Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon 1124
Barence writes "Mozilla has announced that its plans to bring Office 2007's Ribbon interface to Firefox, as it looks to tidy up its 'dated' browser. 'Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menu bar is going away,' notes Mozilla in its plans for revamping the Firefox user interface. '[It will] be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon, [which is] now in Paint and WordPad, too.' The change will also bring Windows' Aero Glass effects to the browser." Update: 09/24 05:01 GMT by T : It's not quite so simple, says Alexander Limi, who works on the Firefox user experience. "We are not putting the Ribbon UI on Firefox. The article PCpro quotes talks about Windows applications in general, not Firefox." So while the currently proposed direction for Firefox 3.7 involves some substantial visual updates for Windows users (including a menu bar hidden by default, and integration of Aero-styled visual elements), it's not actually a ribbon interface. Limi notes, too, that Linux and Mac versions are unaffected by the change.
Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion this is a really, really dumb move. While its all eye-candy and nice, it brings down the usability a lot. If you want to get to the menu, you have to find some button from somewhere obscure location and then the menu will be vertical to begin with, like right-clicking. On top of that its one extra mouse click. I hate the same thing with Office. Another good example is MSN Messenger. I can never find the menu button, and when I do the menu looks just retarted.
The ironic thing is that a menubar is the least intrusive UI object on the screen. It's small, it doesn't get in the way and it goes nicely along with title bar. And you still find everything easily and fast from it.
This doesn't "tidy up" 'dated' browser. There a lot more issues to look at, like UI responsiveness, fast drawing of loading websites and better & smoother scrolling, in which Firefox is actually lacking behind (still wins IE tho, but thats not much)
Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.
Gladly I'm not Firefox user, and even less so with this. It seems Firefox is going more and more to the way of grandma-understands-too. While I myself more and more like the approach Opera takes; feels like a complete suite for browsing. Maybe it'll gain more marketshare for Opera in power users, who still value usability and the simple efficient things like menu bars.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Interesting)
However, I will believe this change when I see it.
Ecchhh... (Score:3, Interesting)
I despise the ribbon more than MS itself. What is it in the human psyche that insists on breaking things that work? There are so many other issues to address -- why screw up a perfectly usable user interface, by replacing it with an illogical hodge-podge that, if nothing else, requires user retraining? What problem is being solved? And is it really being solved?
If you don't believe me, ask a collection of users to perform a task with the existing UI, then change to the ribbon and repeat the process. If not convinced, give the users a week to adjust to the ribbon, and repeat the test. I think you'll find that users burdened by the ribbon will perform their tasks significantly slower than those using the more efficient menu system.
why??? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, a web browser doesn't need that many context sensitive too bar elements. Chrome, Safari and even IE 8 already has a very simplified and usable tool bar (with one or two drop down menus for more detailed options - hardly requiring a ribbon).
i just don't really get this...
Clever. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's really clever. The Ribbon is fully available to any application that doesn't compete with Office... I would have never thought about a web browser as being within that fold, but it most certainly is. IE is not part of the office ecosystem. This is smart move towards integration and a clever way to utilize the platform. However, there likely will be some backlash from purists. Might I suggest a branch of Firefox not unlike Camino for Mac? Perhaps a Windows-centric version of the Mozilla browser would be in order to better provide for the range of needs and interests in the community.
The Office 2007 ribbon is very effective for exposing contextual functionality, but it's also capable of being a lightweight interface. I am curious to see how Firefox implements this. I wouldn't anticipate it being nearly as wide open as Office's ribbon, with much of its functionality likely hidden in the globe.
Alongside some Windows 7 integration, these features could go far towards making Firefox more of a native browser and less of a competing visual element in Windows.
Can they actually do that? (Score:3, Interesting)
It was my understanding that the ridiculous license Microsoft chose for the "Office Ribbon" prevented competitors from using the office ribbon concept unless they paid a hell of a lot of money up front. Does that apply only to competitors of Office? That seems remarkably narrow-sighted for Microsoft's contract lawyers.
I assume the Linux versions of Firefox will continue to use the "messy" menus.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:3, Interesting)
if i were firefox I would check to make sure Microsoft hasn't pattented this.
