> Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)
Yeah, I feel A/B testing is really the place where Satan secretly influences the world. I'm losing track of how many times I've seen user-hostile or application-debiliating decisions justified by "data" on user behaviour. Something is very wrong here.
- Result: wastes precious vertical space on low-resolution widescreen displays (i.e. business displays and most notebooks) that should be dedicated to showing the document body.
# Due to being horizontal, GUI items appear/disappear depending on window width.
- Result 1: having two documents on screen can be disadvantageous compared to having one on screen because a lot of the GUI items aren't showing or are hidden in submenus, encouraging wasting screen real estate by only having one document on the entire screen.
- Result 2: due to the Ribbon's horizontality, instead of having the elements stay on screen in a consistent manner and be easily scrollable, the interface constantly surprises the user by unexpectedly hiding even key GUI items.
# No option to disable.
- Result: if you wanted to have certain GUI items visible at the same time… well, tough. If the floating palette that inconsistently appears when the user places the mouse cursor over certain elements doesn't have your favourite item, then you're out of luck if the items you want to use exist under different tab groupings.
iWork '09 and prior had the best design: a main toolbar with general items, a smaller context-sensitive toolbar underneath, and context-sensitive inspector windows. If the revamped iWork had simply docked those context-sensitive inspectors, rather than get rid of the context-sensitive toolbar, it mightn't have received such a poor response.
The irony is that Office 2003 (and a few releases prior) already had inspectors on the side, and those would have been perfect given the prevalence of widescreen displays, leaving as much vertical space for the display of the document body as possible.
LibreOffice seems to have three GUI modes; one like iWork, one like the old Office, and one like the Ribbon.
I've been using my taskbar on the side of the screen for the past decade, because every screen I use has an excess of width and limited height. I seem to be very much in a minority here - I guess people don't change things from default?
> I guess people don’t change things from default?
Precisely. The average user assumes (often correctly) that the way things are is the way things are. When it comes to what technical people think are basic features (pairing a wireless keyboard to an iPad, or changing default text size on iPhones, or any number of similar tasks on any system), the modern “ease of use” guidelines suggest hiding everything away as much as possible, severely limiting setting discoverability.
Well, I consider myself an expert user, but I rarely change the default because I switch between environments so often that it would represent a major time overhead to extensively customize application to the way I really want them. And besides, the way I really want them is so far away from the way they are shipped that it's normally unrealistic to maintain that level of customization.
So I get used to the defaults. It makes it easier to throw out, reinstall, or switch environments if I need to. In any given day I use 5 or 6 different primary environments.
Probably i switch so often because of actual limited and limiting system design: in a Plan9-like world user's desktop is the center of the world and anything start from it and being done and used from it. In a commercial world it's common to have tons of crappy devices (so you pay more things more often) and no real integration.
Time ago I have a discussion with a "commercial" guy who say that the sole really integrated platforms are cloud&mobile so they are obviously the future because we are a society and we need to interoperate. I respond plugging my laptop HDMI into the room projector and show a quick Emacs/EXWM(-X) demo: email? Hit a single key (F6 in my case) and my MUA (notmuch-emacs) popup instantly. On top of it's big search bar I have few single-key accessible saved searches and bottom the big series of tags, a far superior "dashboard" than bloated GMail UI. Of course compose a new message can happen with a single key at any time with any open application I have focused. Oh I imaging someone demand me a demo, a quick M-x skeletor (ivy-completed) popup, a single key to choose beamer slide, quick typing and slides are made, tested locally and uploaded. Another imaginary interruption and another task (skeletor again + org-mode), an imaginary patch sent via mail and voilà: magit integration. All datas are really integrated and usable in a consistent environment, anything can be done in a snap and NO other monster modern GUI or '90-style can do the same. That's the past (starting from LispM/MIT AI lab glory time) and the future like we have had "golden age" of ancient Greek polis and more modern "middle (dark) age" and again a modern age. That's integration and customization. No need to switch between systems (while can be done easily with NixOS/GuixSD + homeManager/GNU stow + unison). My system is main and I can replicate/extend it on any decent hw as nedeed. That's "switching systems" IMO :-)
I think you're talking about something very different than that about which the person to whom you responded was talking.
