Seems trite. No one is running their display at 800x600 so apps aren't building for it.
And why not compare against actual 2023 Word? The Ribbon collapses down to simplified elements that trigger popups when space constrained. The writing surface dominates.
Also they are comparing draft vs. print layout. Computer display didn't used to have enough pixels to approximate paper, but when they did programs switched to print layout because people liked what-you-see-is-what-you-get. You can still switch back to draft mode where paper margin is collapsed and the content fills up most of the space.
2) The UX at the top is about 25% taller because everything (fonts, icons) is scaled to be about 25% larger in each dimension for readability since people have bigger screens now.
And so actually, usable area has actually increased as a proportion of average consumer screen height.
The original Twitter post is just a silly unfair comparison.
> There's no reason to have a paste button 3-4x the size of other buttons, for example
When Microsoft created the ribbon layout, this was the tail-end of when they were still doing lots of user-research, by putting real users in labs and observing how well they did at common tasks.
So I believe them that having a paste button 3-4x bigger than the size of the other buttons is actually better for the majority of the users.
These days UIs are just all defined by the designer or developers personal preference, without any actual user testing ("personally I just use command-V, why would you even NEED a paste button??!!", "lets make all these icons tiny and gray and obscure because it looks cleaner!!")
Word 6.0 from Windows 3.11 had a print layout on 800x600. I recall it being presented as new at the time but I didn't have any prior experience to compare it against.
> That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.
The ribbon is, and continues to be, garbage. Most days I have to resort to the "Search" function in Office to locate a feature for which I clearly remember the exact menu location from 25 years ago, yet I'll be god damned if I could find it in the ribbon after over 10 minutes of searching.
I can't see how the Ribbon is any better than hunt-and-peck menus. If you can't see what you want on the current Ribbon view you have to click along the various arbitrary Ribbontabs until you find it. But wait, some of them have subsidiary Ribbontabtabs!
One of the many paradoxes that I’ve found (but never figured a reason for) is why I’m able to quickly memorize and find my way to common functions via text-based toolbar menus, but to this day, I STILL have to click through each ribbon menu multiple times, study each icon and struggle to read each label, before finding what I want.
Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
I think this has to do with the varying designs of each ribbon. Menus and their submenus are more like an index, closely following a particular pattern. Ribbons are more like grocery store layouts with variations that shift around and sometimes seem to not follow any rhyme or reason. It's not too surprising that the former of the two is more easily memorized.
Motion patterns in toolbars are strict: you have to start at the top and drill down. This seems like a hindrance, but it means that the motions develop into stronger muscle memory. If you know the names of what you are looking for, you can usually develop the entire shortcut pattern through everyday use, without setting aside practice time(as in a setup like vim or emacs, where you aren't given sufficient prompting to discover and train new interactions automatically).
Ribbons surface more elements to browse in a freeform context, which is correct if you need to discover features...but also conflicts with the goal of a toolbar to be a thin layer over the shortcuts.
One possibility is Mnemonics. You were memorizing the important letters in a text-based menu. Possibly even the keyboard shortcut mnemonics themselves. That's said to be one of the biggest losses in Windows user experience that keyboard mnemonics used to be highlighted at all times with an underline in text menus and then Windows UX switched to only highlighting them when Alt was pressed.
It's something I think about a lot with the Ribbon because it has some really good keyboard mnemonics in Office applications, but mostly only Power Users think to press the Alt button to let them "bubble in" on the Ribbon. The keyboard mnemonic bubbles make great landmarks, and I think that remains one of the reasons I rather like the Ribbon (as a power user) that a lot of people never discover. (In part because I was there a million years ago when Word first lost the underlines and was used to even then pressing Alt on its own just to see them so that behavior carried over to the Ribbon just fine for me, luckily enough.)
One reason could be that the ribbon resizes/hides/collapses buttons depending on the size of the Window. I resizes my word/excel window as I work and it's an ordeal to find the option I want.
This and the hidden ribbons completely ruin the thing for me. But I do tend to like megamenus on other applications, so the problem is probably office, not the ribbons.
Toolbars have text labels. Ribbons have a bunch of small shitty icons on a flat UI background. I can memorize toolbars because it's a set of motions, words, and visual cues. With a Ribbon UI it's a mad search for what I want, hovering over dumb icons to see a label, and repeating that process until I find something. The damn search and rescue process totally blows away my working memory and I won't remember where the button is next time I need it.
It's been a long time since I used Office, but what drove me nuts about the ribbon of that era (not sure if it's still a thing; hopefully not!) is that the "home" ribbon elements weren't replicated in their respective logical tabs (i.e. the home ribbon wasn't just a shortcut palette). Drove me nuts trying to find something when I didn't realize some designer at Microsoft thought the function I was looking for was "essential" and thus deserved to be enshrined in the home tab.
The primary ribbon is supposed to be equivalent to the original default toolbar set, showing the most common options for the current context. The remaining tabs contain what would have been in menus and toolbars. This means that you would have been hunting down options in menus and submenus anyway. In that regard it's no worse than before.
There is a really robust search area, at least as implemented in Office. It will show you where the button is on which ribbontab (at least last I used Office, which was years ago).
So we have:
* Is actually no worse than the existing solution.
* Contains a tool to address limitations carried over from the existing solution.
Correctly implemented ribbons are strictly superior to prior interfaces (ignoring any styling approaches, such as flat UI). The only issue with them is that cheese has been moved, and people are upset about that.
