[Mika]

Haters gonna hate.

Now what sort of comment is that?

Also, never underestimate the amount of thought that has to go into designing a user interface for a userbase that is, by and large, computer illiterate vs the design work that goes into designing an interface for dedicated professionals.
The former is surprisingly hard, as anyone with a passing knowledge of UI design will tell you.

The question is, should you let user to shoot himself in the foot but provide a really good Undo (approach that I call "Siberia teaches"), or limit user options with a Ribbon like interface?

By the way, I should draft my own UI in my Ph. D. work (haven't progressed that well due to complex enough problems in my day job)... rest assured it will not have anything like Ribbon there.

I find it weird that Microsoft says modal UI = good, while the older guys from 80s say modal UI = bad. What could have happened during twenty years so that the opinion is reversed?

[General Battuta]

I have no opinion on the use of a modal interface in CAD programs. I do a ton of heavy-lift data processing in Excel in combination with a command-line program, however, and the Ribbon is a godsend there.

[The E]

Haters gonna hate.

Now what sort of comment is that?

Just a general comment about the whole "Vista's UI suuuucks", "Windows 7's Taskbar suuuucks" and "Ribbon suuuuucks" crowd.

The question is, should you let user to shoot himself in the foot but provide a really good Undo (approach that I call "Siberia teaches"), or limit user options with a Ribbon like interface?

I fail to see what one thing has to do with another. Ribbons are not limiting your options, they are supposed to provide quick and easy access to the functions that, based on the current context, you are most likely to use.

By the way, I should draft my own UI in my Ph. D. work (haven't progressed that well due to complex enough problems in my day job)... rest assured it will not have anything like Ribbon there.

But is that due to you disliking the Ribbon on principle, or because you have evaluated the options available?

I find it weird that Microsoft says modal UI = good, while the older guys from 80s say modal UI = bad. What could have happened during twenty years so that the opinion is reversed?

It's very simple. Modal dialogues represent a break in the User's workflow. A writer working on a document who has to use the mouse to open a drop-down menu, go to an option, open a dialogue, make a few choices, and go back to the main window isn't writing the document he wants to write. Keeping all control elements clustered on the "main" level of your application means that the user doesn't have to switch into a modal dialogue to adjust something.
Note how the Ribbon does just that? The Ribbon is a way to move controls from modal dialogues into the main UI on an as-needed basis.

[spyderrock48]

and if you like modal? then where does that put you?

[Kazan]

a whiny ***** who is annoying someone who has no control or relation to what you're *****ing about

[sigtau]

I would kill for a ribbon interface in FRED.

I would kill for a drastically re-done FRED.

[Topgun]

I <3 ribbon.

thats all.

[Bobboau]

Haters gonna hate.

Now what sort of comment is that?

it is a meme, it's meaning is that you are dedicated to not liking something and that trying to change your mind would be a waste of time.
i.e. there is no way to convince you that it's good because you are operating from a position of "it's bad" and anyone saying otherwise must be wrong

[Iss Mneur]

I find it weird that Microsoft says modal UI = good, while the older guys from 80s say modal UI = bad. What could have happened during twenty years so that the opinion is reversed?

Research!

[Nuke]

since youre on the ui team is there any way you can bring back the classic start menu. its why i haven't upgraded to 7 yet.

oops i misread. oh well. still i cant be assed to upgrade my windows till they bring back the classic start menu (and i dont need no 3rd party hack). i may end up using windows vista until reactos hits beta

as much as i want to hate windows, ive realized that i actually like the windows way of doing things (at least when compared to the linux way of doing things). at least until they change something. change == EVIL! ui needs to be consistent. even if something is less efficient, less productive, whatever. if you changed the ui with every version of windows, it would leave lots of people scratching their heads. i was really pissed off at vista for renaming all the icons in the control panel. i mean 90% of the panels were essentially the same from xp and 2000, the only thing they changed other than the picture on the icon was the name. such a superficial and arbitrary thing, which my no means effects the performance of the system. the only think it did is made it take 4 times longer to find the thing i was looking for. i was using one of my sister's computers last month, with win 7. and i found myself at the command prompt because i couldn't find anything. it was actually less trouble to type commands than to figure out what all they changed. i always claimed to be old skool, but this is ridiculous.

[The E]

Yes, it really is. Knee-jerk reactions usually are incredibly ridiculous.

[karajorma]

Changing the UI does mean having to relearn how to do things you could do almost automatically before. The control panel is a good example. After so many years using XP I actually have to search for control panels I could find easily now that I have Vista.

It's a tedious and largely unnecessary annoyance.


