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Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.
Weirdly as someone who has used both styles heavily, I'd say the ribbon is more practical than the old toolbars. There's more contextual grouping and more functional given the tabs and search, plus the modern flat design is less distracting, which is what I'd want from a productivity application. Also for me two rows of toolbars & a menu is about the same height as the ribbon anyway, and you can collapse the ribbon if you want to use the space
Flat design may be less distracting to you but that also means it's less clear, because there are fewer obvious demarcation.
I despise flat design, it's downright awful design, and done for looks rather than functionality.
Even saying it's "less distractive" supports this.
Microsoft also did this to obfuscate features, which is pretty apparent when you consider new users used to "discover" features via the menu system. I supported Office for MS in the early days, and this was a huge thing at the time. It was discussed heavily when training on new versions.
Flat design may be less distracting to you but that also means it's less clear, because there are fewer obvious demarcation.
I despise flat design, it's downright awful design, and done for looks rather than functionality.
to you
Flat design dominates for a reason—the less visually busy something is, the easier it is for users to wrap their heads around it. This gets proven again and again in user studies, the more busy and dense you make things, the more users miss stuff and get lost.
People's opinions on the ribbon specifically are obviously all subjective, but I would say the less distracting design would be the one done less for looks, rather it's a pretty utilitarian design if you pick it apart. This is an interface for productivity tools, and as such the interface should get out of your way until you need it—the ribbon just does that better IMO.
Microsoft also did this to obfuscate features, which is pretty apparent when you consider new users used to "discover" features via the menu system. I supported Office for MS in the early days, and this was a huge thing at the time. It was discussed heavily when training on new versions.
Why on earth would Microsoft want to obfuscate features? There's no way that motivation would ever make sense.
IIRC one of the main reasons Microsoft introduced the ribbon was that grouping functionality contextually helped users discover features, because people kept requesting features that already existed, but they just couldn't find. I remember there being a blog on the Microsoft developer site about the making of it that went into this.
Yeah, does anyone else remember the menu bars that would show up and disappear depending on what you were doing? Those were awful--the ribbon method of context-specific tabs is better (IMO).
I prefer the ribbon. It makes everything easier to discover and use.
It's also entirely configurable so i was able to tailor it specifically to my needs, even include button for my macro, logically grouped and not thrown together with no heads or tail in a "macro" submenu.
It also allows widgets with much richer informational content than menus.
The ribbon is also entirely keyboard navigable with visual hints. Which means you can use anything mouse free without having to remember rarely used shortcuts.
And if the ribbon takes too much space, and you can't afford a better screen, you can hide and show it with ctrl-F1 or a click somewhere (probably).
It's actually a much much better UX than menus and submenus and everything hidden and zero adaptability. At least for tools like the office apps with a bazillion functions.
Most copies of the ribbon are utter shit though because the people who copied didn't understand the strength of the office ribbon and only copied the looks superficially.
It's funny to see people still hung up on the ribbon 17 years later.
It's because of people like you that we still use qwerty on row staggered keyboards from the mechanical typewriter era. ;)
Funny story, before they did the 2007 redesigns, they asked users what they wanted to be added; 95% said features that were already in Office.
The Ribbon was designed to make features more findable.
Alas.
The ribbon is one thing, the flat design and obfuscating tools/settings are a far bigger issue.
What makes it even worse is that screens got wider and shorter, but the new designs use more vertical space than before, leaving even less height to do anything in.
16:9 was pushed on us because it was cheaper to produce on mass for tv and pc. 16:9 was better for movies.
There are some monitors from just before this massive market manipulation and those have 16:10, sometimes with display port before hdmi was even mainstream.
Apple is actually one of the few companies to make the jump from 4:3 to 16:10 avoiding the 16:9 with very few exceptions.
To this day i see people work with old software designed for the area of more vertical screens but doing so on screens designed for movies.
Most people dont even understand what i mean when i explain this. But the good thing is my issue with it was considered a disability so they had to accommodate me with something more sensible.
Sorry long comments but this is a personal vice for me.
My $300 32 inch IPS 16:9 monitor laughs hard at my old $2000 19 inch 4:3 CRT.
