A stunning disregard to millions, maybe billions of human hours spent learning a menu-based UI of incredibly powerful and feature rich office applications, where ultimately there is no obvious place for an option, feature or toggle; at least offer consistency to make the learning worthwhile.
At the very least preserve the option to keep the old menu. But no, the boardroom was convinced by a shiny presentation. Out with the old, in with the new.
Now, trivial features are easier to find, advanced features are..somewhere else. So you can't discover the advanced features next to the more common ones.
The ribbon was the time when you could start to tell when websites or software products had a new generation of product people taking over and changing things around. You could feel the touch of a designer who hasn't loved or really used the product much. All workflows have become weaker, dumbed down. The important "save as..." icon, where I quickly place the thing somewhere else before I proceed with my fleeting thought, is sabotaged by the delay on the click on "File", the confusion why a menu opens slowly from the left, the hunt downwards to my all-important click. Then, force me into a discussion where to save the file. "Maybe in the cloud as that is what we're selling?" Just no.
Now I won't ever go the extra mile and learn every last feature of an application. Learn it, become fluent, yes. But my learning can only be invested in permanent knowledge. Be it BASH or programming fundamentals. But your UI, no thanks.
I always thought Jobs was prescient to mandate that the menu bar appear as part of the OS chrome on MacOS and not an individual application's chrome like it was on Windows. Always-on menu prevented bored UX folks from EVER removing the menu from the screen. Always active menu has felt clunky on Mac since the advent of multiscreens and very wide screens, but I still appreciate this UX design tenet.
The discoverability heavyweight champ always was and always will be the menu.
I wonder if Jobs ever discussed Always-on menu publicly and contrasted it with Windows' approach.
At the very least preserve the option to keep the old menu. But no, the boardroom was convinced by a shiny presentation. Out with the old, in with the new.
Now, trivial features are easier to find, advanced features are..somewhere else. So you can't discover the advanced features next to the more common ones.
The ribbon was the time when you could start to tell when websites or software products had a new generation of product people taking over and changing things around. You could feel the touch of a designer who hasn't loved or really used the product much. All workflows have become weaker, dumbed down. The important "save as..." icon, where I quickly place the thing somewhere else before I proceed with my fleeting thought, is sabotaged by the delay on the click on "File", the confusion why a menu opens slowly from the left, the hunt downwards to my all-important click. Then, force me into a discussion where to save the file. "Maybe in the cloud as that is what we're selling?" Just no.
Now I won't ever go the extra mile and learn every last feature of an application. Learn it, become fluent, yes. But my learning can only be invested in permanent knowledge. Be it BASH or programming fundamentals. But your UI, no thanks.