Why did UI’s turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
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.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
It seems easier to find things for users. Probably part of dumbing things down.
My mom went through this last week with Libre Office. She said she couldn’t find anything because the ribbons from Word weren’t there. I found the option and enabled it and she said that was much better.
Whereas, I use Word 365 on a daily basis but I still know where things are from the classic menus.
But users want big pictures and less words, less menus.
So UI designers have done that.
You see that in the change between Windows 7 and Windows 8 in heavy ways. More buttons and less menus.
I fucking hate the dumbing down, especially on servers.
What’s dumber about visual grouping instead of menus? Functionality is more grouped and readily visible in a visual menu? Being clear, intuitive, or more readable is not “dumb” lmao. It may require more knowledge to use a textual menu, but that doesn’t make it smart-- in fact, it’s a pretty dumb design.
I swear some people want computers to be more adversarial and difficult to use because it makes them feel smarter for being a tech enthusiast or something
Thankfully, the normies are moving away from computer and maybe the ecosystem will heal in our lifetimes 🤞
We can only hope. Unfortunately phones were headed that way too, but we seem to have maxed out how big a phone people are willing to carry. I dread the idea of folding phone screens, because people will use the same excuses to take up more and more space for fancier UIs (and ads), while decreasing usable screen space to push us into folding phones.
I’m sure it’ll be just like the guy above justifying wasteful UI because of “bigger screens”. No, the other way around: bigger screens became necessary because of wasteful UI.
Yeah, phones are a lost case.
Ohhh I have a feeling you will enjoy this video:
It’s about a dofferent piece of software, but still highly relevant.
30 seconds in and subbed because “man rants about DAW UI/UX” is a genre of video that I never knew existed but suddenly can’t live without.
Funniest thing is, this video series ultimately landed him the job as lead UX designer for Musescore, lol
That’s actually amazing! Maybe I should start ranting about stuff that annoys me in software I love. Wouldn’t mind being lead dev on something I’m an active user of.
and here I thought complaints about the ribbon were late 2000s, early 2010s stuff, incredible we still get these kinds of things in 2024
Eh, I’ve just moved on to something I like more. When I do have to use MS Office, I just get frustrated and try that much harder to not use it again.
It’s crazy how we’ve gone from a seemingly inescapable monopoly on office software in the 2000s to it being optional. I remember working at a previous job where everyone used Google Sheets by choice and they would raise their eyebrows if you spun up Excel.
Yup, that’s basically my previous org, and at my current company, we only really use Excel because corporate pays for it (we also have a Google Apps account for other reasons). I personally prefer Google Sheets because it has a good mix of important features and not being overly complicated.
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.
I will stand with you on the hill defending the Office 2010 UI, it was beautiful, clear and easy to work with.
The flat design of 2013+ was a mistake.
I think the 2013+ design was fine at time but 10+ years of doing the same flat minimalist design over and over makes me hate it now!
I bet it’s capitalism.
The answer for enshittification of the entire reality seems to always be
capitalism.
The Ribbon isn’t the worst thing. It tried to solve the clutter of the previous interface, although I always preferred the old one.
Here is an interesting take on the problem of modern interfaces: https://datagubbe.se/decusab/
I’ll just straight up say that the problem is with Microsoft more than anything else. Their UI design is abysmal. Nothing is consistent, nothing is smoothly animated, nothing is easily identifiable by its icon, nothing is glassy and good looking like Win7/macOS. Even in their peak design of Windows 7, they still had those awful legacy UI elements in system settings and the registry settings.
Even with multitouch trackpads being a thing on Windows now, there’s STILL not linear trackpad gestures as of 6 months ago when I played with the display units in the store.
I am an IT technician working in Microsoft 365 / Azure, Microsoft makes changes so often that their own documentation hasn’t even been updated with the proper new name of the product in the product’s own documentation, oh and the name change took place several months if not a year ago.
Honestly I like ribbons quite a lot as a design framework and hell, even padding can improve the UX, it’s just a shame that neither of these elements have been used well in a decade.
Agreed. I’m sure if I was heads down in Excel for years beforehand it would be a significant downgrade, but as a casual user, making better use of some of the more advanced features became so, SO much easier with the Ribbon.
The old file menu was way more functional if you needed to be keyboard only.
In a world that loves to tout “efficiency” sprawling GUIs and mouse-click-everything has drastically reduced efficiency when a keyboard + shortcuts + macros are far more efficient.
The further we stray from the CLI the further we stray from God. CLI-nliness is next to Godliness.
Look to the atheist. He does not use the command line because he secretly believes. He does so because he knows it’s good.
I’d like to use good GUI programs designed for using with a keyboard, but it seems touch UI is the main theme for bigger developers these days, and keyboard is an afterthought at best
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.’
