I find its discoverability is terrible. I am always hunting for what I want to do and it's never anywhere that seems to me to be sensible. I usually end up doing a google search for what I want. Perusing the ribbon takes me much more time than just looking at the various options under the old style menus.
Also traditional menus had some traditional standards. Once you learned what was under "File" or "View" or "Insert" or "Format" it was often pretty similar across applications.
Logically, users have to learn the name of the tool before performing any sort of geographical associations (which menu, symbol, etc to find the tool).
There is no faster discoverability than O(log(N)) search using the letters of the name as a lookup.
The biggest failure of modern operating systems is failing to standardize this innate reality.
Windows,Linux,etc should have 1. keyboard button to jump to search box 2. type 1-2 letters and hit enter. Operating systems and applications should all have this kind of interface.
The most ironic apps have a ribbon named something like "Edit" but then the most used "edit" command lives in an unrelated ribbon.
Anecdotal evidence from myself: Although I've been using Word for many decades, I've never had much "muscle memory" in terms of accessing features. It was always a case of learning which pulldown menu held the required function.
When the accursed ribbon came along, "discoverability" went out the window. Functions were grouped according to some strange MS logic I could never understand, and it takes me twice as long to format a page as it used to. Now, I basically just use Word for text entry, and if I want an elegant format, I use a graphic design app like Illustrator.
Judging from what I've read online, you may be the only person who actually likes the ribbon.
Hieroglyphics are the opposite of "discoverable". That's why they became uninterpretable for almost two thousand years, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And even then it took considerable work to figure out how they functioned.
In the Ribbon, in order to discover what some hieroglyph does, you have to mouse over it. Since there are lots of hieroglyphs there, that's a lot of mouse-over.
And no, the Ribbon's images make no sense in 99% of the cases.
That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse.
Its probably a case of UI discoverability vs usability. Brand new users might discover better with the ribbon, but as brand new users keep using the product, they transition to experienced users, and the UI needs to adapt to that. My experience is that the ribbon doesn't. Its tolerable, and for me thats enough but I get the points about the ribbon. Its sort of like the new reddit UI, but props to reddit they at least have kept much of the old UI available for longer than I expected them to.
Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!)
I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years.
I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.
Looks like the links in the posts no longer work, but all the posts are readable and he goes through the work they did and why. They did a lot of usability testing for the ribbon. But anyways I have no horse in this race other than liking ribbon over 16x16 icons and menus, so no point in hashing this over.
The Ribbon is more difficult to visually grep for me than the classic menus. Not to mention that a number of functions are still hidden in mini-menus in the Ribbon.
It wouldn’t be so bad if keyboard navigation was as good as with the classic menus, but having to press the Alt key separately, and general increased latency, kills it.
