The Ribbon interface used on office products isn’t there because it’s good UX. It exists because there’s a software patent on it.
If office didn’t use a patented UI, someone could make office software that replicated the UI of MS Office which would allow companies to switch to other products without having to retrain staff.
Microsoft was enshittifying their software long before anyone else.
It’s been a long time since the ribbon came out. It’s possibly expired. If not, a company can enter into a license agreement to use patented technology.
I used the ribbon API when building a C# GUI. It’s just part of the Microsoft application framework. Maybe they prevent other frameworks from using it? Underneath the fancy paint there’s not really much to it though, it’s just adding a tab bar to a tool bar.
If it wasn’t good UX why would other companies want to replicate it? Also, design parents don’t last all that long, Ribbon has been around since MS Office 2007, which means it would be at the longest recently out of patent coverage.
If it wasn’t good UX why would other companies want to replicate it?
That question actually answers itself. Because managers of companies use the exact logic you’re using. “If big company X is doing this thing, they must have a good reason, so we do the same thing.”
MS constantly fails at basic UX. It’s not the company anyone should follow when doing UX. But there’s a lot of people that don’t know what they’re doing and just copy someone else hoping they know what they’re doing.
I did an internship where I was creating a prototype UI for a Windows application, and used the ribbon API to build it. I thought it was a well thought out design, and was definitely an improvement over nested menus. A problem I’ve seen come up a lot though is shitty implementations where the pattern wasn’t followed correctly making it really hard to find things because the developers put items in dumb places.
Generally in UX you want often used buttons to always be in the same place to take advantage of muscle memory. Text is more intuitive than an icon, but an icon will use less screenspace, so once the user learns the icon, you can have an interface that’s more user friendly (though less intuitive) so that’s fine. Small amount of experience or training needed with the softwareresults in more buttons available at all times, so it’s worth the trade off to use one button bar. Less used items should be put into a menu because a) it’s not used often so it’s fine to be hidden away unless needed and b) it’s not used often so the user isn’t going to be familiar with an icon so text is preferable.
The ribbon is some weird combination between a menu and a bar with buttons on it. So all of the disadvantages of menu (buttons aren’t always on the screen) and all of the disadvantages of button panel (icons that have to be learned for nearly every single feature). The advantages of being able to access the most used features from muscle memory is lost, the advantage of being able to discover lesser used features by simply reading text is lost.
It’s just indecisive design. Not putting any thought about how the user actually uses the software, Just chuck some buttons onto a ribbon somewhere, make a pretty icon so it looks good and let the user click on various ribbons an click on random pretty buttons until they find the button that adds an attachment to an email in outlook. But when they find that button, make sure we default to OneDrive instead of the Documents folder because pushing cloud storage is currently the top priority as MS.
Sorry… bit of a rant there. But yeah, just put thought into which features will be used most often make them to be the buttons on the bar, put everything else into a menu. Worst case is the user has to click two things to use a feature, which is the same as using ribbons. Best case the user is clicking the same button they’ve clicked 100 times before and it’s in the exact same place as when they clicked it all of those times before.
I don’t disagree with a lot of what you said, but the applications that use the ribbon are just complex applications with too many commands and options, and while some commands are very common most of them end up having tons of middling use, where it is annoying to have to find them in a menu every time. I think the problem it’s trying to solve is a hard problem and all the other attempts at solving it have a lot of problems too, and I really don’t think menu based design is an improvement. I’m not saying ribbons are the perfect solution, just that the other solutions suck more.
Designed properly the ribbon should take advantage of repeat contexts, so if you’re doing one kind of task repeatedly, it’s likely you need commands from one tab over and over again which beats having to navigate through a menu multiple times. Of course it’s not always designed properly.
Frankly, menu navigation is probably the worst navigation ever devised in terms of hit targets and findability. It has the same organization hurdles of the ribbon, but worse navigation and sometimes nested menus which make things even harder to find. Really, all the ribbon is, is a tab bar on a tool bar, and power users can easily switch tabs with the number hotkeys. The power user option for menus is letter and arrow keys which suck.
Personally, I think the best option for productivity is the command pallet approach like in code editors, but the downside of that is that you need to be a power user to be effective at it.