I don’t want to insult your intelligence, but you may just be tech-savvy, or at the very least, tech-literate. I also don’t have a problem with either because I simply follow the UI logic as the average Jane should.
Yeah, I still use it too, almost weekly.
I kinda remember those conversations, wasn’t there an issue back then that Microsoft had a patent on the ribbon ?
I don’t think so. He just said that he had evaluated it and it wasn’t a good fit for the application. I remembered it was in our Popular Feature Requests thread, and I looked back and (crazy enough) it’s still there.
I’ve sort of been forced over to Mac (not that it’s a bad thing, just a thing), and Paint.NET is perhaps my biggest loss in that transition. I’ve loved that program since its early days, and is always one of my first installs on any new Windows installation.
Yeah, I’ve been trying to make a switch over to Linux for a lot of reasons, but honestly Paint.NET is the one thing that keeps me tethered to Windows that I’m not super grumpy about (Adobe also keeps me tethered to Windows, but that makes me angry every time I think about it).
If *Nix has a decent image editor with layers that isn’t super over-engineered like GIMP is, I haven’t heard of it yet. Maybe that’s all become web-based.
I assume the extra padding was a function of touch screens becoming more prevalent since trying to hit the 2003 style buttons with a finger was not that easy, although I don’t remember offhand when touch first started becoming a thing in Windows so it might have happened the other way around. But either way it’s likely still a factor in why the ribbon with its extra padding has stuck around.
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Larger click targets for touch screen users
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Larger screens with higher resolutions, meaning less need for cramped UIs
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Larger click targets for trackpad users, as the PC market moved from desktops with relatively precise mouse inputs to small, imprecise trackpads that laptops had
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Usability studies showing people generally like padding and spacing in their UX (despite Reddit and Lemmy insisting it’s evil and everybody hates it)
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I think it’s a function of greater screen resolutions being available.
Tablet and phone touch devices also don’t have keyboard hotkeys like desktops do. In a desktop computer you can afford for the icon bar to be a tiny cramped piece of shit because it’s really more of an early crutch until you learn the hotkeys you need. That mechanic doesn’t exist on a phone or pad. You need the menus and buttons to actually be usable permanently.
That’s very funny, of course. But if adaptive design and all that crap are so hot today, could they please limit that to touchscreen-first devices? No sane person would actually write a work document or code on a touchscreen if there’s a keyboard.
There’s nothing about word processors that make them difficult to use with a keyboard and mouse.
New UX has improved that usecase as well.
Touch screen devices.
This is why I believe that they are still chasing Metro UI and reinventing every app out of control panel .
Windows phone was ahead of it’s time.
But now my computer is becoming a phone.
Maybe that’s the point?
I mostly use my phone now anyway…
But it’s Samsung…
Me and my friends calls this phenomenom “appification”, and it is terrible.
VLC is in the process of appifying itself, just look at the screenshots of version 4.
Weirdly as someone who has used both styles heavily, I’d say the ribbon is more practical than the old toolbars. There’s more contextual grouping and more functional given the tabs and search, plus the modern flat design is less distracting, which is what I’d want from a productivity application. Also for me two rows of toolbars & a menu is about the same height as the ribbon anyway, and you can collapse the ribbon if you want to use the space
Yeah, does anyone else remember the menu bars that would show up and disappear depending on what you were doing? Those were awful–the ribbon method of context-specific tabs is better (IMO).
Flat design may be less distracting to you but that also means it’s less clear, because there are fewer obvious demarcation.
I despise flat design, it’s downright awful design, and done for looks rather than functionality.
Even saying it’s “less distractive” supports this.
Microsoft also did this to obfuscate features, which is pretty apparent when you consider new users used to “discover” features via the menu system. I supported Office for MS in the early days, and this was a huge thing at the time. It was discussed heavily when training on new versions.
How many UI/UX usability studies have you done yourself. Links to results.
Since when is it not okay to have an opinion on how you’d like your computer to work? You’re saying it as if usability was an objective truth, not a preference of majority of users. People are different, everyone is talking about neurodiversity, and you’re saying that loving lowest common denominator UIs are the only acceptable opinion in the light of objective facts.
Microsoft also did this to obfuscate features
lol
Flat design may be less distracting to you but that also means it’s less clear, because there are fewer obvious demarcation.
I despise flat design, it’s downright awful design, and done for looks rather than functionality.
to you
Flat design dominates for a reason—the less visually busy something is, the easier it is for users to wrap their heads around it. This gets proven again and again in user studies, the more busy and dense you make things, the more users miss stuff and get lost.
People’s opinions on the ribbon specifically are obviously all subjective, but I would say the less distracting design would be the one done less for looks, rather it’s a pretty utilitarian design if you pick it apart. This is an interface for productivity tools, and as such the interface should get out of your way until you need it—the ribbon just does that better IMO.
