8 ms·

I love the Office 'ribbon' because it has icons whereas the menus don't. It makes it very easy to quickly pick the tool I need by muscle and visual memory. Also

I love the Office 'ribbon' because it has icons whereas the menus don't. It makes it very easy to quickly pick the tool I need by muscle and visual memory. Also, MS does icons and design well, IMO, because they don't make everything too flat or hidden, they give very intuitive indications of mouse position and such, like with a slight popping-up of the button or whatever. With the menus, I have to engage my language part of my brain rather than just looking for an icon and clicking it.

UnFleshedOne 6y ago
Wait till they desaturate the icons like they did in Visual Studio recently or make them all look the same splash of colors like google did with their product icons.
alvarlagerlof 6y ago
I hate ribbon because I could never figure out which tab was right intuitively for most things. The Google Docs-style menu works better for me.
- jfengel 6y ago
  The great thing about Google Docs is that it just doesn't have 99% of the features for which Ribbons were invented. MS Office had accumulated thousands of features, most of which were beloved by a tiny fraction of users, and completely useless to the rest. That tiny fraction wanted instant access without having to memorize keyboard shortcuts, but no two wanted the same one. Ribbons are about the best way I can think of to accept that premise. Aggravating at first, but you and it gradually learn what you do most often, and reach a steady state. But better is to reject those features, put up a simple interface that captures the things you do 99% of the time, eliminates the .9% of fancy flashy stuff that some people use occasionally but everybody else is grateful to have gone, and just tells you to suck up the remaining .1% of stuff that you might actually use sometimes but can't have. There are still days when I have to boot up LibreOffice or MS Office for some document that just absolutely positively needs something extra. Today, it's edit marks on a document, and being able to switch back and forth between the original and edited form, restoring old edits. But that's a special use case and I'm just as glad to not have to be ignoring that feature most days.
MagnumOpus 6y ago
> It makes it very easy to quickly pick the tool I need by muscle and visual memory When you are at the point of muscle memory, menu shortcuts are far better -- because they have keyboard shortcuts associated with them that for power users with muscle memory are 5x faster than mousing around. It is not by accident that MS has kept those menu keyboard shortcuts even when killing their discoverability by killing the menu bar -- because their most valuable power users still press ALT-D-F-F first when encountering a new table rather than hunting around the ribbon bar.
- lambda_obrien 6y ago
  I'm one of those people who use keyboard shortcuts sparingly. I actually prefer the mouse, even for things I do over and over everyday. Why? I'm not quite sure, but I've tried using the keyboard in the past with vim or whatever, and I just prefer to use my mouse for most things. It was hard to remember the combos, even after a few weeks. I do use cli quite a bit, but that's slightly different. If I used office more, maybe that'd be the application which converted me to more keyboard use. I basically only use vscode, slack, and Firefox/Chrome everyday.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Menus can have icons.
thw0rted 6y ago
The ribbon gets a lot of grief, but I think it is a step forward from conventional menus in discoverability. The secret is having multiple types and sizes of controls. If you have 3 top level menu items with 4 option each, a user can very quickly scan for what they're trying to do. If you have 6 or 8 top level categories and 10-30 items under each, it's a totally different story. With menus, you have to use sub and even sub-sub menus for organization, and the user has to mouse over or use the keyboard to see the sub-options. Every sub(-sub) menu looks the same, maybe with a tiny icon to help find it. With the ribbon, every top level category naturally has major sub-groupings (horizontally), within which more important / commonly-used items can use larger icons, split buttons can be used to show a default action with related actions in a drop-down, and option-groups can be presented as a dropdown or expanded to show them all at once (think "view layout" in a file explorer). I have to admit I had a negative reaction to the ribbon initially, but especially with the thoughtful integration into Windows Explorer it's really grown on me since. I'm not sure it's appropriate to replace every use of a conventional menu bar but I think it's the best fit in a lot of places.

UnFleshedOne 6y ago

Wait till they desaturate the icons like they did in Visual Studio recently or make them all look the same splash of colors like google did with their product icons.

alvarlagerlof 6y ago

I hate ribbon because I could never figure out which tab was right intuitively for most things. The Google Docs-style menu works better for me.

jfengel 6y ago
The great thing about Google Docs is that it just doesn't have 99% of the features for which Ribbons were invented. MS Office had accumulated thousands of features, most of which were beloved by a tiny fraction of users, and completely useless to the rest. That tiny fraction wanted instant access without having to memorize keyboard shortcuts, but no two wanted the same one. Ribbons are about the best way I can think of to accept that premise. Aggravating at first, but you and it gradually learn what you do most often, and reach a steady state. But better is to reject those features, put up a simple interface that captures the things you do 99% of the time, eliminates the .9% of fancy flashy stuff that some people use occasionally but everybody else is grateful to have gone, and just tells you to suck up the remaining .1% of stuff that you might actually use sometimes but can't have. There are still days when I have to boot up LibreOffice or MS Office for some document that just absolutely positively needs something extra. Today, it's edit marks on a document, and being able to switch back and forth between the original and edited form, restoring old edits. But that's a special use case and I'm just as glad to not have to be ignoring that feature most days.

MagnumOpus 6y ago

> It makes it very easy to quickly pick the tool I need by muscle and visual memory When you are at the point of muscle memory, menu shortcuts are far better -- because they have keyboard shortcuts associated with them that for power users with muscle memory are 5x faster than mousing around. It is not by accident that MS has kept those menu keyboard shortcuts even when killing their discoverability by killing the menu bar -- because their most valuable power users still press ALT-D-F-F first when encountering a new table rather than hunting around the ribbon bar.

lambda_obrien 6y ago
I'm one of those people who use keyboard shortcuts sparingly. I actually prefer the mouse, even for things I do over and over everyday. Why? I'm not quite sure, but I've tried using the keyboard in the past with vim or whatever, and I just prefer to use my mouse for most things. It was hard to remember the combos, even after a few weeks. I do use cli quite a bit, but that's slightly different. If I used office more, maybe that'd be the application which converted me to more keyboard use. I basically only use vscode, slack, and Firefox/Chrome everyday.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Menus can have icons.

thw0rted 6y ago

The ribbon gets a lot of grief, but I think it is a step forward from conventional menus in discoverability. The secret is having multiple types and sizes of controls. If you have 3 top level menu items with 4 option each, a user can very quickly scan for what they're trying to do. If you have 6 or 8 top level categories and 10-30 items under each, it's a totally different story. With menus, you have to use sub and even sub-sub menus for organization, and the user has to mouse over or use the keyboard to see the sub-options. Every sub(-sub) menu looks the same, maybe with a tiny icon to help find it. With the ribbon, every top level category naturally has major sub-groupings (horizontally), within which more important / commonly-used items can use larger icons, split buttons can be used to show a default action with related actions in a drop-down, and option-groups can be presented as a dropdown or expanded to show them all at once (think "view layout" in a file explorer). I have to admit I had a negative reaction to the ribbon initially, but especially with the thoughtful integration into Windows Explorer it's really grown on me since. I'm not sure it's appropriate to replace every use of a conventional menu bar but I think it's the best fit in a lot of places.