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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. This (and Fitt's Law) is actually why the ribbon UI came about. 80% of the most common stuff is right there, and you can customize or search for the rest.

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Yeah, I actually saw a presentation at Microsoft's Mix (the web-oriented conference they ran for a while) about the ribbon. I never loved the ribbon but it was really an attempt to deal with all the features that maybe 1% (at most) of users ever utilized but that those (many different) 1%s REALLY cared about.

One of the reasons I like Google Workplace. I'm mostly not a power user these days so the simpler option set really works for me even if I very rarely run into something I can't quite do like I'd prefer.

Even before the ribbon they had identified and were trying to deal with the problem. I think either office 2000 or xp had the 'traditional' drop down menus but would hide less-used items until you clicked a little ≫ expander at the bottom, the downside being that would change the layout of the menu a bit as less/most-used changed which works against learning what items are located where.

Even if you were the 99% user, the ribbon solved the problem with toolbars.

Word had like 20 different toolbars. If you wanted to work with tables, you had to open the Table toolbar. If you wanted to work with WordArt, you opened the WordArt toolbar. You could be the 99% user and still end up with 10 toolbars open even if you only needed one button on a certain toolbar. On a small monitor, half your screen consisted of your document and the other half toolbars.

I can’t remember if you could customize toolbars but not a lot of people would spend the time to do that. I sure never did.

> I can’t remember if you could customize toolbars but not a lot of people would spend the time to do that. I sure never did.

You could, but the typical user only did few customizations (if any).

Not only that, but in photoshop and word dialogs for features released in 1995 had different design conventions from dialogs from feature released in 1999. Not UI controls and stuff like that (everything was still using win32), but the design language itself. Like how to display things to user or how to align buttons and stuff like that.

If anything this kind of layout patterns are better today than they were back then. What the OP is complaining about was ALWAYS a problem for any long-lived software. But given how much _older_ some software is today it is no wonder it is way more noticeable.

Win95 had a bunch of Win3.1 settings dialogs just like Win11 still has a bunch of Windows98 setting dialogs (the network adapter TCP/IP configuration one comes to mind).

I mean just look at this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/l85hsx/windows_3...

In Win11, the old-style settings dialogs are the good ones, that allow you to change the settings.

Photoshop used a custom UI toolkit which automatically generated the dialogs layout based on a description of their contents (string field, boolean, color picker, ...)

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