Your point seemed to be that MS chose not to care. I think they cared but made an informed decision to go down a path that many said was wrong. If anything, I'd say kudos to them for not living in an echo chamber.
> Your point seemed to be that MS chose not to care
Quite. It was not about the merits of the ribbon. Which sort of echoes the article "Most software companies ignore user behavior"
> I think they cared but made an informed decision
they were heavily "informed" the ribbon would upset a lot of their customers, and for good reason. If there is another meaning to 'informed' here, please clarify.
People were not against the ribbon, they just wanted the choice. Dynamically reskinning an app like excel/word is entirely possible, and in fact straightforward if you actually own the original skin, which of course MS do.
"kudos to them" - really? For unnecessarily upsetting people who'd paid good money for office? Whose workflow was broken until they had re-learnt the new interface? Who now have a reason to move to LibreOffice, which still has menus?
Why are you defending MS's obviously stupid business decision?
It wasn't an obviously stupid business decision, it wasn't even stupid. But I can see how expert users like yourself would be upset.
Prior to the ribbon design, Office was extremely hard to use, excluding the most basic features, for novice and intermediate users. In general, endless menus are confusing and/or annoying to novice and intermediate users. The ribbon design enabled novice and intermediate users to find and use more advanced features that only expert users knew about in previous Office versions. MS optimized their product design for novice and intermediate users while still maintaining all the functionality needed by expert users.
From a business perspective this made sense for two reasons:
1. Most customers are either novice or intermediate users.
2. Even though expert users will likely get pissed off that they have to relearn the interface, they will still relearn the interface. Or put another way, designing for expert users should take a backseat because they will spend the time to learn an interface no matter how convoluted it is.
"It wasn't an obviously stupid business decision, it wasn't even stupid." -and- "Prior to the ribbon design, Office was extremely hard to use"
I'm afraid I'm just going to disagree with both of these. I'd buy that menus are somewhat harder to use for novices and the ribbon has some greater discoverability, though I'd like to see usability stats (edit: I did a quick search but found nothing solid), but you are missing my point - despite me repeating it multiple times! - that it was not about ribbon/menu. You just aren't getting it. Will people please stop dislocating the discussion onto what you want me to be talking about.
(stuff about optimizing their product design for novice and intermediate users)
That is a really good point, but it was entirely possible to support both. I wonder how.
(edit: "Even though expert users will likely get pissed off that they have to relearn the interface, they will still relearn the interface" - this is exactly what you do not inflict on your customer base without exceedingly good reason)
exactly, if you were a power user you'd still remember your lotus123 / commands. you wouldn't need either a menu bar nor a ribbon. microsoft kept a lot of the features the power user uses. the menu is not one of them.
