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Comment by vanviegen | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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

Not all users know what they want, unfortunately.

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