I would generally agree with that research. (Score:5, Interesting)
I fully expected to hate that damn ribbon, but the reluctant truth is that I find the more I use it the more generally useful it becomes -- especially for exposing semi-obscure but useful Microsoft Word features (like creating cross references). Still, there's a catch. When it doesn't work it falls flat on its face and you spend the next three hours trying to figure out how to do something that should only have taken 5 minutes.
the haters won't notice, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The screenshot [pcpro.co.uk] in TFA looks nothing like the Office ribbon. The purpose of the ribbon is to make apparent the options the are usually buried within expanding hierarchical menus. In the screenshot it looks to me like they just replaced pulldown menus with pulldown buttons.
I love the Office ribbon and would be very happy to see this standard propagate into more user interfaces. I'd love to see it implemented in Firefox, but I see no such thing here.
Re:Usability at the cost of oldies (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Ribbon takes more vertical space than the simple menubar. Theres lots of horizontal space to waste, but no vertical (and even more so with the move to HD dimensions)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability.
This is actually a point of contention among usability engineers.
The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive.
Intuitive is a rather subjective term. Rather the question is how learnable it is and how functional.
There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
The learning curve for new interfaces can be problematic. Any change will meet some resistance. MS's ribbon will probably meets more than most because of vocal minorities and because the coupled it with a switch that temporarily eliminated some features. So power users of Word were frustrated partly by a new interface but also because they assumed they could perform a task and the interface was preventing them, when in truth the task had become impossible coinciding with the new interface.
Putting features in front of the user rather than 3 to 4 deep in a menu system is far more intuitive.
The problem is if the needed feature is in front of the user and determining what is needed where. If a menu system is more than three levels deep, you've failed as a UI designer.
In fact I think the office ribbon layout is due to a massive amount of consumer research on Microsoft's Behalf.
The consensus I've seen seems to be that it is based off of the the U of W's Decision-Theoretic UI project, but where MS was unable to get it to work properly so they scrapped the fundamental adaptive nature and just kept the UI style. The underlying concept resulted in mixed results for UI designers in the first place, so maybe that isn't too terrible and the design of the elements they copied were at least sensible and obeyed fundamental principals of UI design.
MS does not seem to have published their usability testing (if they did it and followed the results which is always a question with MS) but have published PR pieces claiming that user studies show improved usability; of course not publishing that underlying study either. Scholarly works to date seem to contradict their claims, but some of those were a little less than methodical in implementation. I think MS managed to piss a lot of people off and introduce a new UI scheme which is questionable but not terrible in and of itself.
I Already Do This (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually completely hide the textual menu with the addon Hide Menubar. I still leave the standard back, forward, reload and friends, but only because they're on the same bar as the address bar, which I pretty much always want visible.
I started doing this after realizing that the only elements of Firefox's UI that I actually use with any frequency is the address bar and quick search bar. For the rest of it, I'd rather just have a larger viewport. If I need the menus i just press ALT, which is consistent with the rest of a Windows Vista/7 UI that hides menubars. Incidentally, the most common reason for me to need the textual menus is to unclose a tab. This is a feature I need regularly, but not terribly frequently compared to most other functions. I hate that it's buried in the History menu - I just don't make that connection. It's also very hard to bind to mouse gestures in the common mouse gesture addons (Usability be damned, I heart my mouse gestures).
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
The kind of feedback you are talking about is useful for tweaking a UI, not for coming up with a novel UI concept to begin with. The kind of 'advanced research' I'm talking about is the sort of stuff that came up with the concepts in the first place. You may want to read some of Brenda Laurel's publications on human/computer interaction, that was the stuff that got bastardized into Bob and Clippy. The idea for the ribbon interface also came out of university research, not Microsoft's labs.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a hardcore Sony fan and never even held an Xbox controller, but having recent picked up an Xbox 360 I have to say I LOVE the controller. The PS controllers now feel clunky and just ergonomically wrong.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. I imagine it'll be called EpiphanyForWindows, WebkitFF3Theme, FirefoxLite, or something similar. Chances are though, that the Firefox project itself will just plough ahead with this stupid idea, and ignore everyone who disagrees. Any project that fixes it is likely to be a third-party effort.
Whatever. I'm just waiting for a stable version of Chrome that has adblock support.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:3, Interesting)
so why does all linux distro look like windows?
