{"id":759,"date":"2008-07-27T19:52:30","date_gmt":"2008-07-27T18:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/759-nearly-three-years-on-whats-the-verdict-on-the-office-2007-ribbon.html"},"modified":"2008-07-27T19:52:30","modified_gmt":"2008-07-27T18:52:30","slug":"nearly-three-years-on-whats-the-verdict-on-the-office-2007-ribbon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/759-nearly-three-years-on-whats-the-verdict-on-the-office-2007-ribbon.html","title":{"rendered":"Nearly three years on, what\u2019s the verdict on the Office 2007 ribbon?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Mitch Barnett has had enough<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I can\u2019t take it anymore. I am re-installing Office 2003 and forgetting about Office 2007. Why? It\u2019s the ribbon man! For all of the usability design<\/a>, I find it unusable. No offense to Jensen Harris or Microsoft, but for me, the consumer of the product, and after trying it for over a year, I just can’t get used to it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is a thoughtful post, mainly about Word, and worth a read if you are interested either in Office or in usability design. His main point is that there are too many features:<\/p>\n

\n

Honestly, Word should have been \u201crefactored\u201d into perhaps multiple products or features split into a desktop publishing application or a whole other suite of applications. But instead, the UX team went through an honorable and noble design process of solving the wrong problem.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n

Trouble is, users are conservative. Lotus tried to re-invent the spreadsheet with Improv<\/a>, but despite good reviews it failed to compete with 1-2-3, let alone Excel. Another noble failure which comes to mind is OpenDoc<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

OpenDoc is a revolutionary cross-platform technology that replaces conventional applications with user-assembled groups of software components. With OpenDoc, users can create virtually any kind of custom software solution.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Wikipedia also describes OpenDoc and why it failed<\/a>. Evolution, or doing the same thing as before but slightly better, is easier to sell than revolution.<\/p>\n

That brings me back to the ribbon. I recorded my first impressions<\/a> just after the public announcement of the ribbon at PDC 2005:<\/p>\n

\n

It’s a bold move for Microsoft. Most people here seem to like the new look, but will the average office worker appreciate or resent these major changes? There is no "classic mode"; you have to use the new interface. If it catches on, it will make near-clones like Open Office look dated; if it’s just too different, it could boost the competition.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My reflection nearly three years later is that – despite Barnett\u2019s comments \u2013 the ribbon has proved both less controversial and less revolutionary than I had expected. I\u2019ve had the experience of introducing users to Office 2007, and generally they take a day or two to work out where their favourite features are hidden, and then carry on much as before. Only a minority seem to dislike it as much as Barnett, and Office 2007 seems to have been a success for Microsoft. The ribbon is good marketing, because users can easily tell the difference between this and earlier Office releases. <\/p>\n

On the other hand, Microsoft has not convinced the world that the ribbon concept is the future of UI design; and I\u2019ve not detected any great pressure on the developers of Open Office or other popular applications to change to the ribbon style. Here I am typing into Live Writer<\/a>, which has conventional menus, and it is perfectly comfortable; I\u2019d rather the Writer team worked on features other than a ribbon UI. Sorry, I mean other than an Office Fluent User Interface<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Personally I get on OK with the Office 2007 ribbon, thanks to the Quick Access Toolbar<\/a>. I also like the way the ribbon is somewhat protected from customisation, so that it is the same from one profile to another. That said, I agree with Barnett that there is too much UI on display, though I am not sure of the solution, and some of the UI decisions seem strange. <\/p>\n

I still believe that while the effort to improve usability<\/a> was genuine, Microsoft was also determined to make Office 2007 distinctive from its rivals in some way that could be patented. The key question: did that constraint weaken the outcome?<\/p>\n

Note that Microsoft has hinted at plans for the ribbon that go beyond Office. It may be a core part of the UI in Windows 7<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hey, I know plenty of developers read this blog. Are you being pressed to implement a ribbon UI for your applications? Or is this top-down initiative passing you by?<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: office 2007<\/a>, office ribbon<\/a>, office fluent user interface<\/a>, microsoft<\/a>, windows 7<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mitch Barnett has had enough: I can\u2019t take it anymore. I am re-installing Office 2003 and forgetting about Office 2007. Why? It\u2019s the ribbon man! For all of the usability design, I find it unusable. No offense to Jensen Harris or Microsoft, but for me, the consumer of the product, and after trying it for … Continue reading Nearly three years on, what\u2019s the verdict on the Office 2007 ribbon?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}