It's possibly one of the reasons why so many people were bent out of shape when MS introduced the adaptive ribbon shenanigans that tried to 'help' by only showing the most likely options. Really knocked my ability to find stuff
MS Office UI peeked around versions 97-2003 or so. Everything in a menu, actions grouped / categorized so they were easier to discover. QUICKLY accessible by underlined keyboard combinations (alt+menu letter THEN item in menu letter) and with any actions that had a direct keyboard shortcut annotated. Everything easily discoverable.
Ribbons, I've no idea how the categorize what's popular or not, but 'related' things seem weaker to me, and the context switch price is much higher. Plus there's a need to hunt and kill with a mouse instead of direct with the keyboard.
Number of clicks was the #1 metric because a "pretty" UI would generally add steps and slow everyone down.
Verbose UIs are hard to learn but once learned have much better end-to-end workflows with fewer steps. Simple UIs hide information behind interactive (i.e. slow) workflows and universally hated by customers.
Sadly, many images are broken, but the blog series "Why The New UI" survives on web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...
I find it weird based on my comment that windows and office is built around people who choose not to opt out either by ignoring the dialogs or by knowing what it's used for and hoping their metrics make some difference. Unfortunately I think it's mostly just people wanting to be a part of the product who really participate in user voice a lot of the time so we get weird design choices sticking like the mystery meat cut copy paste in windows 11
Meaning, if a new user is learning your software, how would they expect the next [flow] to go?
Consistency often shapes expectations but when things go how you expect them to, you don't need to learn new mental models.
This can be accomplished by making small changes over time that break up all the new info a user has to learn and avoiding the big UI reveal which people universally hate because all that new learning is required at once and they need to get stuff done.
Often times its required because as a product moves into mass market phase of its life cycle, it needs to be simple to use for lots of people, which mean it doenst work great for any specific goup.
Which is why I'm really in favor of allowing customizations to the user where appropriate. It allows experts to have control over their flow and new users can enjoy the UX optimized for them.