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Comment by tempguy9999 | Hacker News Reader

Install an accelerometer in the keyboard. When heavy impacts are detected from someone smashing their face into it repeatedly, pop up a dialog box asking them if there is something wrong and would they like assistance? Extensive feedback will be forthcoming.

A bit more helpfully, MS were asked repeatedly not to fuck with the menus but they replaced it with the ribbon. Ditto that terrible new interface that was nothing like windows 7. They could have allowed the choice of new interface but they did not. MS got plenty of info and chose to discard it.

MS is now in a position where it doesn't need to care.

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There’s a lot of interesting history that I think this comment ignores. The office 2007 project was one of their more heavily feedback-driven initiatives; had they been paying attention the same way for Windows 8, it likely would have looked a lot more like Windows 10.

Really interesting talk: https://youtu.be/AHiNeUTgGkk

They had really good reasons for using the ribbon, not the least of which was that people weren’t finding the features they needed. That was all driven by telemetry back before it was considered the evilest of evils.

I’m amazed that you’re still bitter after 13 years. Afaict actual user preference is strongly for the ribbon, minus a very vocal minority that were bothered by the change. Office 2007 was in fact not the boon for OpenOffice that was predicted.

edit: tone, realized it came across as not as respectful as I intended

After 13 years there are still things I have trouble finding on the ribbon that were easy with the menu. And the ribbon totally kills the menu item->keyboard shortcut learning path to efficiently activate things you use in your personal workflow. I am bitter about this one too!

I think that's the difference with a lot of these things. If you are a primary keyboard user you tend to rage against a lot of these changes.

That may be a good guess: people who prefer words to pictures and keyboard to mouse would prefer menus to the ribbon. That pattern holds for me anyway. And I would believe that word/keyboard people are in the minority, so a UI study would identify the ribbon as superior.

Everything in the ribbon has a keyboard shortcut. Just type 'alt' to see the guides. You can also see traditional shortcuts in the tooltips.

The new 'Tell me what you want to do' search bar should help you find everything else obscure, but that unfortunately doesn't show keyboard shortcuts.

Here's a blog post from 2006 discussing how usage data statistics were used in designing the original ribbon from Office 2007: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/04/11/grading-...

I, for one, love the ribbon...

Good for you. But so what? (Edit: my point is not about the ribbon)

I'm just saying it's not necessarily true that the ribbon is worse than old school menus.

And I'd agree with you. So what do you think my point was?

Your point seemed to be that MS chose not to care. I think they cared but made an informed decision to go down a path that many said was wrong. If anything, I'd say kudos to them for not living in an echo chamber.

> Your point seemed to be that MS chose not to care

Quite. It was not about the merits of the ribbon. Which sort of echoes the article "Most software companies ignore user behavior"

> I think they cared but made an informed decision

they were heavily "informed" the ribbon would upset a lot of their customers, and for good reason. If there is another meaning to 'informed' here, please clarify.

People were not against the ribbon, they just wanted the choice. Dynamically reskinning an app like excel/word is entirely possible, and in fact straightforward if you actually own the original skin, which of course MS do.

"kudos to them" - really? For unnecessarily upsetting people who'd paid good money for office? Whose workflow was broken until they had re-learnt the new interface? Who now have a reason to move to LibreOffice, which still has menus?

Why are you defending MS's obviously stupid business decision?

It wasn't an obviously stupid business decision, it wasn't even stupid. But I can see how expert users like yourself would be upset.

Prior to the ribbon design, Office was extremely hard to use, excluding the most basic features, for novice and intermediate users. In general, endless menus are confusing and/or annoying to novice and intermediate users. The ribbon design enabled novice and intermediate users to find and use more advanced features that only expert users knew about in previous Office versions. MS optimized their product design for novice and intermediate users while still maintaining all the functionality needed by expert users.

From a business perspective this made sense for two reasons:

1. Most customers are either novice or intermediate users.

2. Even though expert users will likely get pissed off that they have to relearn the interface, they will still relearn the interface. Or put another way, designing for expert users should take a backseat because they will spend the time to learn an interface no matter how convoluted it is.

exactly, if you were a power user you'd still remember your lotus123 / commands. you wouldn't need either a menu bar nor a ribbon. microsoft kept a lot of the features the power user uses. the menu is not one of them.

"It wasn't an obviously stupid business decision, it wasn't even stupid." -and- "Prior to the ribbon design, Office was extremely hard to use"

I'm afraid I'm just going to disagree with both of these. I'd buy that menus are somewhat harder to use for novices and the ribbon has some greater discoverability, though I'd like to see usability stats (edit: I did a quick search but found nothing solid), but you are missing my point - despite me repeating it multiple times! - that it was not about ribbon/menu. You just aren't getting it. Will people please stop dislocating the discussion onto what you want me to be talking about.

(stuff about optimizing their product design for novice and intermediate users)

That is a really good point, but it was entirely possible to support both. I wonder how.

(edit: "Even though expert users will likely get pissed off that they have to relearn the interface, they will still relearn the interface" - this is exactly what you do not inflict on your customer base without exceedingly good reason)

@contextfree: I'm not arguing with you.

@nxc18: Or you (but as for "Afaict actual user preference is strongly for the ribbon" show me the stats. All else is talk).

Both of your points are IRRELEVANT to the point I made. LMHY: "choice". Not anti-ribbon, not pro-menu.

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