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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

The concept of the ribbon - tabs with buttons grouped by function - has a lot of advantages in theory. Obviously you can have bigger buttons which is always a good thing, and you allow each button to have sub-buttons which actually works out really well. I personally think Microsoft is on the right track from a high level perspective.

The problem comes in the implementation. The graphic design is just horrible. Where is the grid? Where is the white space? What the hell is that round button that replaces the file menu? The title bar just looks awful.

If they could clean it up graphically I really think it could be just as nice as anything on Mac OS X. Ask yourself this, if Apple had come out with the buttons on tabs in the exact same groupings but done it in a gorgeous way, who would be complaining about it? We'd all be heralding it.

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I think the ribbon concept is inherently flawed because no human brain can remember such an overwhelming amount of information (what command in which function group in which tab).

And your suggestion is?

How is the ribbon any different to a hierarchial menu bar? (See the Gnome drop-down menu or the iOS Settings Menu).

The problem has more to do with the excessive number of available commands. My suggestion is to cut the clutter and avoid hierarchical UI elements altogether, regardless of their nature.

So we're limited to either only exposing a dozen operations or somehow shoving 200 operations into a flat UI? This seems to be rather unrealistic.

A dozen operations may be more than enough for 80% of users. Designing for the remaining 20% is a common UI design mistake.

So basically the rest of the operations simply cannot exist? I guess you'll never burn another disk, or create a new folder for that matter.

Limit the need for Explorer/Finder/etc. altogether. For those cases where it is needed limit top level UI elements to the most commonly used items. Move the rest to either a toolbar or a contextual menu.

You know, I just checked Finder and realized that not only does it not have the things showed in this mockup, but that I have never missed them.

Strange.

Did you consider that you haven't missed these things because you aren't used to using them?

No, I don't think so. Every function given by this ribbon is available in Finder without buttons.

I can give you the steps, if you'd like.

If you have to give me steps, then I think you've missed the point of the Ribbon!

The Finder has a lot of places you can perform operations on a file: the menu bar, the toolbar, the Get Info inspector, and the context menu. All the Ribbon does is turn them into buttons and put them in the same place. There's no remembering how to do stuff - and yes, some people can't remember how to do basic file management - because it's all done from the same row at the top. I could say the same thing about "Every function in the Finder I can do without having to use menus".

If you have to explain steps to me then it isn't working like MS are discussing here. The whole point is that no-one needs to give you steps.

You don't remember it, you develop muscle memory. I couldn't tell you what most key combinations are in Visual studio, but I'm always able to press the right buttons in the right context.

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