The Ribbon Sucks
If you are working with Office 2007 you know the Ribbon. If you don’t you are a lucky bastard.
Although Office has many bugs and is a major case of feature bloat, but up to now I always stood up to defend it, because most of the stuff I use works ok, and that is probably more than 90% of the Office Users use. AND alternatives aren’t really there yet. Ok there is Open Office but the last time I looked at it, it was horrible, ugly, buggy and IMHO only usable for private use.
But now the ribbon enters the room. At least in the way it is implemented in Office it is the biggest usability road block short of a system crash. But first what is this ribbon thing anyway?
The ribbon is a GUI Component which replaces the menu bar and the toolbar found in so many applications. It looks like this:
(Click on the image for a full size version)
At first sight it looks just like a menu bar + a toolbar with different size icons and other elements in it. But this is a misconception.
- The menu bar is not really a menu bar but tabs, which one uses to switch between different toolbars.
- There is an additional thingy on the top which contains some actions like save, undo and redo called the Qick Access Toolbar:
- The is a big ugly bubble like icon which is actually a button, which is more or less the file menu:
If you are a developer there is also a document for you which describes, how you are supposed to use the ribbon component in the applications you create.
So what is wrong with all this?
Let´s start with the minor annoyances:
The more important commands in the Ribbon should get larger icons. Great. Just nobody asked me what is important for me. For example the different layouts you can view a word document with are NOT important for me. For me the whole concept of different layouts for viewing cut go away. I wouldn’t miss it. It actually would be an improvement, because it would stop word from opening documents ‘for full screen reading’.
Who had the weird idea that a two column menu (like the windows start button or the ribbon application button) is a good idea? It is probably the same guy that came up with the idea to add two buttons and a weird extra panel to the menu. Why there aren’t just three more menu items labeled ‘Recent Documents’, ‘Options’ and ‘Exit’? I have no idea.
But now it is getting serious, at least for me. For me toolbars and menus had two very distinct purposes: Toolbars where for quickly accessing stuff. Since I mostly use keyboard stuff for thing I need often. I don’t use toolbars to much. Menus are for looking up commands that I know are somewhere, but I don’t know the shortcut. In this case I look at the available menus, pick the one that sounds promising, and scan all the items in it. This approach completely fails with the ribbon!
Microsoft completely messed up the grouping of commands.
The design guide says explicitly:
Avoid arbitrary command placement. Suppose that you think you have a good tab and group design, but discover that several commands just don’t fit in. Chances are, your tab and group design isn’t as good as you think it is, and you need to continue to refine it. Don’t solve this problem by putting those commands where they don’t belong. If you do, users likely will have to inspect every tab to find them—then promptly forget where they are.
Yet every single office app has a ‘home’ tab which is just a glorified ‘other stuff’ which contains arbitrary stuff. But even within the proper tabs things are of: What has recording macros to do with ‘view’? Why is stuff named ‘… layout’ not in the ‘Page Layout’?
Even when the grouping of commands would have been done properly Microsoft did a great job at making searching the commands hard. With menus searching all items in the menus was really easy: Start with the first menu, go through it item by item. If an item is a submenu, continue with that submenu. When you finish a menu, go to the next menu. If you finish with a submenu, continue with the next item of the parent menu.
For the Ribbon the whole thing got way more difficult. First you scan the application menu. Don’t forget the two buttons in the application menu. Then iterate through the tabs scanning each toolbar within that tab, carefully checking the buttons for tiny triangles, which denote some combo box like control which hides even more commands. Ok scanning the cluttered toolbars, with text, icons in two sizes and all kinds of other controls is way slower than a nice list of commands/submenus but that isn’t too bad, isn’t it. Well it would be if we hadn’t missed 50% of the commands. Have a look at this partial screenshot.
Below the buttons and stuff is another grouping. It is completely useless since your eyes are coming from the tabs and get stuck between the buttons and controls before they notice, after a long search, that their search might have been easier if they had noticed the groups below first. What is more important is the tiny square with an arrow which is in some of the groups. It opens another dialog which sometimes looks like a menu and many actions are hidden in there.
So this is it, my rant about the Microsoft Ribbon Component. I actually don’t like rants. I like my blog posts to contain some useful stuff. So what are my recommendations?
