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Comment by frosted-flakes | Hacker News Reader

I stumbled across this page when I was in early high school, and for someone new to computers in general it was a fascinating read. It taught me that user interface design is something that people actually do for a job and that when done well is delightful to use. Oh, and it set an example of clear, instructive writing with illustrations done right that I think influenced me quite a lot.

Some people don't like the Ribbon, but I love it. As a new user back in the day and a "power user" today, I think it's loads better than the semi-random arrangement of cryptic menus and toolbars we had before.

In my opinion, Microsoft Word 2007 did it best. Later iterations did away with the app button and menu in favour of the obstructive "backstage" menu, and I don't think the flat design does it any favours.

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> I think it's loads better than the semi-random arrangement of cryptic menus and toolbars we had before.

we had meaningful, sensibly grouped, sets of standard icons, but graphics designers got bored and thought those should be updated.

i like the ribbon but i think standard icons are better.

> sensibly grouped

That joke seriously made my day! Where is the global settings/properties menu for Firefox? Photoshop? Eclipse? Premiere Pro? Android Studio?

Between those 5 apps, some of the same category or even same vendor, you can find that one very ubiquitous entry under: Tools, File, Window, Edit, File but there's 4 of them.

> Where is the global settings/properties

see? that's part of what i was trying to say. you say settings, i think cog, hamburger menu, or even three dots. it's so hard lately because designers want to innovate and make their UI different.

So instead of replacing the entire menu paradigm with ribbons, how about just grouping things better, wouldn't that solve the problem?

On Mac OS for example the "Preferences" item is always in the same location and has the same shortcut, throughout first party and third party apps.

Yeah, I think at least half the problem is that among those 5 cross-platform applications, only some of them try to respect the native UI standards on all platforms.

Global settings never standardized in one place for some reason. Everything else is well-organized, but for whatever reason an "Application" menu never became common. It's a shame Microsoft didn't promote such a menu in their own software back in the day.

the two are not mutually exclusive, are they? You can have a ribbon with standard icons right?

I see ribbon as an alternative to the menubar plus toolbar layout, more than visual style.

> You can have a ribbon with standard icons right?

That would be fine, as long as it's possible to completely hide the ribbon.

You can. Just double-click any of the ribbon tabs, or press the "un-pin" button.

That must depend on what apps the ribbon appears in. I have no such option in the ones that I use. But on investigation, a couple of them do have a hard-to-find option to remove the ribbon entirely, which was a welcome discovery!

Every implementation of the Ribbon I've seen allows you to collapse the ribbon, including Office, Paint, AutoCAD, and others.

> we had meaningful, sensibly grouped, sets of standard icons

Come on; the normal method to find the function you needed when you didn't know the icon was to hover them all one-by-one.

"the semi-random arrangement of cryptic menus and toolbars we had before." Well, yeah, if some program had a semi-random arrangement of cryptic menus, I guess that was bad. As I remember, Word's' arrangement was quite good and non-cryptic. Now we have instead a semi-random arrangement (afaict) of cryptic icons. (There's a reason the alphabet replaced hieroglyphics.)

To quote the linked page:

> For example, almost any command in a document creating and authoring program could belong in tabs labeled Edit, Format, Tools, Options, Advanced, and More.

Guess what menus Word used?

All of the buttons on the ribbon have labels, except for very common ones on the Home tab. That's one of the main tenets of the ribbon. As compared to toolbars, which made very little use of labels at all.

I personally hated the ribbon in Excel, not least because it resulted in changes to all the shortcut keys. That killed productivity significantly for me and my colleagues on my trading desk. We got used to it eventually, but it was not fun in the slightest.

The shortcut keys from older versions of Excel still work. The new ones are easy to find too (hit Alt and they appear, but you can type ahead full speed)

Unfortunately, not all of them (especially if you're doing some complex pastes with transpose etc etc).

One really positive thing about the Ribbon was that it exposed every command in a Microsoft Office program to a keyboard shortcut. Yes, in earlier versions, most had a keyboard shortcut, but some commands only appeared in toolbars that only showed in certain situations and were never mapped to a keyboard stroke. Now in the ribbon, every button that you can see has a keyboard shortcut.

Did you ever hear the origin story of Ribbons? A smart person at MSFT petitioned Billy G directly about it! It was really a bold move that not a lot of peers supported, and look at what a good move it ended up being. That said, if you can expose a button instead of hiding all the juicy details in a dropdown, you ought'a.

And that's certainly an opinion. The wrong one, as it turns out, but you're as entitled to yours as other people are to theirs. It would be nice to have a choice though, rather than having your opinion forced on others.

This isn't the way UX design works. You have an objective, test it and measure the outcome. You implement a sensible default and work out if a preference to change it is needed.

I don't have a strong opinion, but also think that mine would be irrelevant anyways -- isn't what matters most here the research they have undoubtedly done to understand how the UI affects their various customers and their needs?

The certainty people often have as to UI design is amusing in light of how successful this line of products has been, as if their small and selfish opinion (or mine!) could somehow be more correct than the millions these guys have invested in getting this right. And not to the problem they or I _personally_ have, but to the problem of shipping a product used by probably billions of people across hundreds of cultures.

I have no doubt that if you (or I!) were in charge of design, guided only by our personal opinions, the product would have completely failed.

So how do you explain the persistent and enduring hatred for the ribbon?

Are those users - still a significant proportion, and certainly not just "power users" - somehow empirically wrong?

They are likely outnumbered by the ones who like the ribbon but stay silent.

They might also be outnumbered by the ones who detest the ribbon but stay silent. (That's not me, obviously...)

In my experience, users are far more likely to stay silent, if they accept or welcome a change.

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