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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

As an example I offer up a review of an Open Source Word-Alternative back in the early 2000's.

The reviewer liked the product enough, but slated the fact it didn't have a word counter. Now, I for one, have never cared about the number-of-words in a document. But, it turns out, journalists tasked with writing a 2000 word review _really_ care.

With great popularity comes great variability, and more "corner cases" matter.

Incidentally the solution is not fewer features, but better UI. Notice thats a very old screenshot of Word. Whereas Word to day looks very different, has the same (or greater) feature set, and a much more streamlined interface. The much-hated-on ribbon bar is actually a better interface than endlessly-deep menus and a million toolbars.

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How can you claim a user interface is 'better' while in the same sentence referring to the fact that most people hate it? People don't know what's good for them?

I'll have my Word with endlessly-deep menus, combined with discoverable keyboard shortcut and Ctrl-shift-p please!

I suspect people hated the ribbon when it was introduced because it was an unexpected change, forcing users to learn something new when they just wanted to be doing actual work.

I don't think most people hate it any more.

Im surprised my passion with witch im hating it hasn’t ceased a bit though it’s only when I use Word and I forget about it when I close it. Some things don’t make sense to me still, it feels dumbed down and more inefficient.

I still hate it, because it's a unicorn UX that doesn't follow any pattern that other software uses, and IMO is not an improvement in any way over the other standard options (normal menus). There's no special problem that Word faces that other word processors do not, so there's no reason for a screwy and impossible to decipher unless you've already memorized it UI.

I still hate it - it takes attention, and I want to give the app as little attention as possible, so I can concentrate on what I'm writing, not the process of typing.

double click it

That is twice the work

What was a good way to temporarily hide all the toolbars at the top until I toggled it again back before the ribbon?

Since this is turning into an anecdote collection: I was sceptical of the ribbon UI initially, to say the least, but it works pretty well for me.

So I hated the ribbon when it was introduced mostly for Excel. Because I did maybe 6-8 spreadsheets a year, but I had been doing that for at least a decade. It took a long time to build new muscle memory for the location of the small bits I use. Now? It doesn’t bother me, but at the rate I use it, it took years to get there.

I still haven’t gotten there. Drives me crazy any time I have to use an Office app. It’s rare enough that I cannot ever get work done.

The problem with the ribbon is that discoverability is extremely slow. If I'm looking for a piece of functionality, it's much faster to read through text menus looking for related words than to inspect a similar number of unfamiliar icons to figure out if they are related. Its keyboard usability is also not as consistent (e.g. alt+f, o to open a file from almost anywhere in the app)

Once you know where everything is and what the icons mean, it's probably better than nested menus for use with the mouse. Since that describes most of the person-hours in the software, this is an improvement on average. New users and those who lean heavily on the keyboard still aren't going to like it, though.

> I don't think most people hate it any more.

Still hate it. Most apps did not follow Microsoft’s lead and add a ribbon to their app.

I think most people were just used to the old UI and resistant to change, so they complained about it. Yet, if you asked someone completely new to computing which UI they'd prefer, they would choose the ribbon.

If anything, placing the Styles menu front and center in the Home tab with live preview has made document formatting very discoverable. I used to receive so many Word docs with manually adjusted fonts and line spacing. Not so much after the ribbon was introduced.

> Yet, if you asked someone completely new to computing which UI they'd prefer, they would choose the ribbon.

How do you know that? This seems like a made up thing I’ve seen it stated by multiple people and it’s probably not true. If you take someone new to computing and show them the old idioms of UI and they’d likely prefer it since it makes way more sense.

Not all users know what they want, unfortunately.

Yes to be fair to Word, his screenshots were taken when all the optional buttons turned on.

It's not only a very old screenshot, it's also a screenshot you'd never get by default, you'd have to manually activate all these toolbars.

>> Incidentally the solution is not fewer features, but better UI.

I completely agree in principle. The problem is IMHO that the best UX is almost no UI.

Microsoft UI is IMHO essentially industrial automation. Select you data, then push a button (or menu item, or ribbon) to cause something to happen to your data. Apple attempts to encourage more direct interaction with data. The best example is pinch zoom. Remember when maps used navigation buttons to pan and zoom? Direct touch manipulation is better. This is very hard to do with a large feature set though.

One solution is hot-keys, but they do require learning and are limited in number. Context dependent hot keys can also be confusing.

In solvespace we have almost no UI and hot keys are critical to productivity. We avoid context dependence partly by having consistency. The constraint solver is always present, from 2d sketching to building an assembly, so those function keys are universal.

UX is hard, but also distinct from UI.

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