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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like it's going to be the "Ribbon" debacle part deux.

The debut of the Ribbon UI in Office 2007 was the tipping point where I started to look at other platforms and other productivity suites. It made no sense at all to me to switch from literally decades of convention in the UI to something that to this day leaves me frustrated every time I use it (probably because it's not often).

The Ribbon is why I now use a Mac, and don't use Outlook or any Office products.

Windows 8/Metro is going to be another such pivotal moment. It's so different, I wonder how many people are going to say "wow, maybe I ought to look at a Mac / Linux if I have to relearn everything anyway."

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I really like the Ribbon. Just like everyone else I found it a pain to begin with but it didnt take long to adjust and now I much prefer it to digging through menus. The customisation options are also really great.

Is there any research or evidence to suggest that the Ribbon is a UI failure? Office 2012 will use the Ribbon (restyled to look all metro-y).

Pretty sure the ribbon is a brilliant piece of well researched UI work. Definitely a case of people just not wanting to break from the familiar.

The Ribbon is too big. It often looks stupidly redundant (section titles matching action button titles, like Find/Find and Exit/Exit). Icons are overused; it shouldn't be a sin to let "only" a word be the label for something. Mostly it looks like somebody emptied all the drawers onto the top of my desk, forcing me to stare at a pile of junk all day long even though 90% of the time all I need from the pile is my pen.

I agree that the Ribbon is too big. It's certainly not something I want occupying my screen whenever I'm using explorer. Though, when I'm searching for options, I am fine with the Ribbon's presentation. It's fairly intuitive. At least as intuitive as the traditional drop down menu system, though that's probably not saying much.

Fortunately, I believe it can be minimized[1]. I just hope that the minimization carries over between sessions.

1: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/02/dont-p...

In the release preview it's minimised by default.

"Is there any research or evidence to suggest that the Ribbon is a UI failure?"

"The Ribbon is too big" is not research, and is anecdotal evidence at best. I, too, would love to see some actual research into the Ribbon. Programmers and the like hate it, but what about the "average Joe"?

Here's some info I've found:

http://www.wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2010/Faro/DNCOCO/D... http://www.exceluser.com/explore/surveys/ribbon/ribbon-surve...

Personally, I'm a programmer and I have no problem with the ribbon interface.

I tried moving away to other office productivity tools. I found out I can't. Excel is still way too full featured compared to Open/LibreOffice. The UX in Excel is waay superior to LibreOffice.

And kids, that's why I have virtualbox on my machine. Just for Excel.

It will definitely be that way for me. I have been using Windows since version 3.1, but Windows 8 marks the end of the road. I basically have no choice but to switch to Linux full-time at this point. Half the Linux desktops have recently gone insane as well, but at least there are still things like XFCE.

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