I'm assuming they were talking about different systems they don't own, aren't their own systems, and over which they don't have the sort of control to install their own software and set things up using their personal configuration files.
It's awesome that you've got, or at least dreamt up, a system that works for you, but if you're able to use that exact system on every single machine you use, that isn't quite what was being described. That's an ideal, but only really feasible for personal machines.
Also, I'm going to get downvoted, but please put in a few line breaks.
My point is that we should not normally need to use "other machines", of course for work there are requisite but tech users should IMO do their best to avoid working in bad environment/do their best to convince their company let them use productive software. It maybe a dream but IME it works at least if you are an admin or a relevant devs or you find a good place to work in. Of course it doesn't work if you are an administrative or other roles...
> Also, I'm going to get downvoted, but please put in a few line breaks.
I still have to learn the idiosyncratic way HN handle text... I do put linebreaks, I'm edit in Emacs and paste here, however HN mess it up...
> My point is that we should not normally need to use "other machines"
> of course for work there are requisite
So, which is it? We do or we don't?
> but tech users should IMO do their best to avoid working in bad environment
More often than not, it's not up to the workers but company policies. Besides, needing to use a machine other than yours isn't a "bad environment", it's life.
Not only that, but the "other machines" could equally be non-networked terminals for heavy machinery. A lot of these run a stripped-down version of Windows, so the basic user interface is usually left at default settings whilst an always-open program takes up most of the display.
I agree with you on the next part:
> [...] to convince their company to let them use productive software
I'm right with you here, but again, company policies. Plus, your example suggests you're just thinking of individuals within a company as individuals.
We mustn't assume that all users here are in technical jobs, particularly development; often we're just moving between standardised Windows workstations, lowest common denominator setups so that (A) non-technical users could log in to any machine and still understand how to use it and (B) the IT department have fewer headaches to sort out.
After all, a company is not just made up of individuals; it's full of teams who have to work together to reduce each others' burdens. Sometimes that means using setups that aren't our favourites; our personal productivity mightn't be as great as if we used our own setups, but the company doesn't grind to a halt when someone's delicate configuration goes haywire and the IT team spends more time on it than anybody has any right to expect.
There's a delicate balance to maintain in most companies. IT departments have no trouble labelling even the very technically competent users as ID10Ts.
> however HN mess it up
Are you making sure to use two carriage returns, not just one? It's not particularly idiosyncratic, reddit is the same. I think it might be inherited from non-WYSIWYG forums or bulletin boards.
At any rate, it's becoming a bit of a standard to use two carriage returns due to this being the way that line breaks are entered in Markdown.
This looks even worse, you've got double line breaks which turn simple line breaks into paragraph breaks.
Your editor shouldn't insert the line breaks at 80 column intervals; separate the content from the presentation, and let HN format your text properly. After all, if you have a small screen, the text will be wrapped according to the browser width anyway.
That's what I do in the first post... Maybe I do not understand what you say then, my English is somewhat poor...
I understand that you complaint about my comment's long lines because I "format" in F-F style (i.e. no linebreak except for paragraph), next I format with double linebreak to force HN "cut" longer lines.
I do not know how to format in other way, inserting html+inline CSS with maximum text width or maybe even media query is not something I expect HN accept nor a thing I'd like to do as a HN user...
Same here. And this is the reason why I use Opera as a browser. It gives me features like mouse gestures and ad bloacking without having to download extensions.
Never underestimate the importance of good defaults.
This. So many technically-minded people are so wrapped up in their configurations that they forget that sometimes you're placed in a situation where those configs don't exist. Good defaults ensure a decent, minimal, baseline experience that isn't hair-tearingly bad.
I have always put the Taskbar on the left as long as I remember I could.
At work, it seems I am always the only one with such habits for more than a decade in different client environment.
Most screens are wider than they are tall, but I wouldn’t say there’s an excess of width. I use the width for multiple windows side by side, and I’m fine with having a “global” taskbar running horizontally and using a small portion of the height. MacOS and other operating systems cleverly have a global top bar that changes depending on the focused application, which I like.
There's an excess of width if you aren't a pro user, who knows how to take advantage of it. Linux has tiling WMs, Windows has basic tiling functionality + someone out there made a hackish tiling WM in AutoHotkey of all things[0]. But you're unlikely to discover this as a regular user, unless someone shows it to you.
