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Comment by cpburns2009 | Hacker News Reader

cpburns2009

The real question one should ask is: should you use a ribbon design?

Ribbon UI is very discoverable. I bet most people would have a better chance of picking up a feature-rich program such as AutoCAD nowadays than back in the time of menus and toolbars.

CAD packages are a good example, really. They tend to have tons of features, which are fairly easy to find with a ribbon, but also have lots of configurability (hideable toolbars) and speed features (radial menus) for power users. But the balance is hard to strike - if anything they tend to have too many ways of doing things, and not good enough defaults.

The current incarnation of Microsoft Office products' UI is a mess too. Buttons and search bars all over the chrome of the windows (what used to be the title bar), most of the old Alt+letter codes still working, and ribbon 'tabs' that bring up full-page menus (the File menu). My answer to your probably-rhetorical question is yes, you should use a ribbon design in a windowed app, to provide a baseline level of making the features easy-to-find. The difficult part is adding more powerful power-user features or most-used features without turning the interface into a big mess.

Oddly enough, I find the Mac versions of Office much easier to use because they still have a menu system where everything sits still and behaves itself.

If the UI of an application involves a huge deeply nested menu of actions that directly modify the visual look of the data being worked on, then a Ribbon might be the right paradigm.

The Ribbon UI was a huge improvement to Excel and Word. I'm kind of mixed on how it has been used in other places.

> If the UI of an application involves a huge deeply nested menu of actions that directly modify the visual look of the data being worked on, then a Ribbon might be the right paradigm.

I would add to this 'and your user base already has a well-established set of paradigms in mind when using your product.' Part of the reason that the Ribbon works for MS products is that they had to make their UI backwards compatible with decades of user intuition, which required carrying forward a lot of baggage. The Ribbon is necessary because they not only have to include a huge array of functionality, they also have to include dozens of ways to accomplish the same task presented so that they feel familiar to an enormous and diverse user base. If you could design Word/Excel from the ground up to optimize for efficiency and usability, but with zero prior user expectations, the UI would probably be radically different.

> If you could design Word/Excel from the ground up to optimize for efficiency and usability, but with zero prior user expectations, the UI would probably be radically different.

Word and Excel have so many options, I am not sure if there is an intuitive way to design the UI.

At some point, software of a certain complexity is going to have a learning curve. Making it so that things are placed naturally along that curve is probably the best that can be done.

Excel also needs to be optimized for power users, and those power user optimizations align with much different UX goals than making something easy to use and discover. There is this weird cliff in the middle of Excel use, where doing basic things is pretty simple thanks to the ribbon, doing slightly harder things is frustrating, and then doing all this super cool advanced stuff really fast is actually pretty damn easy if you watch a couple hours of youtube tutorial videos, but there is no chance of figuring it out on your own!

Yes. As soon as it came out all of the non-computer people I know said, “wow, this is awesome”. No matter what you think about purity or other concepts of how things “should” be, the fact is it made using these programs far more accessible to the average user than they were before, and that’s really the point of computing.

Honestly I don't mind the ribbon UI. It might not be the best approach for all applications, but I think it's appropriate or at least not harmful in MS Office. It's not much different than a menu, functionally, but the persistence and contextual responsiveness I think adds something.

As much as I'm against software patents, I do love the idea of companies like Microsoft using them on GUIs.

Bad GUI design will eventually literally be against the law.

> wants "bad UI" outlawed

> implies Ribbon is "good UI"

o_O

I'm not saying traditional menus are the end-all-be-all of GUIs, but from there to assuming the ribbon is "good" there is quite a jump. I personally find it very difficult to locate anything on Ribbon bars.

Edit: hey, HN banning emojis?

^_^ If something is patented, it will become illegal to use. Hopefully /all/ proprietary patterns become patented, and then perhaps only good patterns will be left :P

Nope, not banning emojis. You got the parent post backward and made fun of the completely-wrong thing you thought it was saying. I'm pretty sure that's what got you the downvotes.

What they actually meant: Ribbons are bad UI, so if Microsoft hold a patent covering them and enforce it aggressively then (one variety of) bad UI will be unavailable or at least expensive.

(Incidentally, I did not downvote your comment; I am guessing at the reasons others likely had.)

Each to their own I guess. I find the Ribbon UI intuitive.

> implies Ribbon is "good UI"

Where was that implied?

I am a 3ds Max User, and I hate the ribbon.

I use this software predominantly because of it’s superior user experience design, which involves a GUI that some would say is dated but most still agree it is great. I love everything about the GUI except the ribbon. Updating the GUI with Qt has not helped the ribbon’s case one bit.

It seems a typical side effect of ribbon application is extraneous options at ribbon’s reach which could very well be be tucked away in a preferences pane, and controls that could be more readily exposed tucked away in the ribbon. And, all of them are therefor now hard to find if not in daily use.

3ds Max users learned it serves one part of what we do decently, which is low level poly modeling where you keep switching between tools which have no great categorization and you know each of these tools like the back of your hand. Even then, most have abandoned the ribbon. And Explorer has nothing even slightly similar. The inconsistent widget display, interactivity, and functionality is a real issue.

>The real question one should ask is: should you use a ribbon design?

Though not an headline, Batteridge Law applies nonetheless:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

even in the more blunt form:

WHY would anyone (outside Microsoft) actually want to use the ribbon interface?

This reminds me that one day I want to post something headlined "Does Betteridge's Law of Headlines Apply to This Headline?" in hopes of causing brain explosions in people who needlessly spam a Betteridge's Law comment into every discussion thread.

Betteridge's Law of Betteridge's Law of Headlines: if you find yourself wondering whether you should mention Betteridge's Law of Headlines in a thread, the answer is "no."

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