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> I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus.

When you discuss UX you always have to be aware that you have two very distinctive populations with very different expectations: new users and old users.

Everyone I've ever seen trying to find something in new Office apps (myself included) was bitching about ribbon menus and how much they suck. It's 100% biased because we all were used to the old UI, but since I use Office and Windows only occasionally, to this day I still didn't get used to it fully.

For new users who grew up on Win10 and this type of UI I'm sure it works great.



The Ribbon’s terrible because there’s no regularity in its structure. The eye can’t scan quickly: sometimes controls go horizontally, then they go vertically, then they run horizontally again.

Old-school Apple menubar; yeah, that’s not exactly cutting-edge UX any more. Scrubbing through fixed hierarchical menus spatially disconnected from the data they operate on is crude and pretty tedious. And Apple’s never really made much effort on the (adaptive) contextual menu front; macOS has them, but they’re more like a resentful afterthought.

Alas, blue-sky R&D into new, novel, cutting-edge UI/UX hasn’t been a thing at Apple for over a decade. Well, except maybe Siri, but even that was bought off the shelf and they’ve hardly put their backs into making it any more than mediocre. Amazon and Google care more(!).


> The Ribbon’s terrible because there’s no regularity in its structure. The eye can’t scan quickly: sometimes controls go horizontally, then they go vertically, then they run horizontally again.

Also some things are hidden in a dialog box which becomes available when you press the little arrow in the corner of the ribbon element. Good luck!


Menubar isn't meant to be the primary way to invoke the command - just a way to advertise it, and the associated shortcut.


I've started more and more using help to find items in big menus quickly, it's actually pretty neat macOS feature...




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