No, I do the same thing. It also allows me to put text labels on my running applications, because I read English and not heiroglyphics... Especially when MS loves to change their icons for VS and Office with every major release.
I've done that... but some of the orientation experience should actually be flipped... example, in horizontal/left, the windows start menu should probably still be in the bottom left, with taskbar climbing upward. Notifications flipped to top-left.
In the end, I find that left-side orientation is rarely done well, or well imho. I did really like the Unity UI in Ubuntu, but I think I'm the only one on this. I used to position my launchpad in macos on the left as well, but this is awkward, and easier to just have it auto-hide.
I put the macOS Dock on the side, but I still keep the Windows taskbar at the bottom; I just prefer how that looks, aesthetically. That said, I change its size to small, I don't need huge icons.
Yeah. I found only one thing Ribbon excels at, and it's not even in Office. It's in Explorer and some other applications, when used in tablet mode. Then, suddenly, Ribbon becomes a brilliant thing, reinforcing my view that Windows is the only sane, non-toy OS for tablets. But Office use is keyboard-heavy, so I don't understand why the Ribbon is there, or why it started there.
Even then, the touch targets are all of different sizes. I find it really bizarre to have small touch targets on a tablet interface.
That said, I'll agree that the Ribbon does work best on a full screen interface at the top, though I still think a or two context-sensitive toolbar(s) would work better.
I was thinking about this in the shower: why is mapping a drive letter to a path in the Ribbon? Shouldn't that be a button somewhere in or near the navigation tree interface in the left sidebar, grouping it with the other aspects of disk drives and paths.
Plenty of what's in even Explorer's relatively simple ribbon could be in a context-based location for greater semantic grouping. That could simplify the Ribbon, and turn it back into a simple toolbar, maybe with a secondary, highly context-sensitive toolbar at the bottom of the window.
That's not an unprecedented thought. Windows XP had it with the Quick Tasks sidebar. The problem there was the use of sentences rather than simple command names made it difficult to separate the signal from the noise; plus, if you didn't change any of the defaults, you had that little dog making the whole thing seem rather unserious when it was actually a rather power paradigm, poorly implemented but with much untapped potential.
Collapsing the Ribbon is lipstick on a pig. In the end, using the basic functions of the software becomes a game of "is my mouse pointer in the right place to trigger the Ribbon to temporarily show without getting fed up and just making it stay shown all the time?".
Ever seen a non-technical user move the mouse with the same dexterity as you or I? I haven't. The mouse always roams around for a month of Sundays before it eventually arrives in the right place.
This is not a stable interface; it is an ugly hack to make up for wasteful the Ribbon was designed to be
At best, it could be a sort of distraction-free writing mode except that you can still see the rest of the interface, some parts equally as eye-catching as parts of the Ribbon.
> Ever seen a non-technical user move the mouse with the same dexterity as you or I? I haven't. The mouse always roams around for a month of Sundays before it eventually arrives in the right place.
Not just non-technical. I hate having to hunt for the tiny target. A very highly technical friend of mine invented a term for that: “pixel spearing”. I am truly insensed at how much time I waste trying to spear the exact right pixel.
It wouldn't be so bad if the correct zone for bringing up the hidden area obeyed Fitt's Law, but (A) the zone isn't directly at the top of the window, and (B) that wouldn't work with non-maximised windows anyway.
It's why hiding toolbars dynamically works well in macOS' fullscreen mode; flinging your mouse to the top of the screen always shows the menubar and toolbar without fail (unless the mouse is captured by the app, of course, like in a game).
Missing the point. I shouldn't have to hide the primary means of accessing even the most basic functions of the software just to save unnecessarily-wasted vertical space.
At the very least, Office should then show a small context-sensitive toolbar (mini-ribbon?) or a sidebar; instead, the only recourses are either the inconsistent appearance of the floating palette that only appears when the stars are aligned with the user's mouse pointer or temporarily showing the Ribbon again.
Like I said to another reply to my comment, lipstick on a pig. Maybe another analogy is that it's a band-aid on a flesh wound.
I don't blame the ribbon design for using vertical space. Unfortunateley nearly all programs do so. It goes hand in hand with the poor vertical resolution of monitors. 1920x1080 is not better then 1920x1200, but marketing says otherwise ("Full-HD"). The inital design phase of the ribbon style was probably at a time where 4:3 or 5:4 monitors were more common.