If you plan to include a Ribbon in your next application think twice. It will look modern, but it will annoy users like me. You could make them happy with an option to replace the Ribbon with a more traditional UI. If you want to make users like me really happy make your menus searchable. In Java you can do that really easy with the substance look and feel it creates a search box for searching the menus all on its own … really nice.
I too think the ribbon sucks. I am a scientist who has been using MS Word and MS Excel since the early 90′s. I am so frustrated that I will look for other software. Hasn’t anyone at MS read Tufte’s book (or The Elements of Style)?
The ribbon is awful. Plain and simple.
Simple key commands from Office 2003 are gone, so one is forced to search through the ribbon to do something one didn’t even need the mouse for before.
Second, if you didn’t know the key command in 2003, you could have every possible function available to you with one-click via the toolbars, which were much more visually compact than this ribbon. It takes at least two and sometimes more clicks to do most anything in the ribbon.
It is a productivity killer.
Download this free plugin to restore the classic menus. It isn’t perfect, but it helps:
http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
I agree, the ribbon sucks in every application that I’ve seen it. I got the hang of Movie Maker (that came with Windows XP) easily. But I can’t get the hang of the Windows 7 version because of this damn ribbon bar. It’s very anti-productive, it takes much longer to learn the program and I’ve just given up trying.
Before, you had a toolbar for frequently used commands and you could customise that to your liking. You also had the menu bar which featured every option in the program. You got to know where the options were that you liked and you added the menu items you wanted to use often to your toolbar. That was a perfect system.
Now the ribbon bar comes and I don’t know where anything is. The ribbon keeps changing all the time, I can’t keep track of where I am or what I’m doing, I keep getting confused. I don’t like the fact that it puts tabs in the window title bar. I don’t like the fact that the ribbon seems to be a set of toolbars with tabs. I don’t want a set of toolbars. I want one toolbar with menus.
I’ve always been a Microsoft fan and supported their Windows OS enormously. But since Windows 7, they seem to be intent on changing things just for the sake of it. There’s a team at Microsoft that thinks something needs changing, this is a change so we must do it. But it’s making their software worse! They don’t even seem to step back and look at what they’ve done.
The Windows 7 Superbar, I spent ages trying to get used to it as best I could but I never liked it as much as the old taskbar. I’ve tried to put the taskbar back in Windows 7 and it mostly works, but you can’t turn the window previews off, it’s very frustrating.
IE8 is another example. It’s always been feature rich with its page progress bar, proper status bar and easy downloading. Then modern Microsoft came along and ruined it with iE9. The page progress bar is scrapped, the status bar is useless and the automatic downloader tries to do everything for you, screwing it all up as it does.
Then on top of all that we get the ribbon bar. Yet another useless change that has made the software unusable for me. I don’t like Microsoft anymore, they used to set themselves apart from the competition by offering quality and ease of use over anything else. Then this “modern Microsoft” came along and now nothing seems to matter other than making your program look new and flashy, to the horror of traditional Microsoft fans worldwide.
OMG I have wasted soooo much time trying to find stuff on the Ribbon, it would have paid for me to buy the Addin Tools classic menus. Unfortunately, my company will not allow me to install it. So, I’m just left with a burning hate for Microsoft hubris.
Microsoft DOES make changes just for the sake of change, but for us it’s a royal pain. They introduced new file formats, so you need to upgrade so you can read those files when you receive them. But now you’re forced to spend more money to replace a perfectly functional program with one that you HATE to use. Yeah, I can work with the annoying ribbons, but the previous menu system was far easier to navigate & search. Although the “adaptive menus” changed which commands were displayed depending on what you you use (who doesn’t like to search for commands that move & disappear?), you could turn that useless feature off. Why Microsoft is forcing the ribbon on us (and removing any way of reverting to menus) I don’t know – it’s like they’re punishing us for using their products. Office 2010 looks pale & washed out too, so the active window never really looks active. Most apps have a dark blue header at the top when they’re active, but not Office 2010 – it just changes from light blue/gray to a slightly darker light blue/gray. They always tell us that the new interface is the BEST, but doesn’t that mean they were wrong when they told us that the LAST interface was “the best”? For a lot of users, making the jump from Office XP to Office 2007 or 2010 is a real headache. I have only met one person who doesn’t hateit
Office 2010 – the necessary evil.