If you are on a desktop, it's insane how both cheap and good monitors have become.
Still I absolutely agree, wasting vertical space is more annoying than horizontal.
Why did this happen?
The cynical but probably truer than we'd like to admit answer is "middle managers who bring nothing to the table but need to 'make big changes' to justify that promotion they've been chasing."
Source: Pretty much all corporations at this point have these people, my sister's ex-husband is one at Google.
Change for the sake of change is so dumb. I'm tired of pointless UI changes every so many years because some middle manager and their designers need to wow some dumb exec to get a promotion and they do so just by rearranging all the existing functionality because the product itself is already a complete solution that doesn't actually need a new version. Sadly, this mentality even creeps into FOSS spaces. Canonical and Ubuntu wanting to reinvent the wheel with Unity, Mir, Snap, etc. GNOME radically changing their UI all the time.
Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It's been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.
To be fair to the Open Source community, Canonical is a private company, and so it's not really a shocker that they keep promoting bullshit tied to their own ecosystem. Especially with someone like Mark Shuttleworth involved, he was one of the early rich out of touch space tourists, long before Bezos looked like an idiot coming back from space. The profit motive always infects everything it touches.
This is so true of so many companies nowadays. The fact of the matter is that the big leaps in profit/efficiency/effectivness have basically all happened in most of these industries and so often people are pressed to make these sweeping changes because there isn't any real way to improve on a system like this.
Reading Ed Zitron's coverage of the Google antitrust cases is pretty eye opening.
Mostly because it says basically what you just said: we've already reached pretty much peak efficiency in these forms, and since they can't bleed out more money via "efficiency" they're now leaning towards "How many customers can I piss off while increasing ad interactions by 1%?" As Zitron points out, they're literally chasing tiny percentage points of growth through "how many people can we piss off and still grow?" instead of offering anything new and useful. It's just "we're entrenched, so why would we try anything risky at all ever?" all the way down.
I love Ed. He is a fantastic writer.
Corpos are down voting you because their butts hurt. You are right.
Honestly I like ribbons quite a lot as a design framework and hell, even padding can improve the UX, it's just a shame that neither of these elements have been used well in a decade.
The old file menu was way more functional if you needed to be keyboard only.
In a world that loves to tout "efficiency" sprawling GUIs and mouse-click-everything has drastically reduced efficiency when a keyboard + shortcuts + macros are far more efficient.
The further we stray from the CLI the further we stray from God. CLI-nliness is next to Godliness.
Look to the atheist. He does not use the command line because he secretly believes. He does so because he knows it's good.
Agreed. I'm sure if I was heads down in Excel for years beforehand it would be a significant downgrade, but as a casual user, making better use of some of the more advanced features became so, SO much easier with the Ribbon.
The Ribbon isn't the worst thing. It tried to solve the clutter of the previous interface, although I always preferred the old one.
Here is an interesting take on the problem of modern interfaces: https://datagubbe.se/decusab/
I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get "the new ribbon UI!"
The answer was never, incidentally.
Wow, I still use paint.net. My needs are pretty humble, and it still hits that sweet spot between MS Paint and Gimp.
There's been a trend towards simplicity/minimalism in UX for a long time. Sometimes it works really well. Other times it makes it difficult to find things like setting preferences (or they just don't implement them because the assholes think they know better than you).
For me, MS is a mixed bag. Some of the UX changes are good, some of it is horrible.
But I love a well done minimalist UX. Obsidian and Reaper are two examples that come to mind.
The ribbon is better than menus. They're even customizable. And lots of non-Microsoft software uses ribbons, too.
Plus there's a search function right at the top if you can't find the option you're looking for
The ribbon was introduced in Office 2007. The backsliding started a long time ago.
View-> Then the little v arrow in the right. Switch to tabs only, the Ribbon UI will now only appear when you click one of the titles like home or View.
Everyone wanted to compete with Apple
You can use OpenOffice which hasn't adopted any new UI since 1998.
Yeaaah, don't use open office, it hasn't had any code updates in like 15 years. Use and suggest libre office instead.
Except that OpenOffice has been forked into LibreOffice in like 2010 and has since gotten an optional ribbon UI.
