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Comment by makeramen | Hacker News Reader

This guy really doesn't have enough UX/human factors experience to be saying anything about these UIs. His opinion appears to be based on a few commands, and a generalized opinion with little quantitative support.

"In Windows Live Photo Gallery, with the program window at least 1200 pixels wide"

That's quite a wide screen to expect someone to have in order to see all the available commands. I feel like this limit is even larger in more involved programs such as Word, Excel, etc where I've frequently run into the issue of having to click the "more" button, only not to find the command I'm looking for.

Also, counting clicks is a very weak UI rule to follow. Navigation time is key. The "clutter" description of the windows toolbar comes from the varying sizes of buttons that don't follow any regular order for the eye to follow, resulting in greater confusion and potentially slower responses.

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Couldn't agree more. This article is useless in its approach to analysing UIs and the author really should have gotten this thrown out by the editor of ZDNet.

Hope this doesn't get picked up by a wider audience.

> should have gotten this thrown out by the editor

Would happen on a print magazine, where space is limited, but on a website there is no such thing. Besides, Ed Bott generates pageviews and that's their performance metric.

1280x(anywhere from 720 to 800) is probably the most common resolution for a modern widescreen laptop, and it's very common for Windows users to run with their windows either maximized or manually dragged to take up the entire screen. The ribbon appears to be designed for this, with the option to present a less optimal interface for smaller screens by a combination of resizing interface elements and eliminating uncommonly used ones.

Try resizing the Ribbon all the way from super-wide (if you've got dual monitors, it's particularly interesting) to really narrow. It's quite fun to watch, especially in Office products with zillions of interface controls - the giant buttons and large scrollable boxes full of options become groups of smaller buttons with text, then even smaller buttons without text, then collapse into a single menu, before disappearing altogether into the 'more' button.

Conveniently enough, this article has a helpful graph of the most common screen resolutions on Windows:

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/26/improvements-...

Interesting - the most common resolution is even wider than I thought. Thanks for pointing that out - I'd read the article not long ago but had forgotten about that particular point :)

The resizing behavior you outline for the Ribbon is actually a horrible UI design decision for repeat actions, which most are.

Example:

If a user remembers the "Copy" button as the first big button, or paste as the third little button, etc. Next time you open the window at a different resolution, or you resize, everything changes. Your positional memory of this button is gone. I absolutely hate the Ribbon's design for this. (I don't have windows running, so I'm making this up as an example, but I know it has happened to me before)

I prefer apple's "old" menu design over the Ribbon. Albeit seemingly archaic, it's actually a very useful place to store multiple commands in easily readable text that never changes position (especially on a mac, where the menu is always at the top toolbar).

Another factor to consider when talking about navigation time is what level of experience the user has.

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