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Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
Funny story, before they did the 2007 redesigns, they asked users what they wanted to be added; 95% said features that were already in Office.
The Ribbon was designed to make features more findable.
Alas.
The ribbon is one thing, the flat design and obfuscating tools/settings are a far bigger issue.
I've used Office 2003, 2007, 2010 etc. all the way up to 365 not for work purposes, but just happened to have interacted with all of the versions.
I have to say, I seriously don't know what happened, but Office 2003-2007 feels the most stable and least clunky versions of Office (at least Word) in terms of basic word processing.
I learned how to properly edit and format text in Word in university in a way that I could, without fail, reproduce almost any text design you could think of. When I was learning it on Office 2007 I believe, everything was so stable and predictable. Now when somebody asks me to format some text with 365, the styles functionality continually keeps bugging out and doing stupid shit that I basically can't recover from unless I create a blank file.
In conclusion, Office 2007 > 365
/rant
I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.
Almost like Microsoft did a tremendous amount of user research aimed at improving the accessibility of the most commonly used features. I don’t use their products much, but the design has definitely improved over the years and extra padding is a big part of it.
You are among the first people I've seen online who hasn't circlejerked about literally any level of padding/spacing being too much padding.
People on Reddit/Lemmy always talk about how unusably shit any modern design is, and how UX/UI from 20+ years ago was so much better.
Yet do people use ancient copies of the software that broadly still performs the tasks people need of them? No.
Do they theme their system to look like the oh-so-superior Win98? No.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes I see a design change I dislike. But as a general rule, UI has definitely got better over the years.
And don't get me wrong, part of me feels great nostalgia at seeing old UX's, because it reminds me of the "good old days" when I bought my first computer in 1999. It's fun to Go back and use systems from back then. And at first you think AAAAA this is so cool, I remember all this, this looks neat, but after that nostalgia wears off you think *"thank god modern UIs aren't inconsistent, cramped and cluttered like this"
Nostalgia goggles are a powerful thing.
Weirdly as someone who has used both styles heavily, I'd say the ribbon is more practical than the old toolbars. There's more contextual grouping and more functional given the tabs and search, plus the modern flat design is less distracting, which is what I'd want from a productivity application. Also for me two rows of toolbars & a menu is about the same height as the ribbon anyway, and you can collapse the ribbon if you want to use the space
Yeah, does anyone else remember the menu bars that would show up and disappear depending on what you were doing? Those were awful--the ribbon method of context-specific tabs is better (IMO).
Why did this happen?
The cynical but probably truer than we'd like to admit answer is "middle managers who bring nothing to the table but need to 'make big changes' to justify that promotion they've been chasing."
Source: Pretty much all corporations at this point have these people, my sister's ex-husband is one at Google.
Change for the sake of change is so dumb. I'm tired of pointless UI changes every so many years because some middle manager and their designers need to wow some dumb exec to get a promotion and they do so just by rearranging all the existing functionality because the product itself is already a complete solution that doesn't actually need a new version. Sadly, this mentality even creeps into FOSS spaces. Canonical and Ubuntu wanting to reinvent the wheel with Unity, Mir, Snap, etc. GNOME radically changing their UI all the time.
This is so true of so many companies nowadays. The fact of the matter is that the big leaps in profit/efficiency/effectivness have basically all happened in most of these industries and so often people are pressed to make these sweeping changes because there isn't any real way to improve on a system like this.
Reading Ed Zitron's coverage of the Google antitrust cases is pretty eye opening.
Mostly because it says basically what you just said: we've already reached pretty much peak efficiency in these forms, and since they can't bleed out more money via "efficiency" they're now leaning towards "How many customers can I piss off while increasing ad interactions by 1%?" As Zitron points out, they're literally chasing tiny percentage points of growth through "how many people can we piss off and still grow?" instead of offering anything new and useful. It's just "we're entrenched, so why would we try anything risky at all ever?" all the way down.
I prefer the ribbon. It makes everything easier to discover and use.
It's also entirely configurable so i was able to tailor it specifically to my needs, even include button for my macro, logically grouped and not thrown together with no heads or tail in a "macro" submenu.
It also allows widgets with much richer informational content than menus.
The ribbon is also entirely keyboard navigable with visual hints. Which means you can use anything mouse free without having to remember rarely used shortcuts.
And if the ribbon takes too much space, and you can't afford a better screen, you can hide and show it with ctrl-F1 or a click somewhere (probably).
It's actually a much much better UX than menus and submenus and everything hidden and zero adaptability. At least for tools like the office apps with a bazillion functions.
Most copies of the ribbon are utter shit though because the people who copied didn't understand the strength of the office ribbon and only copied the looks superficially.
It's funny to see people still hung up on the ribbon 17 years later.
It's because of people like you that we still use qwerty on row staggered keyboards from the mechanical typewriter era. ;)
Honestly I like ribbons quite a lot as a design framework and hell, even padding can improve the UX, it's just a shame that neither of these elements have been used well in a decade.
Agreed. I'm sure if I was heads down in Excel for years beforehand it would be a significant downgrade, but as a casual user, making better use of some of the more advanced features became so, SO much easier with the Ribbon.
It's not UI backsliding. It's Microsoft being incompetent. I have no idea how they're still in business, and astounded at their valuation. It seems like everything they manage to push out is just barely functioning
They have to maintain backwards compatibility for 40+ year old applications so that they don't lose big corporate and government customers, but they also have to chase the newest trends in order to keep their shareholders happy. They built their business on selling their software, but most of their competitors are giving functionally-equivalent programs away for free. Their software runs without incident on literally billions of devices for decades, but one or two high-visibility bugs or design missteps and public perception of their brand totally tanks.
