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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?
Funny story, before they did the 2007 redesigns, they asked users what they wanted to be added; 95% said features that were already in Office.
The Ribbon was designed to make features more findable.
Alas.
The ribbon is one thing, the flat design and obfuscating tools/settings are a far bigger issue.
I've used Office 2003, 2007, 2010 etc. all the way up to 365 not for work purposes, but just happened to have interacted with all of the versions.
I have to say, I seriously don't know what happened, but Office 2003-2007 feels the most stable and least clunky versions of Office (at least Word) in terms of basic word processing.
I learned how to properly edit and format text in Word in university in a way that I could, without fail, reproduce almost any text design you could think of. When I was learning it on Office 2007 I believe, everything was so stable and predictable. Now when somebody asks me to format some text with 365, the styles functionality continually keeps bugging out and doing stupid shit that I basically can't recover from unless I create a blank file.
In conclusion, Office 2007 > 365
/rant
Same, but for Excel.
Also, JFC the save menu in Office 365 is Cthulhu-level madness.
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.
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.
How many UI/UX usability studies have you done yourself. Links to results.
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.
I prefer the ribbon. It makes everything easier to discover and use.
It's also entirely configurable so i was able to tailor it specifically to my needs, even include button for my macro, logically grouped and not thrown together with no heads or tail in a "macro" submenu.
It also allows widgets with much richer informational content than menus.
The ribbon is also entirely keyboard navigable with visual hints. Which means you can use anything mouse free without having to remember rarely used shortcuts.
And if the ribbon takes too much space, and you can't afford a better screen, you can hide and show it with ctrl-F1 or a click somewhere (probably).
It's actually a much much better UX than menus and submenus and everything hidden and zero adaptability. At least for tools like the office apps with a bazillion functions.
Most copies of the ribbon are utter shit though because the people who copied didn't understand the strength of the office ribbon and only copied the looks superficially.
It's funny to see people still hung up on the ribbon 17 years later.
It's because of people like you that we still use qwerty on row staggered keyboards from the mechanical typewriter era. ;)
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.
The old file menu was way more functional if you needed to be keyboard only.
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.
It's not UI backsliding. It's Microsoft being incompetent. I have no idea how they're still in business, and astounded at their valuation. It seems like everything they manage to push out is just barely functioning
Moving away from Office and Windows and so forth is a nightmare for any larger company. If you use specialized software, it might very well only run on Windows or only have an integration into Office. Even if you could, you then have to retrain staff to use Libre Office, Linux and other alternatives. You also will have problems converting, changing servers and so forth.
So companies just do not switch. That is how Microsoft makes money. They really do not care that much about private users. That is only usefull so people can use their products.
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.
Btw, just so you know, Libre Office has multiple UIs, incliuding a Ribbon-like variant. View > User Interface.
But they let you choose.
Padding is a very versatile thing in UI design, and none of it will make anything look terrible.
Even in your first example, the toolbar has slight padding on the edges and so do the buttons.
The reason there's more padding now is because it makes it easier for new users to process everything.
What makes it even worse is that screens got wider and shorter, but the new designs use more vertical space than before, leaving even less height to do anything in.
16:9 was pushed on us because it was cheaper to produce on mass for tv and pc. 16:9 was better for movies.
There are some monitors from just before this massive market manipulation and those have 16:10, sometimes with display port before hdmi was even mainstream.
Apple is actually one of the few companies to make the jump from 4:3 to 16:10 avoiding the 16:9 with very few exceptions.
To this day i see people work with old software designed for the area of more vertical screens but doing so on screens designed for movies.
Most people dont even understand what i mean when i explain this. But the good thing is my issue with it was considered a disability so they had to accommodate me with something more sensible.
Sorry long comments but this is a personal vice for me.
UI designer here - people are simply getting dumber, tech-wise at least.
That being said, there have been a lot of improvements in UI and UX world in the past 20 years the problem is that many users are so technically inept the drag down the entire curve all the way down.
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.
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.
meh i like the ribbon much better.
the tools are better organized and findable.
Part of the problem is that people who grew up on phones and tablets are now old enough to start entering the tech industry as UI developers.
The Ribbon is much better, and has been a part of the Office suite for over a decade, easily.
Poor examples aside, designers and engineers are rarely given a seat at the table in big tech companies. Most tech CEO's were either tech managers or sales people at some point, and are so far removed from IC work or valuing specific crafts for their user value that someone on the UX side probably doesn't get a say in how this shit is built.
Some UX designers either work to very specific business constraints, or work on stuff that has zero benefit to the end-user. Some engineers work on stuff that solely provides metrics for shareholders and leadership.
I'm tempted to set up a blog just to post about this subject, because it's everywhere, but big tech is now so top-heavy that for years many huge decisions have been made on a whim by execs. Tech has grown so large and powerful that tech execs (and those clinging to their coat-tails) put themselves outside of the echelons of what an IC can reach, and far above the user. Years of MBA double-speak and worshipping the altar of guys like Gates, Bezos, and Jobs means that it's "good" to be opinionated and ignore fact over your own judgement. This results in senior management deciding "let's put AI here" or "the colour scheme should be mostly white", despite reluctantly paying hundreds of people many thousands of dollars a year to KNOW about this stuff.
That, in essence, is why everything feels shitter nowadays. It's because some fifty-something MBA cunt believes that you need AI, or a good UI needs more buttons - stuff we've known for decades is fucking stupid. That's irrelevant though, because by being "General Manager of UI at MegaCorp" and having an assistant to arrange their Outlook calendar, they know more than you, pleb.
and here I thought complaints about the ribbon were late 2000s, early 2010s stuff, incredible we still get these kinds of things in 2024
Because everyone is switching from a custom ui to a css standard so they can have a web app that is also a desktop app.
To sum up, your app became a web page.
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
And you can't have legible icons, as they must be as small and cryptic as possible. They should also all look alike at first glance if possible.
The ribbon was introduced in Office 2007. The backsliding started a long time ago.
View-> Then the little v arrow in the right. Switch to tabs only, the Ribbon UI will now only appear when you click one of the titles like home or View.
I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get "the new ribbon UI!"
The answer was never, incidentally.