Microsoft also did this to obfuscate features, which is pretty apparent when you consider new users used to “discover” features via the menu system. I supported Office for MS in the early days, and this was a huge thing at the time. It was discussed heavily when training on new versions.
Why on earth would Microsoft want to obfuscate features? There’s no way that motivation would ever make sense.
IIRC one of the main reasons Microsoft introduced the ribbon was that grouping functionality contextually helped users discover features, because people kept requesting features that already existed, but they just couldn’t find. I remember there being a blog on the Microsoft developer site about the making of it that went into this.
All that usability testing that Microsoft did is a big part of the problem. Instead of the functionality of functionality being organized under menus by function ….
They made “typical” functions more accessible to “typical” users, but I’m not typical; most people don’t match that average profile. Anyone who uses Office at all frequently are not average users. Anyone who frequently needs a particular functionality are not average users
Instead of being organized under menus by name, it’s now organized under ribbon tabs by icon, visual grouping, and sometimes also name. It’s no less organized lol
Granted the icons are getting better over time, but all too often I’m still looking for the name to figure out what that mysterious icon is. Now I need to adjust the screen size so more names appear so I can figure out what to click. Wouldn’t it be nice if the names were all visible at a click, organized hierarchically?
Why wait for a click? Each ribbon tab has submenus with their contents already visible (no necessary click --> hover/click --> hover in submenu without letting your mouse leave for even 1 pixel) and the state of each option represented in whatever way is most convenient (button, toggle, dropdown, etc.). A menu doesn’t show all options in one category at once, doesn’t fully show their state, and closes itself every time you mess up a mouse movement if it’s programmed badly. The lack of names can be bad, but the learning curve for identifying options (hovering and seeing the name) isn’t worse than it is for finding options in a menu (searching every menu until you find the right option).
I remember people being upset by the ribbon back when office 2007 was released. Their complaints made sense until I sat down and used it. Found it to be a great improvement. I switched my libre office to the ribbon layout as soon as they added it. Because I don’t use it often, it’s great for finding stuff compared to looking through the menus.
The nice thing about the LO implementation is also that they added a couple of varieties of the design, like the compact one which pushes things closer together so it’s not distracting.
It’s like having a robot vacuum. You’ll catch yourself saying “Why is it ALWAYS getting in my way??!” It’s not, it’s just that you only think about where it is when it’s in your way. When it’s not around you, you are thinking about other things.
UI is the same. People complain about any UI they actually stop to notice. If you know the UI well you don’t even really think about it, you just use it. When a UI changes you have to relearn a little bit and this causes people to have to stop and think about the UI.
99.99% of the time people seem to interpret this as “This UI objectively sucks! Any UI I need to think about must be terrible!”
But it’s not that hard to understand that a little relearning will follow change, and that things will have to change over time unless they were perfect forever out of the box, which nothing is.
But no. “The new update is horrible!” Every. Time. It’s so routine to UI designers that they totally ignore this feedback. So people really shouldn’t even bother to post it.
You can use OpenOffice which hasn’t adopted any new UI since 1998.
Except that OpenOffice has been forked into LibreOffice in like 2010 and has since gotten an optional ribbon UI.
Yeaaah, don’t use open office, it hasn’t had any code updates in like 15 years. Use and suggest libre office instead.
The ribbon is better than menus. They’re even customizable. And lots of non-Microsoft software uses ribbons, too.
Plus there’s a search function right at the top if you can’t find the option you’re looking for
Yet the menus had a search option and were fully customizable … and didn’t waste so much screen space.
As a user, I’ve never once thought: “I wish I couldn’t fit so many windows on my screen”, nor “I wish non-working space takes up most of my screen forcing me to buy bigger monitors”
I have all the stuff I use regularly on the first ribbon. I also run excel with the formula bar 3-lines tall. Common keyboard shortcuts were removed so there’s very little unused clutter
At work I use a 1920x1200 display and have never once thought “ugh I wish I could see 4 more rows” - but if I did, I’d just collapse the ribbon…
I remember when much lower resolution was useful, now that’s a small size. Maybe a core problem is the number of people who maximize a window (see, look how much room there is), rather than trying to have multiple Windows to work together
I think it’s more of an evolution in the way we use computers than a problem. The original Office UI was made during a time of single monitor dominance and now dual monitors is the standard for companies.
My most-used applications for work at AutoCAD and Excel and it’s very rare I DON’T have them maximized. They both have ribbons but even if they didn’t, I can’t imagine using them in a small window. Really the only program I don’t run full screen is Notepad
Sure auto card is a great example where you might want to maximize a window to make it more useable. Although wouldn’t it be nice if there were small widgets somewhere out of the way for functions like texting or email? I have no idea what the autocad ui is like, but you’d bet I’d be frustrated if some stupid ribbon was taking up valuable screen space, especially the all important vertical space