If you’re running into an issue where a user is constantly going to the menu because they’re using a feature that’s only there then that’s a feature that should be on the button bar. If the button bar is full because the application has that many features that are commonly used, then it should be considered that that maybe the application is suffering from feature bloat. The application could be split off into two applications focused on the tasks for the different purposes the application is used for. If that’s not feasible, then context specific actions can be offered in a side panel that can be closed once the user decides they no longer need those context specific features.
Isn’t it strange that interfaces are still designed that still use up vertical real estate when basically everyone has widescreen monitors now? Probably there’s a thought that there’s a need to make an interface that will also work on phones and tablets, but that just results in poor interfaces for someone sitting on a computer for eight hours a day. But the problems with interfaces designed to work on all devices that end up being sub-optimal on everything is another subject.
Anyway for me I’m constantly just clicking around on different ribbons and trying to interpret the meanings of various icons just to try to get the thing to do what I want. There have been many times I’ve had to save an excel file to CSV so I could make changes to it in a text editor and import it back into Excel. I know Excel probably has a feature to do what I want, but it takes longer to find that feature than it is to just do it in a text editor.
Just to send an email with an attachment I have to click around a bunch of ribbons because the interface is different if I’m replying to an email in the preview pane or if it’s “popped out” then I realize the attachment button probably isn’t showing because I don’t have the window sized wide enough, so resize the window and click around again. Ok I should my signature on that email to look professional and shit, click around on some more ribbons to find that. Oh I want to copy and paste something as a table in the email? I have to pop out that email because that feature doesn’t work when replying in the preview pane for some reason. Why is it so much work to just send an email? I guess it’s because I’m not a power user?
To me the ultimate interface for an experienced user would be key combos. No need to click on anything if you learn the key combo. A menu can tell you the key combo for the action, and if it is something you use often then you know you just hit Ctrl-K, D and boom the tabination is fixed for a file that came from a dev with weird tab settings. Or whatever weird feature you find you need to do often. Sure maybe I could find some unfamiliar button on a ribbon, hover over it and hopefully it might say something about it being the button for fixing tabination, and maybe it tells me the key combo to do it. But that’s a lot of hovering over various icons to figure out if it’s the thing that does what I want.
So to me the ribbon is only good for people that have learned which features are available on each ribbon. I’m sure you can get good at it if you use it enough. But isn’t that true of any UI no matter how poorly designed it is? It’s not better than a menu for learning key combos, so less efficient for someone trying to use it more efficiently. It seems to me it’s just something for the “power user” which to me is just something MS invented to make people who know how to use MS software well feel proud of that, but it’s only MS software they know how to use well. But the whole thing just feels like a lock in scheme to me.
Cats are just a whole other being of existence. My cat fell asleep next to the wooden cabinet that I’m hammering down at full force, but got scared shitless and zooming to hide when I dropped a spoon.
Wait, but fusion is working. They’re seeing net positive output. It’s still quite small at the moment, but moderate gains continue to be made in the field.
This isn’t properly calculated though. They only count the actual laser energy inside the reacttvs output. They don’t account for the huge amount of energy thatch’s needed to run the lasers in the first place or the rest of the facility. It’s nowhere near putting out more energy than it consumes and it’s also a reactor for nuclear weapons testing so they don’t really try to produce energy anyway.
You’re not wrong. It’s still an important step for the field though. Having a net positive within the reaction itself could theoretically mean eventually the energy from the reaction can help sustain the reaction after the initial higher activation energy. But with the poor state of science journalism the result was reported with extreme hyperbole.
Well seeing how you almost need the output of a Dyson swarm to make a Dyson swarm, cool glowy rock power and explodey gas power can and will work just as good. Especially for places that are far away from the ideal conditions to exploit solar energy terrestrially. Where I’m at we have to use literal piles of garbage to be able to get high enough above the trees to achieve sustainable output.
Sadly I believe they found adding more mirrors did not appreciably raise the temperature of the focal point. Diminishing returns and all. So unfortunately more mirrors is not the answer, more Lasers is!
They already do this fyi. Solar plants tend to use mirrors that concentrate light to heat water and turn a turbine instead of actual solar panels. Amazingly, iirc converting light into heat, the heat into steam, and then the steam into kinetic energy, is still more efficient than a normal photovoltaic cells.
I mean yeah, we should absolutely be replacing as much fossil fuel use as we can with existing renewable energy tech. But there’s no reason we shouldn’t also be investing in fusion research, at least as far as I’m aware
Because bad actors like fossil fuel and car companies will say “look, the government is funding fusion. Don’t make us go renewable now, just wait five years until fusion is here.” You have to consider the political impacts pursuing research will have on society’s perceptions. Even if you know your project is just a wild experiment that probably won’t work, journalists won’t.
