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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
Same, but for Excel.
Also, JFC the save menu in Office 365 is Cthulhu-level madness.
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.
Yet do they use ancient copies of the software that broadly still performs the tasks people need of them? No.
Yes, actually—I have a VM reserved mostly for 16-bit software.
Do they theme their system to look like the oh-so-superior Win98? No.
Yes, actually—the Windows machine I'm forced to use for work restores as much of that aesthetic as practical, sometimes with the help of third-party software. My main home machine features a Linux DE whose appearance is largely the same as it was circa 2005 and whose development team is dedicated to keeping that look and feel.
Some of us do put our money where our mouths are, although I admit that isn't universal.
It's true that some level of padding is necessary in a UI, but the amount present in contemporary design is way too large for a system using a traditional mouse or laptop touchpad, which are capable of small, precise movements. Touchscreen-friendly design is best saved for touchscreens, but people don't want to do the work involved to create multiple styles of UI for different hardware. I've never encountered anything touted as "one size fits all", whether it be a UI or a piece of clothing, that actually does fit everyone. At best, it's "one size fits most", and I'm usually outside the range of "most" the designers had in mind. At worst, it's "lowest common denominator", and that seems to be the best description for contemporary UI design.
For some, with only a small screen, wasted space means extra navigation to find hidden commands. A usability fail just so the app looks pretty. Also a symptom of "one UI fits all" just to save businesses money.
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).
I remember people being upset by the ribbon back when office 2007 was released. Their complaints made sense until I sat down and used it. Found it to be a great improvement. I switched my libre office to the ribbon layout as soon as they added it. Because I don't use it often, it's great for finding stuff compared to looking through the menus.
The nice thing about the LO implementation is also that they added a couple of varieties of the design, like the compact one which pushes things closer together so it's not distracting.
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.
To be fair to the Open Source community, Canonical is a private company, and so it's not really a shocker that they keep promoting bullshit tied to their own ecosystem. Especially with someone like Mark Shuttleworth involved, he was one of the early rich out of touch space tourists, long before Bezos looked like an idiot coming back from space. The profit motive always infects everything it touches.
Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It's been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.
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.
The old file menu was way more functional if you needed to be keyboard only.
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
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.
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.
16:9 was pushed on us because it was cheaper to produce on mass for tv and pc. 16:9 was better for movies.
There are some monitors from just before this massive market manipulation and those have 16:10, sometimes with display port before hdmi was even mainstream.
Apple is actually one of the few companies to make the jump from 4:3 to 16:10 avoiding the 16:9 with very few exceptions.
To this day i see people work with old software designed for the area of more vertical screens but doing so on screens designed for movies.
Most people dont even understand what i mean when i explain this. But the good thing is my issue with it was considered a disability so they had to accommodate me with something more sensible.
Sorry long comments but this is a personal vice for me.
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.
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.
meh i like the ribbon much better.
the tools are better organized and findable.
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.
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.
And you can't have legible icons, as they must be as small and cryptic as possible. They should also all look alike at first glance if possible.
and here I thought complaints about the ribbon were late 2000s, early 2010s stuff, incredible we still get these kinds of things in 2024
The ribbon is better than menus. They're even customizable. And lots of non-Microsoft software uses ribbons, too.
Plus there's a search function right at the top if you can't find the option you're looking for
The ribbon was introduced in Office 2007. The backsliding started a long time ago.
View-> Then the little v arrow in the right. Switch to tabs only, the Ribbon UI will now only appear when you click one of the titles like home or View.
The Ribbon isn't the worst thing. It tried to solve the clutter of the previous interface, although I always preferred the old one.
Here is an interesting take on the problem of modern interfaces: https://datagubbe.se/decusab/
