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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Things like the Office ribbon were a product of Microsoft user research, I just have no idea how they reached the conclusions they did with it (and I've watched a presentation by one of the lead designers on their reasoning - which all sounds valid, but doesn't explain how they specifically reached "the ribbon" and "personalized menus moving all over the place" as a solution).

I have a suspicion that the rise of the "user experience" engineer as opposed to UI designers played a big role - they got a bunch of people, did a bunch of research, and managed to narrow their focus to "so the first time a user ever opens Word, having somehow never used anything like it previously..." and ignored "our entire company is powered by enterprise sales of this product".

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The ribbon get a lot of flack but personally I love the ribbon. I fell in love with it the first time I used it, so much better than navigating through classic menus. The implementation of it is excellent in Office. Other applications have tried implementing the same thing but they don't get it as right as Office does. Many seem to think the ribbon is how you control the program, but that's not really the point of the ribbon: the ribbon is dependent on the context, it supplies you with the tools that are available for whatever part of the work piece you have in front of you.

> the ribbon is dependent on the context

Is it? That would explain why I find it confusing and moving buttons around randomly.

Yes, that is one of the tenets of the ribbon. For example in Word, it makes no sense to show you options to style a table if your cursor is not inside a table.

Here's my theory, having never worked there but having seen how sausages get made in a hierarchical company. A "VIP" designer in Microsoft invented the ribbon out of some creative inspiration or chemically induced fever dream. In order to justify developing it, user research had to be conducted. Since the designer was a very high ranking person, the research obviously could only have one conclusion: the ribbon is good and should be implemented. And so data was found that showed the ribbon was good, and data that showed otherwise was discarded, and like that, we got the ribbon!

Whatever the reasoning behind the ribbon, I still associate the era the ribbon was introduced with 16:9 displays becoming common, starting with laptops. In that case, users would have had less vertical screen real-estate for developers to work with. If you remember the old Office, the menus were nested fairly deeply and it became a bit of a maze to use some of the features.

I had been using computers for so long at that point that I still don't feel 100% comfortable with the ribbon. It's fine, I can do what I need to do to work the programs. It's just a bit fiddly in a way the standard menus weren't. I used to be able to invoke commands with keystrokes and arrow keys. Now there's are bunch of icons on different scales, which sometimes hide if the window isn't maximized.

Where it kicks me is the loss of real estate for toolbar buttons.

Pre-ribbon (and currently in LibreOffice which is what I now use), I could keep File control, Fonts and Styles, Reviewing and Drawing all on the one screen.

Post-ribbon...this is literally impossible.

The worst is going back to mac versions of office after you have finally gotten used to everything being in the ribbon, half the stuff is in the ribbon, the other half is buried in menus, its incredibly frustrating.

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