Running Slackware64 13.0 with WindowMaker here (sometimes FluxBox). Scares Windows people like yourself, but it does come with KDE if you are that way inclined.
See, most popular Linux distros "look like Windows", i.e. come with KDE or GNOME as the default desktop to appeal to the Windows crowd, to make them feel at home, so that their learning curve isn't too steep.
However, their is a vast choice of desktop environments (e.g. KDE, GNOME, XFCe, GNUstep) and window managers so you get you use the one you like best rather than the single one that the OS vendor thinks you should be using.
I like the choice. Most people don't and they are quite welcome to stay with Windows or Mac OS X if that's what floats their boats.
Windows doesn't float mine, so I'll stick to Slackware Linux and Slamd64. I won't tell you what you should and shouldn't use. That's your choice. It's entirely your own business, not mine.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that drives me nuts about Office 2007's menu is that I'll use a function on something, then move to a different part of the document and discover that the function I just used is gone, even though it would still be valid. Then I'm forced to flip through the various ribbon tabs to find the function on a different ribbon that looks different and has slightly different options (oh, this one has blue and grey instead of blue and pink for some reason). It drives me nuts. I'm forever hunting around on the stupid ribbon for wherever the function I want wandered off to.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps most of that menu should be in a "Character Encoding" dialog box, maybe with tabs and pull-down lists, kind of like the Tools->Options dialog. It's a matter of using the right UI tool for the job.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:3, Interesting)
Or they could have made the default option for Personalized Menus 'off' for Office XP/2003. None of this 'word processor trying to be smarter than you' stuff-- I prefer my menu layouts to be deterministic, thank you.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:2, Interesting)
I second vimperator, I've been using it for quite a while now. I first started using it because it was the easiest way to maximize the amount of screen real estate for the actual web page, putting all the menu options out of the way. I don't use all the shortcuts, but it's definitely my favorite plugin.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:1, Interesting)
There actually is: http://www.askvg.com/insert-classic-menubar-and-toolbar-in-microsoft-office-2007/ [askvg.com]
Paying $20 for a third party program to friggen change a menu isn't nearly as nice as it would have been to have a native free "2003 Office Theme" included in 2007.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition to the pther people kicking your ass, I'd like to say that using (by default, which most users won't even ask if it can be changed) non-standard images to "advertise" a feature makes me slow down when scanning. It might have been a good idea, but visually I can't quickly see what I'm doing.
Some things are similar and therefore grouped. some are basically menus which vertically drop down. Some bring up a windowless dialog type, where older versions would have popped up a dialog (I prefer this actually, since the dialog is usually modal). Some are on/off buttons, some actually do something without additional interaction.
Like everything else, they had a good idea and good intentions, but implemented it in a very unusable way.
From left to write: paste, cut/copy, font selection, alignment, wrap text, styles all work differently. Paste actually has two places - the "Paste" command itself, and the dropdown which duplicates the formatting tool that comes up after pasting. Conditional formatting looks like pixel editing in MSPaint. Format as table looks like a paintbrush tool. The "Editing" section is misnamed, should have been whatever is short for "operations on multiple cells".
Did you know you can click what looks like a "close" button on the bottom left and open up a dialog? Oh, but for "Paste" it brings up a sidebar. Only half of them on the Home page have the option to click.
Last for now, I have to select WHICH ribbon is showing using the very menu-like selections of "Home, Insert," etc.
It's a great idea, but just terrible implementation. Whatever project manager was responsible for this, and similar disasters throughout the Windows ecosystem, should be removed from the gene pool. we don't need that kind of help.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:2, Interesting)
I use the menu bar in a browser for maybe one thing on a regular basis... organize bookmarks. I very seldom use the context menu. The only things I really care about in a browser is a tool bar with bookmark icons. On the Mac I had to download a GUI addon for Firefox to even get those, which was a little annoying, though I sure appreciate Firefox allowing it at all. Don't think Safari supports bookmark icons at all which is why I'm not using it. Only way I load web pages I look at every day is by the pretty little icons on the tool bar. Safari with its grizzly black on dark gray space wasting text completely sucks by comparison. Best thing any GUI engineer can do to a browser as far as I'm concerned is make the bookmark toolbar with icons(no text please) ROCK.
