It is some power user's dream. There are a huge number of power users who consider it a nightmare, though. Well over half of the people I know who have to use the ribbon range somewhere between disliking it and hating it, because it makes it difficult to find what you need to do.
It makes it easy to find what you need to do. It makes it difficult to apply your knowledge of how things were before it existed. That's a much different problem
But it doesn't make it easy to find what you need to do, because it's almost insanely random.
So I have Word open. When the window is set to one width I get a Styles button and a Styles Pane.
Which do I need to click to remove all styles?
Wrong! The quickest option is the unlabelled Clear All Formatting button above the font/background colour selectors.
I make the window wider. Styles expands to a list of styles - in its own little horizontally scrolling microbox - and the Styles Pane button stays to the right of it.
If I click the Styles Pane, I have the same styles in two spaces on the screen, very close to each other - one in a little scrolling microbox, and the other in a vertical list.
This is nonsensical. It violates any number of established and well-researched design principles.
What's next to the Styles Pane button? "Dictate". Because why not? Most people are going to dictate after styling, and not vice versa.
Meanwhile the box with the font names isn't wide enough to show names properly. Someone decided it would be more useful to fill the ribbon with an expanding horizontally scrolling microbox for styles - which is annoyingly hard to use - than to make the font name box wider, so you can see which font you're using.
And the font size box has some completely useless right padding. Even if you use fractional sizes, or three digit sizes, there's still some useless white space there.
And so on. Is this really the absolute pinnacle of all possible UI designs?
> And so on. Is this really the absolute pinnacle of all possible UI designs?
No, it's just a good UI design. It's easy to pick and choose nonsensical examples like that from any design philosophy. No software perfectly accomplishes every task for every user.
I disagree entirely. I think the ribbon is a great example of terrible UI design because it's clunky, it makes it very hard to find what you need, and it eats up a lot of screen space.
I think that it makes it hard to find what I need to do when what I need to do is something uncommon. This is because it not only hides things, but it changes where it hides things depending on the current state of the application.
It's not a matter of it being different than the other ways. I don't have a problem adapting to new ways, unless the new ways are worse.
It is some power user's dream. There are a huge number of power users who consider it a nightmare, though. Well over half of the people I know who have to use the ribbon range somewhere between disliking it and hating it, because it makes it difficult to find what you need to do.