Ribbon Menus and UI

Why did Microsoft think this was a good idea? It seems to keep getting worse with every version of Windows. Let's take a moment to admire the number of different UI concepts you can see in these shots.

There is a traditional file menu on the left although for some reason it's now colored blue like it was selected and what the ribbon is displaying when the ribbon is actually showing home. As an exercise in inconsistency, the file menu is not part of the ribbon, and there are not traditional menus for the ribbon items, so you are forced to use two very different UI paradigms for menus for almost every task. Edit controls are also not part of the ribbon so if you need to undo you'll be using three different UI paradigms.

Hitting alt to select the traditional menu no longer works and now displays a flickering set of floating hotkey letters that vanish and reappear as the mouse moves and stops. This replaces just underlining the 'F' in file, although when expanding ribbon items like paste those items still use underlines. Hitting the menu key if you have one no longer does anything at all.. unless if you're hovering over an item in the file menu where it opens (but not closes) a dialog for adding the item to the quick menu. It does not do this when hovering over ribbon menu items despite it being the same right-click dialog.

The ribbon itself has icons that are grouped and sized by frequency used by Microsoft's testers instead of any logical order ensuring you have to examine them every time you're presented with them as the order differs per application rather than the universal consistency of previous Windows versions. In this case, we have a huge paste icon followed by a small cut then copy.

"Brushes" is a multiple selection and plural, "Size" is a multiple selection and singular. The "Size" icon shows every line that can be selected rather than some indicator of which is selected, but the "Brushes" icon shows only the selected brush.

If you shrink the window vertically all the controls disappear, even the ones that will always have room in the window border. If you shrink it horizontally the ribbon sections collapse into single icons and each is highlighted blue like it is selected, even clipboard which contains no selectable items.. except the size selector which for some reason is not highlighted.

The mouseover tooltips have a bolded one-liner followed by regular text detail, except for color tooltips which only have a one-liner but don't bold like the other tooltips.

And to top it off there's even a set of program functions hoisted into the window border and oddly placed next to the window controls like save, undo, and redo. And just to keep it as inconsistent as possible, undo/redo is paired but open is missing for an open/save pair. Did they not have space for one more icon? Just to make sure no one can ever feel familiar with the UI when using someone else's computer, there's also a customization pulldown that lets you change a few items displayed from the file menu, but not all of them ('save' but no 'save as'). It can even convert this mess into a toolbar in addition to the ribbon.

How does UI this convoluted, confused, and shit get made by a company that supposedly spends billions on UX?

Other urls found in this thread:

winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-works/3x-dos
bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=538694
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Because they outsourced their entire development to Pajeets.

Windows has no aesthetics

Welcome to 15 years ago

The sooner you migrate away from it, the happier you will be

This is the cancer that originally drove me to LibreOffice.

Because they design entirely by (flawed) metrics. The Cut/Copy/Paste deal is a dead giveaway.

me too

I don't even care about >muh open sores, I just want an interface that is not cancer.

I stuck with Office 2003 for almost a decade because of this.

They test these things on real people.

The sort of people who would sign up for UX focus group testing.

If you want to destroy a software company from the inside out, that's the entry point to target. I wouldn't be surprised if all the yes men were sent there by Apple.

They test it against retards and this is what retards are able to use.

Was the last good Office 2007 or 2010?

I don't think the UI is even that bad, it gets the job done. This thread honestly seems like baseless moaning to me. LibreOffice is a lot of the same, it gets the jobs done. No harm in using either one unless open sores is your fetish.
t. arch i3wm user (in case you feel the need to question my experience with ,,superior'' UIs)

More like 1992. Because Windows just plain sucks.
winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-works/3x-dos

That's a pretty low bar. What image editor UI is so bad the job can't be done?

Ribbon works fine once you get used to it, if anything it's better as you can access everything with a few clicks.

Then why not just a ribbon? Why have two other different types of menus as well? What was the logic behind having some functions in one and not the other?

Appease old and new users

How does it appease either when you're forced to use all three?

They didnt think that through

Microsoft doesn't know shit about UI design. They got lucky with Metro and even then it only looks good; it doesn't actually perform well. It's pure form over function. You only have to use Windows for 10 minutes to see how many random UI design choices they made over the years and how little effort they put to make it consistent. Microsoft is full of pajeets who can only add more and more, and they'd rather make a new program besides the old one than fix the old one.

That's the first time I've ever heard anyone say that.

Microsoft has no sense of quality, everything good about Windows has been taken from more talented companies, and everything bad is Microsoft aping their superiors. They just got lucky when they made the deal with IBM that they could license DOS to other manufacturers, otherwise that shit company would have been forgotten a long time ago.

