Why Microsoft’s ribbon sucks
Bottom line, I have a lot of respect for Microsoft and many of the outstanding people that work there (e.g. Bill Buxton).
But the new ribbon sucks.
I’ve been using it daily for months (Word, Powerpoint, Excel), and I consistently stumble on the same functions over and over again. I doubt I will ever master it. And I’m an interface designer!
When I want to center text both horizontally and vertically, I can always find the horizontal centering, but have to search for quite some time to find the vertical centering.
I consistently to this day scan all of the available options in the ribbon looking for things.
Just yesterday I couldn’t figure out how to change the paragraph style for some text without looking for 3 to 4 minutes.
When I want to print a page, I have to remind myself that it’s under the big Microsoft circle button. And there are so many more…
Bottom line, for me at least, nothing is automatic. Nothing is natural. Learnability is poor. It’s as if I’m looking at a bag of goodies and my eye has to scan through all of them to find the particular piece of candy I want.
If the problems were all a result of change, that would be one thing. But I’ve been using Office 2007 long enough to exclude change as a problem. If the changes were learnable I would have certainly learned them by now. I believe the problems stem from the following:
1) visual density/complexity
There is just too much to process on the screen. It’s a Swiss Army Knife with every tool exposed (well, not all of them). Not only is it too much, but the density, the proximity and variety, make it difficult to process quickly or to associate a function with a location. For example, it’s impossible to mentally associate upper-middle with paragraph styles because upper-middle is too broad and would include many other functions. My mind must process the ribbon each time rather than jump to a location.
2) anticipated functionality
The designers chose (through testing and usage data I’m sure) what functions to display prominently and where to display them. Whatever criteria they used leaves me with less than half of what I need visible on the screen at any given time to accomplish what I need to do. So I wind up searching for what I need — everytime. In my experience, anytime I’m asked to anticipate what users will want to do, I hesitate. True, very often you have to do it to some degree, but it’s challenging to get right. And the degree to which this was done with the ribbon, in my opinion, made it an impossible goal to achieve.
We (designers) all make mistakes. I recently designed a navigation system that I thought was innovative and efficient. In testing it failed miserably and I had to redesign it. What amazes me given what I know about the Office redesign, and the amount of work that went into it (along with the great minds that contributed), is that they must have gotten good test results and I can’t fathom how. I personally would have failed.
I would love to hear comments from others on their experiences. I haven’t heard many positive remarks personally (except regarding the context-sensitive right-click menus, which I think are excellent).