Disagree. The classic toolbar reads easily left to right just like a line of text - clean, simple, consistent. Ordered left to right, with icons grouped like words in a sentence - file operations, editing operations, other less-commonly used operations. Second line reads style operations, formatting, less-commonly used formatting.
The ribbon, on the other hand, reads like someone took all the icons off the toolbars, shook them up in a toybox full of other junk and clutter, and dumped it all out into a messy pile. Randomly sized icons, arrow menus, tabs, just scattered haphazardly all over.
There's no way that can be considered 'strictly superior' to a clean, straightforward, well-organized UI.
I'm not sure your last claim is true, or at least there's no citations.
I never used Word until recently, or any wysiwyg Word processor really.
The ribbon is just confusing. It so happens many of the functions I use are not surfaced, so I have to remember which tiny expando angle to click and that a function I use often is demoted in a ribbon to a smaller icon.
It is pain. Some functions are more visible and surfaced at the expense of added friction in the others. Which functions are surfaced is guess work and statistics. Outliers suffer.
The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level.
I could customise the ribbon, but then when I Google how to do something, my menus don't match the examples!
> The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level.
The ribbon is nothing more than a menu laid out in a grid, rather than a list.
The tool I'm referring to is the search box. It should be on the window chrome, alongside the ribbon tabs. You can find verification of that claim in your copy of Word, or basically any screenshot of it. The source is that it exists.
I'd argue that toolbar gore is only really a problem if the user is stretching the intended use of toolbars, which is to elevate a handful of more important or frequently used functions to the top level of the UI. Of course they're going to break down if the user puts everything on them.
I think the best fix for this problem is to have different sets of toolbars for different tasks, a sort of modality. Ribbons achieve this, but but they also bring odd bits of seemingly arbitrary UI design that can't be changed, like the gigantic paste button in Word's Home ribbon which can't be removed without removing the whole control group. The more uniform/standardized nature of the old toolbars is preferable in my eyes.
That was one of the ostensible reasons, although the real driver likely had more to do with commercial than technical reasons.
There were probably some AOL types who accidentally opened toolbars and couldn't figure out how to close them. But no one who knew how to use Word launched two dozen toolbars as in that infamous image. Keep in mind toolbars (plural) arose from a single bar of tools that was limited with the width of the screen. Someone who knows more than me may want to comment, but my guess was that product groups didn't like seeing their features buried in three layers of flyout menus and used by no one. (Tools...Options...) At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started.
The best explanation of the ribbon I can remember comes from Jensen Harris's old blog[1]. Unfortunately much of his goals and designs were dropped to make the original ship date, leaving the ribbon the mess that it was, and not much better today imho.
The biggest loss was for keyboard users, for whom correctly chorded toolbar mnemonics (win32 parlance: accelerator keys) were dropped for nonsensical ribbon chords where the keyboard letter had almost nothing to do with the desired feature. And to add insult to injury, menu operations that used to happen in milliseconds took nearly full seconds to do the same thing on capable machines of the time (and even today).
> At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started.
I'm pretty sure Office had customizable toolbars, so yes, every menu item should be a toolbar item, but it's unlikely that anyone actually wants them all enabled. And yeah, customizing toolbars is pretty far up the learning curve; so I understand the motivation for the Ribbon, but I managed to stop using office before I had to experience it, so I don't know how well it actually worked.
Yeah, customizability of toolbars to YOUR comfort is also something the modern UX "experts" cannot even fathom. Why would ANYONE of billion of worlds people have different preferences than what they served?!
Not to mention that the ribbon itself is collapsible, so if you unpin it, it hides nicely like a menu bar and when you click an item it shows the sub-items as if it were a traditional menu list from 2000, only horizontal instead of vertical.
I have a 10" LCD as a secondary monitor, positioned above my main display. I wouldn’t want to replace it with anything else, it’s just as perfect for my needs as it gets.
Technically it’s 2K, but it’s so small that I use it at 2× scale. That means its effective resolution is 960 × 540, just 8% more pixels than 800 × 600.
Fair enough, 800x600 is a bit of a stretch. But we have a customer which users have old monitors which maxes out at 1024x768, so our application has to fit that...
As someone's already pointed out; yes they are. That's not the point though. The point is that modern GUI design is godawful, all because when Apple does something, everybody follows unthinkingly.
Apple is the pied pier, leading all the rats off a cliff (unified and locked-down single device, it's coming), and we're the rats who follow blindly. Nobody questions the design decisions, they presume it's good because Apple did it.
> I have no idea why Apple is catching strays in a conversation discussing non-Apple software, for a problem not seen in Apple software
I don't think they're strays or unwarranted. Apple makes icons flat, every else makes icons flat. Apple adds white-space around icons, everyone else does.
I guess I could have been clearer, but we aren't talking about smartphones, much less the fake pixel metrics that were kludged onto CSS to deal with Apple's introduction of retina screens.
And FWIW, little to nothing on the web is optimized for less than 800x600. We work with the fake pixels as just another measurement tool, but actually using most websites with physically less than 800x600 is brutal.
Menu's are. The content is usually just fine. I use 1366x768 on my 24" monitor and snap browsers to 1/2 of the screen. Most work fine...
Some are Funny and you see, Massive Hamburger (1/3 of the screen followed by a Cookie Consent taking another 1/3 of the screen.) -- I don't stay on these sites often.
And why not compare against actual 2023 Word? The Ribbon collapses down to simplified elements that trigger popups when space constrained. The writing surface dominates.