Talk:Ribbon (computing)

message: According to MS help on removing the ribbon, "The Ribbon ...is part of the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, is designed to help you quickly find the commands that you need to complete a task. Commands are organized in logical groups that are collected together under tabs. Each tab relates to a type of activity, such as writing or laying out a page. To reduce screen clutter, some tabs are shown only when they are needed. When the Ribbon is minimized, you see only the tabs."
I think that many of us may disagree with sections of this paragraph from Microsoft.
Commands are not organized into logical groups, they are merely plastered across the screen in a logic defying manner that only serves to look pretty and make conventional functions hard to find.  Finding commands is not quick because the density of icons is spread out across the screen instead of gathered into a close area, so the eye must search back and forth across the screen until a poorly designed icon that is not well related to previous menu choices may be found.  It is like reading the this paragraph.
The function choices are not even the same as the 2003 menu choices, so previous users have to hunt through multiple mouse menus to find what is not shown in the new Ribbon.
Tabs may relate to types of activities that do not seem to be carefully related.
The ribbon hogs screen space in an abhorent manner making the document window seem completely irrelevant.  Taking of valuable screen space is especially noticeable on short screen laptops.
When I minimize the Ribbon, I'd like it to disappear completely.
Microsoft refers to it's software as "Professional."  The Ribbon does not seem to meet the standards for 'professional' since it does not maintain continuity for those professionals who use it.
Is Microsoft's feedback loop completely broken?   If sales are their only parameter, then they certainly are not doing themselves and their users any favors.70.89.209.81 (talk) 16:41, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: As an example of how the ribbon items are not organized logically, but by some other criterion, I (was forced to) use Excel today.  I needed to insert a row.  Easy, that hieroglyph should be on the Insert tab, right?  Wrong.  It's in the Home tab.  I have the same issue with inserting tables in Word; I can never remember where the hieroglyph for that should be.  Wherever it is, it's not logical.  Now if I could just find some prominent review that said that, I would put it in the article. Mcswell (talk) 01:44, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incorrect assertions by Microsoft 

message: it would be nice to see a reference to any studies Microsoft has released to support its claim of productivity enhancement, given users' self reported impairment of productivity by 20-35%.  Allowing for the bald faced facetiousness of the productivity argument, there should be discussion about other strategies justifying this massive antagonizing of their customer base, i.e. is it yet another of Microaoft's many lock-in strategies?  Ensuring lock-in of new users to Office vs Open Office, by training new users in a non standard non portable unique and crippling interface.  It would also seem to be potential grounds for a class action lawsuit if in fact productivity is reduced as much as the 20-35% report.  if so, Microsoft should have foreseen this and conducted sufficient usability studies to defend any such legal action on behalf of its long suffering abusive relationship victims aka 'customers'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.61.142.33 (talk) 11:49, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: In my to-do list there's a desire to write a summary of the story of the MS Ribbon. Once you learn that the Office most used command is Paste and that users in focus groups were asking MS for new features that already existed in Office (that obviously they didn't found), it starts to explain many things about the redesign. Office 2007 was certainly designed based both on collected usage statistics and goal-based design. The designers issued a series of blog posts discussing the design process, they should be added as a reference to the article. Diego (talk) 10:09, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Damn, they're already included in the article. Guess nobody read them. Diego (talk) 10:14, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

text: I would still like to see some usability studies quoted in the article and none of those above come close. One of the underlying merits of the classic "WIMP" interface was the number of ergonomic studies that demonstrated the relative merits of keyboard and mouse for different operations. It did demonstrate that the old diehard "command line interface" supporters were plain wrong, at least for the majority of usage. I'm prepared to believe a ribbon interface is easier for the new user and could be as efficient with practice, but as one who still prefers the drop-down menu approach I'd like to see the evidence. Chris55 (talk) 12:33, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: See this (and this if you have access to it). I don't know of other published results by Microsoft that I'm aware of, but the design descriptions above say that they certainly performed them in combination with their usage stats to arrive to the current design. Maybe you could track the papers by Microsoft Research, it's likely that they have published more of them at that venue. But AFAIK the main benefit provided by the Ribbon design is not efficiency with common actions but easier access to some of the more obscure ones. Diego (talk) 12:51, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The first one you quote is very lukewarm - more users preferred WIMP or were neutral! (section 4.1) I was amused by the user comment "I don’t like it at all. From a modern civilisation back to pictograms and hieroglyphs".  I can't (yet) access the second. But they seem to be addressing marketing issues (do people like it) rather than ergonomic issues (is it more effective or learnable). So maybe the reason there isn't any research is that it doesn't show what MS wants it to show. Chris55 (talk) 18:00, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

text: I would judge my productivity with the Ribbon to be 3-5% of that with the existing menu interface. I could just do things, like change page orientation, print, configure styles, and more. Now I have to Google for anything I want to do because the smattering of icons in haphazard fashion frequently don't contain those important functions that were easily found in menus. I swear at anybody who thinks one should use the Ribbon in the workplace. There's no justification for it whatsoever. Bring back the menu.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.228.82.178 (talk) 08:54, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Any Usability Studies Cited by Microsoft? 

message: Is this a ribbon patent?  The drawings are grainy, but the second one looks like a ribbon, and is described thusly on the second page of the description:
FIG 2 is an illustration of a computer screen display showing a ribbon shaped user interface for displaying task top level functionality tabs and for displaying a plurality functionalities available under a selected top level functionality tab .  
This patent was issued to Microsoft on Feb 14, 2012.
http://www.google.com/patents/US8117542
Dbsx (talk) 18:38, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Possibly. The patent doesn't use the term "ribbon" however, and I can't find any citation that conclusively identifies it as related, so it would probably be original research to make the link. Microsoft do have at least two other ribbon-related patents:  and . Horatio (talk) 21:31, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is this a ribbon patent?