And so, their business model sucks. Moving Windows to become a data-harvesting SaaS was a terrible choice, their pivot to AI is going to crash and burn, and rent seeking software subscriptions are a scourge.
But I think they're just too big and too vertically integrated to actually be any better at this point. I just don't think it's possible for their executive team to make good decisions anymore, not because they're dumb, but because the good decisions literally don't exist. It's like a black hole, where the closer you get to the event horizon, the more possible paths point toward the singularity; likewise, the bigger Microsoft gets, the more possible decisions point toward "devastatingly bad." They honestly should have been split up 25 years ago; for the industry's sake and for their own.
Moving away from Office and Windows and so forth is a nightmare for any larger company. If you use specialized software, it might very well only run on Windows or only have an integration into Office. Even if you could, you then have to retrain staff to use Libre Office, Linux and other alternatives. You also will have problems converting, changing servers and so forth.
So companies just do not switch. That is how Microsoft makes money. They really do not care that much about private users. That is only usefull so people can use their products.
I'll just straight up say that the problem is with Microsoft more than anything else. Their UI design is abysmal. Nothing is consistent, nothing is smoothly animated, nothing is easily identifiable by its icon, nothing is glassy and good looking like Win7/macOS. Even in their peak design of Windows 7, they still had those awful legacy UI elements in system settings and the registry settings.
Even with multitouch trackpads being a thing on Windows now, there's STILL not linear trackpad gestures as of 6 months ago when I played with the display units in the store.
I am an IT technician working in Microsoft 365 / Azure, Microsoft makes changes so often that their own documentation hasn't even been updated with the proper new name of the product in the product's own documentation, oh and the name change took place several months if not a year ago.
Btw, just so you know, Libre Office has multiple UIs, incliuding a Ribbon-like variant. View > User Interface.
But they let you choose.
Padding is a very versatile thing in UI design, and none of it will make anything look terrible.
Even in your first example, the toolbar has slight padding on the edges and so do the buttons.
The reason there's more padding now is because it makes it easier for new users to process everything.
Eh, I don't hate the ribbon UI. It certainly looks a lot nicer than the old ones.
I think the biggest crime is that we went towards widescreens and kept all the menus and toolbars along the top.
Another issue is complexity. In a rush to sell yearly updates, more and more features are crammed in. Most of us only use a tiny fraction of them, but there they are on the screen just in case. For everyone.
You're never going to make one UI that makes everyone happy. Most people just learn where the 20 buttons or so that they use are, and blank the rest from their mind. That's the real reason the ribbon UI got hate. Their buttons moved.
What makes it even worse is that screens got wider and shorter, but the new designs use more vertical space than before, leaving even less height to do anything in.
I assume the extra padding was a function of touch screens becoming more prevalent since trying to hit the 2003 style buttons with a finger was not that easy, although I don't remember offhand when touch first started becoming a thing in Windows so it might have happened the other way around. But either way it's likely still a factor in why the ribbon with its extra padding has stuck around.
Contrast is Satan to designers, because being able to distinguish the zones of a UI messes with their perfect colour blocking.
UI designer here - people are simply getting dumber, tech-wise at least.
That being said, there have been a lot of improvements in UI and UX world in the past 20 years the problem is that many users are so technically inept the drag down the entire curve all the way down.
I feel like I belong to one of the last generations that had to figure stuff out on our own when it came to computers back when I was a kid.
I was born in 87, my first computer ran Windows 3.11, I remember installing Windows 95 from floppy disks.
The whole "it just works" part of tech is both fantastic and horrible, fantastic in that it works, horrible in that when it doesn't you get way fewer tools to work with.
It seems easier to find things for users. Probably part of dumbing things down.
My mom went through this last week with Libre Office. She said she couldn’t find anything because the ribbons from Word weren’t there. I found the option and enabled it and she said that was much better.
Whereas, I use Word 365 on a daily basis but I still know where things are from the classic menus.
But users want big pictures and less words, less menus.
So UI designers have done that.
You see that in the change between Windows 7 and Windows 8 in heavy ways. More buttons and less menus.
I fucking hate the dumbing down, especially on servers.
Part of the problem is that people who grew up on phones and tablets are now old enough to start entering the tech industry as UI developers.
o no
meh i like the ribbon much better.
the tools are better organized and findable.
The Ribbon is much better, and has been a part of the Office suite for over a decade, easily.
Poor examples aside, designers and engineers are rarely given a seat at the table in big tech companies. Most tech CEO's were either tech managers or sales people at some point, and are so far removed from IC work or valuing specific crafts for their user value that someone on the UX side probably doesn't get a say in how this shit is built.
Some UX designers either work to very specific business constraints, or work on stuff that has zero benefit to the end-user. Some engineers work on stuff that solely provides metrics for shareholders and leadership.
I'm tempted to set up a blog just to post about this subject, because it's everywhere, but big tech is now so top-heavy that for years many huge decisions have been made on a whim by execs. Tech has grown so large and powerful that tech execs (and those clinging to their coat-tails) put themselves outside of the echelons of what an IC can reach, and far above the user. Years of MBA double-speak and worshipping the altar of guys like Gates, Bezos, and Jobs means that it's "good" to be opinionated and ignore fact over your own judgement. This results in senior management deciding "let's put AI here" or "the colour scheme should be mostly white", despite reluctantly paying hundreds of people many thousands of dollars a year to KNOW about this stuff.
That, in essence, is why everything feels shitter nowadays. It's because some fifty-something MBA cunt believes that you need AI, or a good UI needs more buttons - stuff we've known for decades is fucking stupid. That's irrelevant though, because by being "General Manager of UI at MegaCorp" and having an assistant to arrange their Outlook calendar, they know more than you, pleb.
Because everyone is switching from a custom ui to a css standard so they can have a web app that is also a desktop app.
To sum up, your app became a web page.