It must be lost on the Firefox GUI engineers with too much time on their hands that the menus ain't broke, so don't "fix" them. I'm serious, leave it alone. People don't use menus in a browser enough for them to be worth bothering with. The tool bars are the only thing that matter. In a word processor you use the menus a LOT so work flow matters. Menu work flow in a browser is nearly irrelevant. Anything resembling eye candy around the edges is also a foolish waste of time and bandwidth. People just want their browser to render the browser page... FAST. Mr. Browser... this ain't about you... its about the content so do your best to be light, fast and stay out of the way, and refrain from becoming a giant steaming pile of bloat, THANKS.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:3, Interesting)
...isn't nearly as nice as it would have been to have a native free "2003 Office Theme" included in 2007.
Didn't you KNOW? Moving the functions from one menu to another is part of Microsoft's "innovation"!
I've had to use MS Office since the mid-1990s, and going from one version to another to do what I had to do was a simple matter of re-learning what menus the functions I needed were placed under[1]... ...until Office 2007. That interface has to be THE MOST RETARDED idea they've ever come up with, and I'm saying it nicely.
---
[1] No, OOo was not an option in my workplace. Too often, applications we were "permitted" to use were kept on a short leash.
For The Love Of God... (Score:2, Interesting)
F the ribbon!
While I'm at it, I'm tired of the shit force-feedings, so F the cloud & F web2.(h)0, too.
Re:Repeat after me, (Score:3, Interesting)
It says toggle, I'm assuming the idea is that you hold it down for a second and then the menu switches from one to the other until you do that again. And like all mozilla options, it will probably be set-able in about:config
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:1, Interesting)
...quite possibly the best user interface I know of, because the basic design hasn't changed since the days of the horseless carriage.
No. People like what they are used to, but there is no automatic connection between time and usability. My father was brought up with a currency here in the UK that until 1971 was a total headfuck [wikipedia.org]. You should have seen the howls of pain from those who tried to make out that base 10 was utterly confusing.
How on earth you can equate longevity with usability is utterly beyond me.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are using a netbook, this has to be about the dumbest thing possible.
I have a 28" desktop monitor and it seems rediculously wasteful even under that setup.
There should be LESS of this menubar AND iconbar nonsense, not more of it.
No wonder old msoffice users go running and screaming into the night when they see this crap.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because they hate change, not because the Ribbon is a worse UI.
Basically, their opinion has nothing to do with:
1) Whether the Ribbon is a better or worse UI
2) Whether they are more productive with the Ribbon than without it
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that those Excel users who marked "hate it" are more productive using it. I know I am, and I consider myself a pretty advanced Excel user. (Of course, I'm also open-minded and don't have a problem with change.)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently Microsoft thinks otherwise - and they have hard data from the actual clickstream of Excel users. The whole reason they introduced the ribbon (and got rid of the awful UI "improvements" of Office XP and 2003) was that (a) other than the top 10 commands, everyone uses a different subset of Office functionality, and (b) the top 10 feature requests were already in Office. Everyone thinks Office is bloated, but just like pork-barrel politics, everyone means something different by "bloat".
Office had already grown way past the point where you could discover a feature by reading all the menus; that's why they tried Personalized Menus and Task Panes and all that. According to Microsoft's data, the ribbon is more discoverable than the old UI - though obviously it requires relearning, and thus rediscovering a bunch of functions all at once.
That said, Firefox clearly doesn't have the massive command vocabulary of Office, and I can't imagine there are any Firefox features that were too hard to find via menus. This seems more like copycatting.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
Haven't we had that argument a couple of times here already? Anyway : the reason you had trouble with it is not because it isn't intuitive, it's because you're very fluent with and accustomed to the old UI.
Don't think so, it violates quite a few basic rules of UI design. I know there are issues with the old 7+/-2 rule, but a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of non-intuitive icons is hard to search, it takes more screen real-estate than necessary, and is hostile to touch typists who don't want to have to keep moving their hand from keyboard to mouse and back (Alt-F S has become Alt H F D F -- double the keystrokes).
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:1, Interesting)
He's way too biased to make meaningful comments? What kind of bullshit is that? There's not one person who isn't biased. Just people who pretend not to be.