The floating palette is not inconsistent. It appears when you select text. First it's half transparent because you might not need it. If you want to use it, hover with the mouse above, the palette becomes non-transparent. If you just want to highlight something by selecting it, you can move the cursor away, the transparent palette hides.
I can reproduce this behaviour all the time. It might not be the best idea, but it's not inconsistent in its usage.
> The initial design phase of the ribbon style was probably at a time where 4:3 or 5:4 monitors were more common
Though they were more common, the market had already moved to notebooks outselling everything else. Microsoft should have had foresight. In fact, you might say they did, with Windows Sidebar in Vista; whilst not fantastic, it was a good use of horizontal space.
Besides this, they already had interfaces in prior versions of Office that made more efficient use of vertical space __and__ made efficient use of horizontal space on widescreen displays; they were the sidebar palettes, still used in Visual Studio. They just needed further development; instead, they were completely removed.
> It's not inconsistent
It is if you're a user with special accessibility requirements, especially those with motor skill problems or vision difficulties; ephemeral interfaces are hard to target, and without a means to manually invoke it and a consistent location, might as well not be there for many a user.
A well-designed interface doesn't need to account for edge cases. Office 2003 and prior's interface, whilst not pretty, was already extremely usable in that sense. All that was needed was context-sensitivity; instead, the baby went out with the bath water.
>It is if you're a user with special accessibility requirements
But you didn't specify that when you called it "inconsistent" in the parent comment. I assumed no special accessibility, as did you, because you haven't mentioned it before. So maybe it is inconsistent of those users, for the rest it's still consistent.
>All that was needed was context-sensitivity; instead, the baby went out with the bath water.
The ribbons in Office have context sensitivity. Select an image, image ribbon is shown, table - same and so one. Since text is the primary context, it is always shown per default ("Start" ribbon).
That's your mistake, then. When talking about user experience design, it's always inclusive-by-default, accessibility a top priority, not an afterthought.
This comes back to my parent comment right at the top of this thread: using native widgets with full accessibility support gives you this for free. Of course, I'm not saying there shouldn't be innovation, but those outcomes should be on par with the default widgets, not even a tiny bit lesser.
> The ribbons in Office have context sensitivity
But they (A) still show too many features for whatever is selected, demonstrating that the context-sensitivity is limited; (B) don't always automatically change to the appropriate tab; (C) sometimes show two tabs, confusing users (especially when it comes to tables or graphs); (D) hide other tools, by virtue of switching tabs, which would still be useful (namely, everything on the main tab).
Also, context-sensitivity would mean that the Ribbon would change back to the main tab after any operation in the other tabs was done. Since it doesn't, it demonstrates that the user has to constantly switch between contexts manually, meaning that the Ribbon's context-sensitivity is pretty poor and, again, inconsistent.
>That's your mistake, then. When talking about user experience design, it's always inclusive-by-default, accessibility a top priority, not an afterthought.
Not really. I think you pulled this card to win the "consistent" argument. After all, I don't see evidence that this style does hinder accessibility.
>(B) don't always automatically change to the appropriate tab;
They do, Word 2010. Inserting Image -> Image ribbon, same goes for tables. If you want to force-show a ribbon you can always doubleclick.
>(C) sometimes show two tabs, confusing users (especially when it comes to tables or graphs)
Whats confusing about this? It shows a header "table tools" (translated) so the purpose is clear. Sometimes stuff is more complex and needs more space.
>Also, context-sensitivity would mean that the Ribbon would change back to the main tab after any operation in the other tabs was done
It does. Again Word 2010. Select image, make an operation. Write text again, (because you might make several operations) thus exiting the image manipulation mode and the Start ribbon is there again.
Note: I'm not saying this is the best interface there is, merely that it's not as inconsistent as you depict it.
> I think you pulled this card to win the "consistent" argument
Actually, if you look at all the comments I've been making in response to my initial comment, the parent of the thread, I've been talking about accessibility the entire time, especially for visually impaired.
For the visually impaired and those with motor skills impairments, it's fairly easy to overshoot where the floating palette appears. If you shoot too far up, it disappears; it doesn't reappear when the mouse comes back to where the palette was, the text needs reselecting.
