Why did UI’s turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It’s easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
Microsoft was pushing all their designs to this new ribbon UI design, across their apps. I dunno why they thought that was a good idea. But I left Windows for years already. LibreOffice is just the old school layout, and if you really really want you could optionally also ribbons in LibreOffice.
I’ll just straight up say that the problem is with Microsoft more than anything else. Their UI design is abysmal. Nothing is consistent, nothing is smoothly animated, nothing is easily identifiable by its icon, nothing is glassy and good looking like Win7/macOS. Even in their peak design of Windows 7, they still had those awful legacy UI elements in system settings and the registry settings.
Even with multitouch trackpads being a thing on Windows now, there’s STILL not linear trackpad gestures as of 6 months ago when I played with the display units in the store.
I am an IT technician working in Microsoft 365 / Azure, Microsoft makes changes so often that their own documentation hasn’t even been updated with the proper new name of the product in the product’s own documentation, oh and the name change took place several months if not a year ago.
What makes it even worse is that screens got wider and shorter, but the new designs use more vertical space than before, leaving even less height to do anything in.
My $300 32 inch IPS 16:9 monitor laughs hard at my old $2000 19 inch 4:3 CRT.
If you are on a desktop, it’s insane how both cheap and good monitors have become.
Still I absolutely agree, wasting vertical space is more annoying than horizontal.16:9 was pushed on us because it was cheaper to produce on mass for tv and pc. 16:9 was better for movies.
There are some monitors from just before this massive market manipulation and those have 16:10, sometimes with display port before hdmi was even mainstream.
Apple is actually one of the few companies to make the jump from 4:3 to 16:10 avoiding the 16:9 with very few exceptions.
To this day i see people work with old software designed for the area of more vertical screens but doing so on screens designed for movies.
Most people dont even understand what i mean when i explain this. But the good thing is my issue with it was considered a disability so they had to accommodate me with something more sensible.
Sorry long comments but this is a personal vice for me.
I swear I still get letterboxes on a 16:9 television watching at least some movies. And of course I get pillarboxes for days watching “fullscreen” pan & scan DVDs or anything shot for TV before 2010.
16:10 is a pretty good laptop aspect ratio, but on the desktop I don’t think I’m giving up my 21:9 monitor. For gaming it’s simply majestic and having enough real estate for CAD and a spreadsheet open side by side and actually get stuff done is something I won’t give up.
Actually i have and love my 21:9, but it was a weird journey.
The most common resolution for them is 3440x1440 21:9
At work i use a 2560x1600 16:10
You may see my problem, i was not going to give up those 160 vertical pixels. So i got a 3840x1600 instead…
Which comes down to the same 21:9…
I think the reason its not a problem is cause how rarely your only using a single fullscreen window on such ultrawides.
Majestic for gaming ind… and the gpu caught fire again.
Ha, but the presence of vertical monitors means we can do this , amirite? We’re just better using the screen space people have …. Who have spent hundreds of dollars extra on extra hardware to make this shitty ui usable
Everyone wanted to compete with Apple
Eh, I don’t hate the ribbon UI. It certainly looks a lot nicer than the old ones.
I think the biggest crime is that we went towards widescreens and kept all the menus and toolbars along the top.
Another issue is complexity. In a rush to sell yearly updates, more and more features are crammed in. Most of us only use a tiny fraction of them, but there they are on the screen just in case. For everyone.
You’re never going to make one UI that makes everyone happy. Most people just learn where the 20 buttons or so that they use are, and blank the rest from their mind. That’s the real reason the ribbon UI got hate. Their buttons moved.
Yea, I agree that Office 2003 was the pinnacle of Office UI design. And I’d go so far as to say that about Windows 2000.
Having controls in predictable shapes and locations really contributed to “ease of use”. One of my pet peeves is the more recent trend where clickable elements aren’t obviously so. Such as a string of text that one has to hover across and see the cursor change shape to know that it’s clickable.
As others have said, I think a significant part of why the UIs have changed since then is to accommodate touch screens and “webification”.
'Glad to see your posting. I thought I was just being curmudgeonly :)
Not sure I follow, even in the example above there’s many icons that are interactive but aren’t enclosed in a button, do you have any other examples?
Btw, just so you know, Libre Office has multiple UIs, incliuding a Ribbon-like variant. View > User Interface.
But they let you choose.
Exactly, this is the way. I use it w/o the ribbon, but I like that the ribbon is an option for those who like it.