The big difference between finding something on a menu and finding it on the ribbon is the time it takes. A menu, almost by definition, has text, which you can *immediately* read. On the ribbon, you have to wait for the tooltips to appear, which takes about 1 second for each thing you want to see. Far far slower.
And don't give me that shit about how 1 second isn't very long. Add up a lot of single seconds and eventually you'll have a lifetime. This concept that people should put up with changing things to take longer every time to help people learn to do it their first time has to go.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, as you pointed out, some of the more intermediate features that I never really used or understood before are more prominent, and actually more useful.
It wasn't a perfect transition. It took me a few minutes to figure out how the new single/double spacing is implemented, and I'm sure lots of people will point to that as proof that the new interface blows. Oh well.
Of course, I might just be feeling adventurous having just upgraded to Slackware 13 and spending the last few weeks figuring out KDE4
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:4, Interesting)
The current interface presents a nice CLEAN list of commands, which can be quickly and easily scanned. The new ribbon interface presents a confusing mess of pictures and words that make a "quick scan" very difficult.
Yeah, but there's a trade off here. In the old office menu system, you'd often find what you're looking for buried in a menu somewhere with a half-assed dialog box to go along with it. Sure, you could scan each menu every time fairly quickly, and it was easy on the eyes. But once you found what you were looking for, repeating the path there really sucked.
One thing the new system does get right is that everything now has a keyboard short cut and everything is supposedly quicker to get to with less mouse acrobatics. The only reason you're used to the menu system is you've been trained since windows 95 to get good at navigating menus so you don't notice anymore.
I'm sure if you took two people, started one up with a ribbon, started the other with a menu, and then switched them after about a year, they'd both immediately complain. But that's obvious. The real question is after a month or so of training and learning, who will be performing better and is that performance change (if any) worth it?
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
> (Heck, Windows has pretty much _always_ had one of the most responsive UIs.)
(grabs paper towel to wipe Diet Mountain Dew from the display... AFTER blowing as much as possible from nose once the coughing stopped)
Windows has always had one of the easiest-to-hang UIs (with the possible exception of pre-OSX MacOS and PalmOS) of any modern OS, thanks to Microsoft's retarded architectural philosophy of putting the application in charge of managing its own UI effects and redrawing itself on demand. It's why a badly-written Win32 app can't be minimized, usually can't have its window moved, might swallow its mouse pointer, and needs ctrl-alt-delete to be involuntarily killed. It allows the consequences of that braindamaged app to spread beyond the application itself, and affect the working of every OTHER running application, too.
It's why a 20+ year old Amiga running at 7.16MHz had a UI that was, in many ways, more responsive than Windows running on a 3GHz quadcore i7. Intuition (the Amiga's window manager) was completely indifferent to the state of running applications. If you clicked a close gadget, it XOR'ed the nanosecond you clicked the button, and returned to normal the moment you released it. The app itself might have crashed beyond repair 20 minutes earlier, and the gesture might achieve nothing besides the visual indication of a close-gadget click, but at least there was zero doubt in your mind that the click was made. If you saw the colors invert, and the app didn't close, you knew INSTANTLY it was hopeless, and just cycled the power. There was no "did Windows see my mouse click?" ambiguity.
Ditto, for window moves. If an app died a horrible death and froze, you could still move the window, and its contents obediently moved right along with it. The hardware didn't care... bitmap bits were bitmap bits. You could cover and uncover the window, and it looked exactly like it did before. Unlike Windows, Intuition genuinely didn't *care* whether the app was still working. It did its thing, and got out of the way. Compare that to Vista, XP, and just about everything since the invention of Active Desktop... where you might not even be able to show the Start menu for ~45 seconds if something in a web page being requested by FIREFOX (an app completely unrelated to Windows) or IE causes a fractured DNS lookup to hang Explorer's stupid, brain-damaged single-threaded name resolver that gets used for everything from DNS lookups to figuring out the meaning of "C:\" It's not *quite* as bad under SMP as it used to be with a single core/CPU... but it still happens, and it's still incredibly annoying when it does.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
<sarcasm>Yes, I'm sure that's what he meant. You have to spend 336 hours straight studying the Office ribbon before you can use it correctly.</sarcasm>
His point (which I agree with), is that all things being equal, the ribbon is a better interface than the file menu. Of course all things are not equal. You've been practicing on that clunky "Word for Windows" file menu for 15 years. It may take you a little time to retrain yourself. People like myself, on the other hand, don't use Office regularly, and find the new interface much easier to use.
