still use good ol' Total Commander and don't bother with Explorer at all. What Microsoft (and Google, and Apple) don't understand is that for most people, applications are just a tool to get a job done. They don't want the latest and greatest UI, but they get annoyed if they have to re-learn how to do the things they want to do. It's as if the controls on your car would be rearranged every time you got it back from inspection...

"almost EVERY command was available in this way [= via the ribbon]" Surely you're joking, Mr. NotTheDro1ds! Afaict, relatively few of Word's commands are exposed in the ribbon; look for example at the long list of additional commands that can be added to the ribbon (customization). I think, although it would be hard to prove, that more were exposed by the old menus.

> it was a power user's dream

It is some power user's dream. There are a huge number of power users who consider it a nightmare, though. Well over half of the people I know who have to use the ribbon range somewhere between disliking it and hating it, because it makes it difficult to find what you need to do.

It makes it easy to find what you need to do. It makes it difficult to apply your knowledge of how things were before it existed. That's a much different problem

But it doesn't make it easy to find what you need to do, because it's almost insanely random.

So I have Word open. When the window is set to one width I get a Styles button and a Styles Pane.

Which do I need to click to remove all styles?

Wrong! The quickest option is the unlabelled Clear All Formatting button above the font/background colour selectors.

I make the window wider. Styles expands to a list of styles - in its own little horizontally scrolling microbox - and the Styles Pane button stays to the right of it.

If I click the Styles Pane, I have the same styles in two spaces on the screen, very close to each other - one in a little scrolling microbox, and the other in a vertical list.

This is nonsensical. It violates any number of established and well-researched design principles.

What's next to the Styles Pane button? "Dictate". Because why not? Most people are going to dictate after styling, and not vice versa.

Meanwhile the box with the font names isn't wide enough to show names properly. Someone decided it would be more useful to fill the ribbon with an expanding horizontally scrolling microbox for styles - which is annoyingly hard to use - than to make the font name box wider, so you can see which font you're using.

And the font size box has some completely useless right padding. Even if you use fractional sizes, or three digit sizes, there's still some useless white space there.

And so on. Is this really the absolute pinnacle of all possible UI designs?

> And so on. Is this really the absolute pinnacle of all possible UI designs?

No, it's just a good UI design. It's easy to pick and choose nonsensical examples like that from any design philosophy. No software perfectly accomplishes every task for every user.

> No, it's just a good UI design

I disagree entirely. I think the ribbon is a great example of terrible UI design because it's clunky, it makes it very hard to find what you need, and it eats up a lot of screen space.

Speaking personally...

I think that it makes it hard to find what I need to do when what I need to do is something uncommon. This is because it not only hides things, but it changes where it hides things depending on the current state of the application.

It's not a matter of it being different than the other ways. I don't have a problem adapting to new ways, unless the new ways are worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com