this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?

E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365

Office 2003

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.

Microsoft 365

Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.

Why did this happen?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wow, I still use paint.net. My needs are pretty humble, and it still hits that sweet spot between MS Paint and Gimp.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

no, I'm willing to die on the hill that the ribbon UI is one of the greatest UIs period - especially how it was done in office 07 and 10. As a computer noob at the time, it was a huge improvement over the previous office 2003 UI.

The icons always gave you a good idea what something was doing, important functions were bigger and when you for example selected a table the table tab was visible and with a different color so you knew that you could do things with that table.

I think however many 3rd party programms did the ribbon UI poorly or had not enough features for it to make sense.

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[–] xlash123 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would like to see them add something like the VSCode command pallette. That way if I know the name of the tool but can't remember or don't want to go click for it, I just just type the name and fuzzy find it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Doesn't office already have a very powerful search bar?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I have no problems with it, so I guess I'm some sort of savant? There is such thing as good and bad UI, but I think this is a case of 'what you're used to' causing problems with 'what is.'

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Ohhh I have a feeling you will enjoy this video:

https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI

It's about a dofferent piece of software, but still highly relevant.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Probably so since jackass in a suit could double his annual bonus.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I bet it's capitalism.

The answer for enshittification of the entire reality seems to always be

capitalism.

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