Well a big problem is when a UI has a small learning curve that then gives a huge benefit in usability, letting the user decide based on their feelings might lead to them having a worse off experience in the end, is that something you’d be open to getting people complaining about not finding their options day and night while they stubbornly avoid the ribbon?
Sure. If they prefer to not use the ribbon, UX have two options:
- advertise the ribbon better
- improve the non-ribbon UX
Eliminating the non-ribbon UX is more likely to alienate those users than to actually improve anything.
But the ribbon is the improvement over the non-ribbon UX. There’s just no pleasing some people who don’t want anything to change, even if they’re currently struggling to use all the tools they have available and they’ve stockholmed themselves into learning workarounds. Someone else posted about how before the ribbon, when asked for features to add, people asked for features that they already had access to, but didn’t know about it
It’s really not though. The ribbon:
- takes up way more space
- essentially hides features I actually use
- can change depending on context, which is jarring for a new user
And that’s why there should be two options, just like LibreOffice has done. Have a simpler UX for new users, perhaps based on a ribbon UI, and leave the more compact UX for power users. The problem isn’t that the ribbon sucks innately, it’s just that it’s not ideal for power users.
- It’s about the same size as the before screenshot if you added one more toolbar, except you have better groupings
- you can customize it, if you find features you frequently use are in hard to reach spaces. I doubt it actually fully hides the thing, and they’ve also majorly improved the search at the same time as they deployed the ribbon so you can use that as backup. It’s not like features weren’t hidden before anyway, you just didn’t use them yourself at the time to notice.
- you mean the extra tabs it can get? It never fully changes everything afaik, just get a few more tabs that are otherwise not needed.
I simply dislike the connection that clean modern design is for noobs and power users just need a list and that’s it. It’s not like the design is made without consulting or taking in data from advanced users, and if you’re truly a power user you can customise it and make it your own. No, I believe that’s just stubbornness to trying something new, or lack of openness to do so when it’s not a priority to evolve your workflow, you simply want to get from A to B. Feel free to correct me, but tight compact layouts aren’t inherently power user friendly, just as padded grouped layouts aren’t inherently anti-power user
- right, and I hated the initial one, and I’d usually customize it to get rid of a row
- the problem is that everything is differently sized, so it’s hard to just drop part of it; e.g. I use shortcuts for bold, italic, and underline, but just getting rid of those doesn’t particularly help
- really? I could’ve sworn it changed based on what you were doing, like editing a table or cell or something. I honestly just use Google Drive (work) and LibreOffice (home) instead because Office annoys me
clean modern design is for noobs and power users just need a list and that’s it
Modern design has, by definition, a lot of negative space, which by definition means fewer functions can fit on the screen at the same time. I certainly appreciate clean design, but the tools I use the most as a power user are fairly obtuse to get into:
- vim - my editor, and the learning curve there is like a cliff
- CLI tools like ripgrep + regex - learning regex properly is something for later in a 4-year CS degree
- Rust programming language - learning curve is basically a meme (it’s not that bad though)
- favorite game is EU4 - complex strategy game with a ton of variables and numbers; second favorite: Dwarf Fortress
And other than vim and regex (learned in school), I learned all of those (and more!) after entering the workforce, some of those ~10 years after, and I’m constantly learning new tools (e.g. we use macOS at my current job, and this is my first time using macOS full-time in my career). So I don’t think it’s really about being stubborn, but frustration when the tools you’re familiar with change drastically. If it was an option, I might try it and swap between it sometimes, but if I’m forced to use the new UX, I’m going to be pissed.
I’m not saying “tight compact layouts are inherently power user friendly,” I’m saying power users are comfortable with a certain workflow and know where all their tools are, and then when everything gets jumbled, they have to go relearn everything. It’s like when my MIL comes and reorganizes our kitchen, my SO and I get pissed trying to find everything again. Once you learn a compact tool, it’s really easy to find what you want, whereas when a tool has a lot more negative space, less fits on the screen and you have to go find the stuff you want (i.e. click a different ribbon menu, then click the tool, instead of just clicking the tool).
That’s why I think both should be an option. If you decide your workflow only needs a handful of tools, you should be able to ditch the ribbon and make a toolbar with just those tools (which includes some in the menus).
last time i used libre office was probably more than a decade ago and it was atrocious. did they make things better?
because i still don’t have ms office and would like to have an alternative to edit documents other than uploading a file to google docs and downloading it back.
I think they got better.
But there’s still other (closed source) office suites in a pinch.
