12 Jun 2014, 01:19
The ribbon isn't necessarily inherently flawed, but it contains several fundamental blunders. The first one is consistency: you can't follow Office ribbons with your eye because there's no flow to the arrangement. Some parts of Office's UI are accessed by virtually invisible arrows at the bottom-right corner of ribbon tabs. Remind me — the ribbon is supposed to do away with hard to follow UI, so why are bits of the UI shoved into the title bar and the rest of it in a higgledy heap? (The bar that other MS teams have decided should not only have no quick access toolbar, but that the window title doesn't belong in the ............ "the bar" either. What do you call a bar that doesn't have a title in it?)
The other massive flaw is that no thought was ever given to the literally millions of people who actually do know where everything in the menu system and toolbars is. Apple solved this: put a box in the Help menu that points to where the menu is that you're looking for. The ribbon could have had the same: a "I promise to go directly there myself later, but for just this moment, just this once, please, pretty please, with Cherry on top, tell me where you hid the control to toggle the style palette" box.
There are other gotchas. You've got to learn to deal with inconsistent persistent state: while toolbars and menus always remain or revert to a neutral state, the ribbon does not.
Most software falls into two camps: a) easy, b) hard. Easy software doesn't need a ribbon as there really aren't enough controls. Adobe Reader for example: all most people need is the bookmarks sidebar, find, print, zoom and rotate. Browsers: back, forward, refresh, search.
Whether the ribbon helps people discover all the features of hard software (such as Word) without training, I don't know. I suspect that it won't, as people will simply zone out at the huge mess of icons. Training seems to be de-emphasised by a society that's no longer interested in investing, and filled of people who would respond to investment with disloyalty anyway (they'd take their trained mind straight to another company for a few more quid). In such a disintegrated culture, the ribbon is a barrel-scraping Band-Aid in a last-ditch effort to see if a world of disaffected, disillusioned workers might finally figure out how to use Word on their own — people who still don't know about managed numbering or what a stylesheet is, or automated TOC and indexing, or any of its other myriad features. (What's more sad is how much Word retails for considering that it's largely unchanged since Word 6 in the early 90s. I figured out how to use it from just looking at the menus and toolbars. Word hit a functional limit a long time ago or, at least, as far as Microsoft's imagination is able to carry it.)
</rant>