It's all design by committee instead of having one strongly willed person driving the direction. This is why you have four solutions for one problem.

WinXP paint was perfect, there was no need for change.

This is just change for the sake of change, to satisfy the boss of the graphics designers so they can keep their jobs. Also Microsoft trying to compete with themselves and failing. It's what happens when your company gets too big and loses focus.

If those posts about how MS works are true, then it's because they have no review process. Basically looking at what they've already made and going "What can we do to make it more consistent in use with our other programs?" Instead they've got managers being told by managers being told by managers being told by managers what they want in onomatopeia.

They need a single vision.

The only decent interface is the old MacOS one with menu at top of screen, not this shit where every window is crammed full of menus and bars and widgets and crap.
They also used simlar thing in Amiga, and even DOS had decent TUI in programs like and such like Norton Utilities.
A simple screen drop-down menu and keyboard shortcuts is all that was ever needed in most cases for the majority of users. The rest is a bunch of useless solutions looking for a problem, and ways for companies like Microsoft to try and justify and sell their new shit.

I'm STILL using Office 2003. LibreOffice is so god damn bloated it's nearly unusable, and I can't stand the ribbon interface.

The topmost bar is what really baffles me. I cannot fathom the mindset of any focus tester who liked the thought of an undo/redo bar right next to save file or the close window context

I finally decided to start a new leaf on LibreOffice because I realize I just can't stay on 2003 forever. My only issue with it is I really don't like the visual for highlighting text. Does Microsoft have that shit patented or are they just being dumb?

Seriously this looks awful. Isn't there some way to make text highlight look like it does in every other program in existence?

Serious question: Why? I might have missed something since I don't use Office, but if it works, it works.

Well for one I can't stay on Windows forever. Windows XP gets less and less support every year and everything since Vista has been too cancerous to convince me to move on. So eventually I'll be on GNU/Linux full time and I'd rather not fire up WINE just to do word processing.

I generally do agree with that sentiment though.

Ah, I assumed you wanted to stay on Windows. Wine works rather transparently when a program is well-supported, but I can definitely understand a general aversion to it.

An ASCII GUI with intuitive keys is still unbeatable in 2016. And even if it's some snowflake autism it's still pretty good.

It's pretty shit for making documents when you want to have an idea of what the thing you're actually going to print looks like.

/thread
UX engineers incite change needlessly to justify their worthless existence.

Google chrome literally had a feature removed temporarily by one of their UX engineers based on reasons pulled out of their ass based on statistics which they seemed to think unquestionable. It was only fixed because someone with a brain (e.g. not a UX engineer) told the fuckers off. bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=538694

If hitler were here today, he'd hold hands with jews while marching in lockstep in order to exterminate this disgusting, subhuman filth.

In the case of MS Works for DOS, it actually has a graphical preview in the word processor, and the spreadsheet can do pie charts. I mean, so long as you have a VGA card or something that can show more than just text.
But the editing parts are comfy TUI.

kys

don't worry, it won't stop working just because you haven't updated

14-year-olds can understand text based config files and apt-get, but can you?

Talking about the programs (not) made for it, not Microsoft's shitty security updates.

Not OP but in the last two years Windows XP has seen a drastic reduction in software support. This may not matter for simple programs like word processors but it's becoming a challenge to find hardware drivers beyond Core 2 Duos and Athlon II.

enjoy your ime botnet user

I will :)

thank you user-kun!

huehuehue

He could be talking about OS X.

GNOME 3 looks and feels nicer than Windows 10.

But does it look nicer than win7?

I like it better, yes. There's less wasted space, the search is great (there's something similar in w10), I don't have to hack it with tray applications to display seconds, etc..

GNOME3 has a ton of wasted space, what are you smoking nigger?

Don't forget the hamburger menus on a fucking desktop.

Don't you mean GNOME3 *is* a ton of wasted space, user? :^)

The size of a maximized window on GNOME 3 is larger than on Windows 10. I like the way they've separated the launch/search/desktop UI. Everything's generally less cluttered and confused as well, like Microsoft's outdated start menu vs GNOME's way.

Just for discussion, here is a collection of every version. (Courtesy of Nathan Lineback).

This. Pajeets don't care. Everytime MS does something you can find them on sites going "oh this is very good for my Windows 7 64 bits." They always fucking say 64 bits too which triggers my autism.

There isn't a reason not to use LibreOffice now. Anything MSO can do, LO can do now too.

97. Was the last one that didn't need IE. To be fair, there is a copy of 2000 that lacks IE too, but I, nor Nathan Lineback could verify that this was 100% the case. Allegedly it's the professional version. I'll trust Nathan since he's super autistic when it comes to this.