Microsoft is taking a calculated risk to separate themselves from their competitors. I think it was a good decision.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:2, Interesting)
Another literal interpretation simply for the sake of hating on change. Do you really think I meant that each user has to spend 80 hours learning the menu? No - I meant each user acclimates over the course of roughly 2 weeks or otherwise normal application usage. Real-time lost? Who knows, minutes?
How many functions in the application do you regularly use? 10? 20? Crap, if it takes you 80 hours to learn where 20 functions are, even if they were hidden down 400 menus deep, then I'd have to question your cognitive abilities and wonder whether you should actually be using a computer in the first place.
I think this most
Slick. Look forward to the improvements. Thanks. (Score:1, Interesting)
The mock ups on the mozilla site show some very good usability ideas. Fitt's Law for the expanded window among them.
Buttons vs menus has seemed to mirror a mandatory trade-off between novice approachability and expert speed. I saw this in practice when I had to develop an Excel "data base" for my sister when I had not used Excel in years - living as I do in Linux. The buttons instead of menus seemed a bad solution in favor of the novice. Yet over 3 hours I found it was well organized and provided all the same functionality. Understanding that 3 hours is very far from expert. Yet as on old XEmacs user I think I can speak for what would have worked as an expert. Hot keys and 'show a menu' buttons can still be there.
Screen real estate is valuable particularly on the new netbooks. Moving the tabs into the top title area is slick. Allowing the controls to be with the affected page uses fewer cognitive brain cycles. Showing the 'will go to address' in the location bar preserves that vital (security) information at low cost.
As far as being "not standard". Your browser is not some minor app that is used infrequently. If I can learn to use Excel's ribbon in 3 hours while developing something, I think most people should be able to deal with it. Or find the "do the old thing" setting.
I studied UI a bit and had classes with Don Norman before he went to Apple. Firefox, great ideas, please do this.
Michael
10 years as a professional developer.
(really ancient \. number, from the slakware on floppies days, but no idea where it is.)
phone support (Score:2, Interesting)
The ribbon is horrible for phone support. Before, I could say "click Edit, click Paste", and the user would know exactly what I mean. Now, I have to say "click the icon that looks like...". Not to mention the fact that emailed instructions now need to include all sorts of graphics instead of just plain text. In short, ribbons are a suppiort nightmare.
GUI design is not common sense (Score:3, Interesting)
disclaimer: I use a Mac, I've never used the Ribbon UI, and I'm an HCI professor. These two facts make me competent to talk about it.
In short: Microsoft (which I do not support usually) people has done a lot of work usability-wise (see the end of this msg): no it's not eye-candy.
It's ok for some people used to the old interface to complain: they have to learn new ways of interacting, it's costly, but the designer's bet is that it will pay off in terms of efficiency at the end. ALL interfaces need users to learn before (hopefully) becoming efficient. Changing for changing will only oblige users to forget what they've learnt. But changing for more efficiency is valuable, and that's what Ribbon designers claimed they have done, and it seems the processus they have used to design the thing is good. I think you can't blame them for that.
A link about the story of the Ribbon: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx [msdn.com]
In summary:
word 1: 50- menu items Word 2003: 250+ (not counting toolbars, small property windows etc)
something has to be done
design took five years
Designers have:
Visited people at their workplace
Visited people in their home
Invited people into our labs for freeform working and discussion
amassed over 10,000 hours of video of people using Office, Over 3 billion data sessions collected from Office users ~2 million sessions per day
Over the last 90 days, theyâ(TM)ve tracked 352 million command bar clicks in Word
tracked nearly 6000 individual data points
Analysis:
Which commands do people use most?
How are commands commonly sequenced together?
Which commands are accessed via toolbar, mouse, keyboard?
Where do people fail to find functionality theyâ(TM)re asking for(in newsgroups, support calls,etc.)?
They also iterate a lot to find new solutions, and they evaluate the solutions until they were satisfying.