I miss 07 jfc…
It’s not UI backsliding. It’s Microsoft being incompetent. I have no idea how they’re still in business, and astounded at their valuation. It seems like everything they manage to push out is just barely functioning
Moving away from Office and Windows and so forth is a nightmare for any larger company. If you use specialized software, it might very well only run on Windows or only have an integration into Office. Even if you could, you then have to retrain staff to use Libre Office, Linux and other alternatives. You also will have problems converting, changing servers and so forth.
So companies just do not switch. That is how Microsoft makes money. They really do not care that much about private users. That is only usefull so people can use their products.
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I’m ashamed to say I used to work for one. How do you like having licenses to use your printer? I might have enjoyed it even if only I were a sadistic personality type.
Touch screen devices.
This is why I believe that they are still chasing Metro UI and reinventing every app out of control panel .
Windows phone was ahead of it’s time.
But now my computer is becoming a phone.
Maybe that’s the point?
I mostly use my phone now anyway…
But it’s Samsung…
Me and my friends calls this phenomenom “appification”, and it is terrible.
VLC is in the process of appifying itself, just look at the screenshots of version 4.
I would like to see them add something like the VSCode command pallette. That way if I know the name of the tool but can’t remember or don’t want to go click for it, I just just type the name and fuzzy find it.
Doesn’t office already have a very powerful search bar?
no, I’m willing to die on the hill that the ribbon UI is one of the greatest UIs period - especially how it was done in office 07 and 10. As a computer noob at the time, it was a huge improvement over the previous office 2003 UI.
The icons always gave you a good idea what something was doing, important functions were bigger and when you for example selected a table the table tab was visible and with a different color so you knew that you could do things with that table.
I think however many 3rd party programms did the ribbon UI poorly or had not enough features for it to make sense.
I will stand with you on the hill defending the Office 2010 UI, it was beautiful, clear and easy to work with.
The flat design of 2013+ was a mistake.
I bet it’s capitalism.
The answer for enshittification of the entire reality seems to always be
capitalism.
Part of the problem is that people who grew up on phones and tablets are now old enough to start entering the tech industry as UI developers.
Funny story, before they did the 2007 redesigns, they asked users what they wanted to be added; 95% said features that were already in Office.
The Ribbon was designed to make features more findable.
Alas.
I’ve used Office 2003, 2007, 2010 etc. all the way up to 365 not for work purposes, but just happened to have interacted with all of the versions.
I have to say, I seriously don’t know what happened, but Office 2003-2007 feels the most stable and least clunky versions of Office (at least Word) in terms of basic word processing.
I learned how to properly edit and format text in Word in university in a way that I could, without fail, reproduce almost any text design you could think of. When I was learning it on Office 2007 I believe, everything was so stable and predictable. Now when somebody asks me to format some text with 365, the styles functionality continually keeps bugging out and doing stupid shit that I basically can’t recover from unless I create a blank file.
In conclusion, Office 2007 > 365
/rant
Same, but for Excel.
Also, JFC the save menu in Office 365 is Cthulhu-level madness.
Can you tell me more about that save menu?
the windows save menu has remained mostly the same since win3. Office products used the regular windows save menu for ages. Then suddenly they introduce a monstrosity that takes up the whole screen and throws decades of useful design out the window. If i describe it further I shall descend into madness
Am I wrong, or isn’t Office 365 a web app? Not really a 1:1 comparison.
There’s Office online, which has a free tier and a “365” tier, whatever that means. Does it mean that you have Office available 365 days a year? Good luck on February 29th, I guess. /j
Anyway, Microsoft transitioned Office into a subscription-based model, which I abhor because I just want to have a piece of software without feature updates, just bug and security fixes. So Office 365 is just normal Office, but on a subscription basis.
Not really correct. Microsoft is moving ALL their apps to offline web apps. Modern Outlook and Modern Teams are the first to go.
Modern…
://///
I miss native apps being the norm (and I don’t mean Chromium disguised as a native app).
No. Microsoft 365 (previously office 365) is not a web app. They have web apps, and some licenses (the bare bones $6/mo one) only has web apps. But overall the suite of apps can’t be defined as web based.
Not to be confusing, but some of the apps are only web apps, but those are “other” apps than you’re probably thinking of. Like Planner or Power Automate. The “office” apps like outlook, word, excel and PowerPoint all have desktop and web versions included.
Office no longer exists as it used to. The applications are being turned into offline websites. See Modern Outlook, Modern Teams ect. They are cost cutting all the different app platforms down to one. An offline website for each app.
peak enshitification
The ribbon is one thing, the flat design and obfuscating tools/settings are a far bigger issue.