Why not have both? Why is it so hard for MS to offer both the new gay method, and the older superior method?

Stopped reading right there.

My goal is to buy a new machine for Linux, and then just keep my old Windows machine offline.

You don't really have to fire up Wine. Once Wine is installed, running office will be like running it on Windows.

When I do development for Windows, I still target Windows 2000, and in some cases if it's not too much of a pain in the ass, I'll target all the way back to Windows 95.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Even the simplest WINE programs routinely take extra long to start up.

Starting up a program doesn't exactly take up most of its execution time, now does it?

That's true, which is why it's not really a problem for playing Windows games. When it's a word processor that you constantly open and close to read and edit stuff, however, it is extra irritating.

Their UI peaked in the 5th version from the top.

It could be worse. This is artrage's UI.

Their use of screen space is nice, they just need to dial back the drop shadows and shading.

smh tbh fam

Word has always been overloaded with controls. I like how the old Apple iWork did things: you had one very lightweight toolbar you could customize and everything else was done via floating inspectors. You could open as many inspectors as you wanted, they would always reflect the current document and when you switched to another program all the inspectors disappeared. You can also close the drawer or display something else in it. The inspectors of course don't have to be on the document window, I just put them there for the screenshot.

Of course Apple eventually fucked it up with the new iWork where everything is in one window. I fucking hate this "everything in one window" design like we are still on DOS. It is appropriate for some use-cases like tiling window managers, but not everywhere.


There's a \LaTeX command

Dear tech,

I have been out of the loop re: proprietary software for nearly ten years primarily on linux where everything just werx and if it doesn't you just clone and compile it yourself.

What in christ happened?

I'm holding onto a laptop and an iphone for a friend and I don't have a fucking clue what is going on with them. The iphone is useless: I can't browse files, I can't download files, I can't import music into the mp3 player, I can't find anything to do on it but browse the internet.

The laptop is even worse, I left windows 7 for the fair shores of gnome 2 and cinnamon. When I returned I tried to pop the start menu and the screen turned purple, it took me 20 minutes and a call to my sister to figure out how to turn the fucking thing off again.

Everything I loved about windows and ipods (technically rockbox) is dead buried in flying menus and shit. How do normies on mainstream operating systems cope with the overabundance of interface and severe lack of features and compatibility? I mean fuck, they never fixed the abstract "library" folders in win7.

Why do people think that linux distros are hard or badly designed?

Normies just use a computer to open facebook. They don't experience your pain.

As someone who still uses Windows and gets severely pissed off at so many things about it: Stockholm syndrome. Better to stick with the annoying piece of shit you know than to put in the minimal amount of effort learning something new. They don't want to be able to do things themselves, they just want to plug a phone into a computer and have it wipe out entire music collections as it synchronises automagically. And as says, they only use programs to do the most simple shit.

I really miss grep, which, and a command line that doesn't suck.

the tragic thing is the iphone is nearly good: solid construction, next to no lag, hierarchical interface that drops a squat on android. It just doesn't actually do anything.

not a fucking thing.

everytime I searched for a way to make it do something I found a six post thread, where the first guy posts "how I make do thing?" the second guy posts "u cunt do it lol" and the third guy posts "reported, enjoy your ban troll, how dare u want 2 do a thing" and poor OP gets dogpiled untill the thread is locked.

iPhones are only for consumption, not production. iPads can do some production if your needs are low enough. For everything else use a desktop computer. I don't see phones ever becoming suitable for anything but consumption, the form factor simply does not allow for it. Apple did the right thing in making their phones retard-proof.

Think of it this way: you can have a swiss army knife that's good enough for the most basic shit like opening a can or cutting some cloth. You could invest the resources into better and sharper steel, but would you ever want to use a swiss army knife for anything but the most basic tasks? Even if you were to shrink down an industry-quality saw to the level of a knife, the form factor of the knife would make it impractical for actual woodworking. You're better off with a shitty knife and a toolbox of actual tools.

yeah, that's great and all, but playing a .flac .wav or an .mp3, or managing a library, or scrubbing out the shit on either end of a clip, or opening a zip file, or loading a fucking .pdf or .doc is the basis of consumption and messaging and they missed the mark on that.

I'm not crying that it doesn't have photoshop. I'm pissed off it didn't do the basics of new media communications.

Although it did stream a U2 album with gay porn on the cover. gg apple.

That's just horrifying and absolutely true.

But they're the same fucking shit.

They put a poo in the loo in charge of Microsoft.

Apple has always catered to new fags. Eventually, they'll have just one big button that does everything because anything else is too hard.

Agreed. A place I applied to recently told me they're still running Office 2000. Hard to find a company that doesn't feel the need to use the latest version.