Software should be intuitive. The Ribbon is
not.
Software should not necessarily be intuitive. I love vim,
for example, and moved from using the big word processors to Lyx to LaTeX in vim
for my own documents. It would have been a pain to learn if it hadn't been so
rewarding, vim's power is amazing, and LaTeX, old as it is, has beautiful
typesetting and I can easily produce PDFs for others. Those certainly are not
the right tools for everyone, but intuitive software isn't either. Since I
started to use an OS that offers a lot of choice in UI styles (Linux), I
gradually found out that I prefer modal applications and typing commands over
using a mouse.
I remember reading the reason (or one of the reasons) why
Microsoft developed the ribbon: users would ask for features that had been
implemented in Office forever, the problem was these users couldn't find them.
The menus as we're used to in desktop applications were meant to make the
available functions easily discoverable. Just explore the menus and you know
what's there. But many people don't do that, they don't explore at
all.
I have seen that in other situations. I know the city I live in
pretty well. I like to walk and bike around in my spare time and when I notice a
street I've never been in for me that is a reason to go there immediately. The
result is that I often notice I know neighbourhoods miles from where I live
better than some people who've lived in those neighbourhoods forever. I explore,
they don't.
Microsoft created the ribbon for people who don't explore.
Putting it bluntly, they shove all available functions in the user's face in the
hope they will finally notice they're there. The problem with that approach is
that Microsoft reacts as if all users are like that. They aren't. One
size does not fit all people. Ideally applications would offer several UI
styles. Of course that is far too expensive for most software developers to
implement, and using the familiar desktop style with menus is a reasonable
compromise. But Microsoft is huge, they should be able to offer users a choice
between a few UI styles aimed at different kinds of users for their most
important applications.
For some reason (that I don't understand at all)
Microsoft, as well as many others who build software, and so-called usability
experts, keep insisting that nearly everybody has the same requirements.
Nonsense. User friendly is not the same as beginner friendly, and people are as
diverse as software users as they are in other respects. You can't possibly make
everybody happy, but at least acknowledge that not everybody is the same. A
giant like Microsoft should be able to at least maintain the old style menu
based UI for their products as an alternative for the ribbon, and perhaps
introduce a third style for keyboard-centric users. Instead they assume that one
size fits all.
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