That's my main inconsistency.
> (B) don't always automatically change to the appropriate tab;
> They do
I stand corrected in one respect, but we still have inconsistent behaviour. Say you create a table, the Ribbon will change to Table Tools. Great.
Click away from the table and then click back. Still on the Home tab. Well, this makes sense since you're probably editing text — but again, that just reinforces my belief that those tools should be in a separate toolbar (à la Office 2003 and prior).
> What's confusing about this? It shows a header "table tools" so the purpose is clear
The technically minded may figure it out, but ordinary users have to rote learn what the tabs do. As an example, Table Tools shows two subtabs, Design and Layout.
Do you think you could get Sheila from accounting or Bob from packing to tell me the difference between the two tabs, or how the two Design tabs differ, without letting them click around the interface? I doubt it.
When there are two context-sensitive tabs shown, and they're both heavily related, you can almost bet money that an ordinary user, Sheila from accounting or Bob at reception, is going to cycle between the two tabs to find what they're looking for. This isn't intuitive.
> Note: I'm not saying this is the best interface there is, merely that it's not as inconsistent as you depict
That isn't high praise. A user interface shouldn't be inconsistent at all, especially the flagship product of a multi-billion dollar company, and especially the de facto standard in productivity software.
>The technically minded may figure it out, but ordinary users have to rote learn what the tabs do. As an example, Table Tools shows two subtabs, Design and Layout.
Not just the technically minded. Office is primarly used by non-technical people.
>Do you think you could get Sheila from accounting or Bob from packing to tell me the difference between the two tabs, or how the two Design tabs differ, without letting them click around the interface? I doubt it.
Telling? Probably not. But asking them to do X with the table? Yes, at this point (when working with the program) it's probably muscle memory to do the stuff you want.
Who, in my experience, have only a grasp of the absolute basics of what they're using (and pretty much only live in the home tab), and consider most of the other basic functions as too complicated.
> [...] it's probably muscle memory to do the stuff you want
A good user interface design doesn't _require_ muscle memory, though it can reward it by making repetitive actions quick and efficient. Intuitiveness should be the goal.
That and removing "increasingly little used" things because the telemetry told them so. Features that they've spent the last 4 releases downplaying and hiding. Funny that.
Or occasionally a setting you last touched five years ago when you installed the thing, as you're quite happy it's been set ever since.
How strange that they don't need data to to install ads in start menus and new tabs, "refreshing" the whole GUI (once you've fully assigned the old one to muscle memory), or adding other pointless bloat.
There's a common anti-pattern that happens with what I'll call "short attention span" development processes (excessive reliance on A/B testing, agile sprints, etc, no long term vision). A poorly implemented, buggy, poorly documented, and/or not well integrated feature doesn't see much use so the developers avoid putting work into it, which just makes all of its problems worse until eventually someone has the bright idea to cut it because "nobody uses it". Sometimes this is warranted, but more often than not it's just laziness and short-sightedness. Nobody ever puts in the effort to fix broken core functionality, all the effort ends up dedicated to superficial turd polishing or gimmicks.
Ever wonder how bland, feature barren, largely useless lowest common denominator shit that nobody really seems to like, or identify with can come to dominate design of software products?
My theory is that the assumption there is some kind of meaningful "Average user" which a product is then built for ultimately destroys utility in software.
If you have 50 features that on average 1% of people use, you can easily reach the false conclusion nobody cares about these features, when on aggregate 90% might use at least one of those features. Thus in aiming for the average, you haven't designed for anyone at all.
Combine this with the fact that metrics can't truly tell you why something is, only that things somehow appear to have a relation. Developers love love to run wild with a narrative about how their particular reading of why the metrics shook out this way is unchallengable fact, backed by DATA (when its really exactly the opposite, you drew a conclusion based on relations you assumed to exist), you have a recipe for some really horrible misdesigning.
I think modern application design is completely off the rails, driven by statistical phantoms that are assigned significance in an arbitrary and non-systematic way and its leading to software that is genuinely a degraded experience for the user, wearing the mask of something that is propped up as "objectively better".
Yeah, I feel A/B testing is really the place where Satan secretly influences the world. I'm losing track of how many times I've seen user-hostile or application-debiliating decisions justified by "data" on user behaviour. Something is very wrong here.