no, I’m willing to die on the hill that the ribbon UI is one of the greatest UIs period - especially how it was done in office 07 and 10. As a computer noob at the time, it was a huge improvement over the previous office 2003 UI.

The icons always gave you a good idea what something was doing, important functions were bigger and when you for example selected a table the table tab was visible and with a different color so you knew that you could do things with that table.

I think however many 3rd party programms did the ribbon UI poorly or had not enough features for it to make sense.

I always hated the ribbon context menu system. It ruins the way I learn watch involves where something is just as much as what it’s called, kinda like remember where on a physical page something is even if you don’t remember the page.

Static, nested menus are superior.

Yea, I agree that Office 2003 was the pinnacle of Office UI design. And I’d go so far as to say that about Windows 2000.

Having controls in predictable shapes and locations really contributed to “ease of use”. One of my pet peeves is the more recent trend where clickable elements aren’t obviously so. Such as a string of text that one has to hover across and see the cursor change shape to know that it’s clickable.

As others have said, I think a significant part of why the UIs have changed since then is to accommodate touch screens and “webification”.

'Glad to see your posting. I thought I was just being curmudgeonly :)

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.

I bet it’s capitalism.

The answer for enshittification of the entire reality seems to always be

capitalism.

I would like to see them add something like the VSCode command pallette. That way if I know the name of the tool but can’t remember or don’t want to go click for it, I just just type the name and fuzzy find it.

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.

Touch screen devices.

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.

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.

Probably so since jackass in a suit could double his annual bonus.

Ohhh I have a feeling you will enjoy this video:

https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI

It’s about a dofferent piece of software, but still highly relevant.

I have no problems with it, so I guess I’m some sort of savant? There is such thing as good and bad UI, but I think this is a case of ‘what you’re used to’ causing problems with ‘what is.’

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.