Exactly. And that’s with the little reactors. If I remember correctly ITER is less than 5 years from first plasma. After that monster gets online, fusion research gets much easier.
Giant earth theory is wild. I followed a guy on Reddit who had some absolutely insane videos “teaching” the subject. He also thought multiplication was a lie because if you do 5x5 by counting your fingers 5 times you still only have 5 fingers.
In every dumb movement you have the tucker carlsons that say shit they don’t belive in, the trumps completely demented even lower iq and truly believe those things they say. And who ever the hell are the monkeys that whatch it.
I’ll see if his YouTube channel is still up so you can get the crazy sauce straight from the tap. Be warned, it is difficult to find a cohesive thought let alone any logic.
He also discarded a lot of data that didn’t meet his proposed patterns.
How do we know? Well, wouldn’t it be a nice coincidence if this motherfucker just casually randomly selected 13 different traits that follow simple dominance patterns - but none of the other dozens of traits that do not?
Being a SOLIDWORKS customer is exactly the same as being a rat in a cage. They are the most aggressively evil I’ve ever experienced. Adobe etc not even close
You’re supposed to reevaluate brain size as a measure of intelligence. The expression “bird brain” is so outdated we need to stop using it. Bird neurons are significantly smaller than ours, so they can fit a lot more brain in a smaller volume.
While you’re at it, you should probably reevaluate everything about intelligence and memory because apparently jellyfish have memories despite having no brain or ganglia of any kind.
The neurons themselves? Because human axons are already as small as can be; they sometimes missfire because of this (brain is built around that, no worries).
It’s an incredibly well made and reliable wooden spear but it costs ridiculously more than other wooden spears that are 95% as good.
And since they’re primarily concerned with big military contracts for wooden sticks, they make it clear that the persistence hunter market is one they actively disdain…but we still line up to buy their wooden sticks.
Yeah I wanted to do an aside about whether Delaware was the correct choice, but I felt it was a bit excessive for a meme community.
I think your picks of Wyoming and Nebraska are evocative of a coastal-centric perspective though. Nebraska is quite large and has Omaha, easily taking it out of the bottom 5. Whereas Wyoming has… a large and beautiful expanse. Despite the lack of population, that sheer amount of terrain provides significant value by itself, but maybe not enough to escape the bottom 5. My personal second choice was Vermont, but I feel like Mississippi is potentially also in the mix.
I want to throw Rhode Island in but I feel like the historical significance has to be respected, despite its miniscule size.
We can and should give the dakotas back. Not just for ethical reasons, but also because it’s a dick move to keep those states from the only people who want them.
Vermont is great. Does it matter? No. But it’s Appalachia without the coal nuts and oppressive laws.
And speaking as a Midwesterner, Nebraska is fine but you’re grading on a curve there. Sure it beats Iowa but still. And the best part of Kansas is halfway into Missouri a state so miserable it’s aptly named.
Yea Vermont is great, but if had just remained part of upstate New York this whole time, instead of becoming its own state, it seems like it would make very little difference.
Yeah but if that’s our metric Wyoming being part of Colorado would solve more problems than it fixes. It’s mostly a national park and there’s so few people you’re left asking why they get senators.
True, I can’t disagree with that. It’d at least solve the problem of the legality of recreational cannabis, which is a pretty damn big one, if you ask me.
Speaking of cannabis, I almost didn’t notice before I replied but I just realized you said it “would solve more problems than it fixes”. Sounds like a win-win 😅
I need to not reply to comments before my Adderall kicks in lol.
And yeah my main issue is that their lack of population is so extreme that they hold an outsized influence on the federal government without having any good reason to not be part of other states. Alaska may be underpopulated but sticking it in Washington would be ridiculous. Wyoming could reasonably be represented by Colorado. There’s a city in fucking Ohio with more than twice the population of Wyoming. And they get two senators, a representative, and three electoral votes
That’s fair and I considered it, but I feel like that’s almost the most damning aspect of Delaware. The only trivia anyone knows about the state is it’s a tax haven; otherwise it is entirely unremarkable, both in public awareness and in fact.
I do respect those percentages though, that’s totally fucked.
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