More important though is the fact that many FAQs and Guides to XP are now obsolete or needlessly confusing because of this. That's a significant annoyance when a program has an old guide that is no longer relevant and you have try to figure out where the control panel option you need to change lives in this particular iteration of the OS.


Now this is not be a reason to prevent change. I'm no Luddite, but it does mean that more care should be taken when choosing what to change. I often get the feeling that Windows changes things not because it makes the OS better but simply in order to make it different. That's not a good thing for an OS to do cause I'm of the opinion that an OS should be quiet and let you actually use the computer rather than getting in the way.

[The E]

So? Vista (which did most of the UI changes) is 3 years old now. Not my fault if people didn't use the time to adapt.

[General Battuta]

This is gonna cause a small inferno, but I've never used OS X for any significant period of time and yet I can sit down at a Mac and find what I need (whether it's a file or a function) very quickly and very reliably.

Whatever those guys are doing, it works.

[karajorma]

So? Vista (which did most of the UI changes) is 3 years old now. Not my fault if people didn't use the time to adapt.

Who cares how old Vista is, not everyone ran out and bought Vista the second it came out. Not everyone bought Windows 7 either. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why someone could be using either of those two OS's for the first time ever today! So what are you saying bringing up the age of Vista? That people who don't immediately run out and buy a new version of Windows (regardless of whether or not they have a computer capable of running it) somehow deserve to have problems with it? What about people who did immediately get Vista, do their complaints have more validity simply because they happened to be at the right point in the endless computer upgrade cycle to get it?


My overall point is simple. Why should I have to adapt to do exactly the same task I was doing before?

If I've spent time learning how to do something why should I have to now learn a different way of doing things (which isn't any better or easier) just because someone though it looked more flashy. Now if the way of doing things is better, that's another matter. But as I said, many things in Vista and 7 aren't better, they're just different.

[Bob-san]

My overall point is simple. Why should I have to adapt to do exactly the same task I was doing before?

If I've spent time learning how to do something why should I have to now learn a different way of doing things (which isn't any better or easier) just because someone though it looked more flashy. Now if the way of doing things is better, that's another matter. But as I said, many things in Vista and 7 aren't better, they're just different.

I agree fully with your point--it's one that I think I've been making without saying it flat out. There's very few features in Office 07/10 that weren't available in Office 03. I've effectively mastered all of the important tasks (in my experiences) in 2003, so why should I have to be unproductive for 6 months to learn a new Office environment to do the same exact task I was doing before? Further, from what I've seen, the real difference between 03 & 07 is that 07 supports a wider (and perhaps more noticeable) color pallet and it's easier to change chart types. The color pallet is a nice feature, I'll admit, but it's not enough reason to relearn a hundred or a thousand new tasks.

As for Windows Vista & Se7en, I've run both extensively now. I'll be honest; I like MS's shift to "search". They made searching the start menu very fast & easy and the control panel, once you got a handle on the name of the section, was also fine with me. I like the stock gadgets and a lot of other little things, but that doesn't mean I don't have grievances. My first and largest grievance is that hung processes CANNOT be forced to close if the soft closing command goes ignored. Most notably, Civilization IV enters endless loops (that my Wolfdale @ 3.5+GHz can't exit in 24+ hours) and, while the window can be closed, the rest of the application is kept in RAM. Partially my own fault (since I disabled Page File), but extremely annoying to have 1GB of useless program that can't be relaunched sitting in RAM.

[Nuke]

This is gonna cause a small inferno, but I've never used OS X for any significant period of time and yet I can sit down at a Mac and find what I need (whether it's a file or a function) very quickly and very reliably.

Whatever those guys are doing, it works.

thats always been the mac mantra. i actually liked most of the macs ive ever used. only thing i dont like about macs is you have less control over your hardware and os (though thats likely changed since osx).

So? Vista (which did most of the UI changes) is 3 years old now. Not my fault if people didn't use the time to adapt.

vista at least gave you the option of doing things the old way in several places. makes me wonder if ms didnt intend vista as a transition os to win 7 from the start. the problem with change is that anything that can change can be changed back, or changed again.

seems to me the first word in ui design should be consistency. consistency tells me that ctrl+c will copy something. i dont have to even think about it because ive done it so often in the past. if somebody came along and decided that ctrl+c should be cut, and went to the trouble of calculating the length of time it took to issue the command and cross reference that with the statistical frequency that the command was issued, and the results showed that it was faster. you could argue that the command change will improve productivity. what it doesnt account for is that when does something frequently enough it becomes so automatic that you dont need to think to do it, this someone comes along and changes it. you now have to stop and think,  and re drill into your head something that was a mere reflex before the upgrade. some people may take to the change instantly, others do not.

when i was in highschool i used to type flawlessly, then somewhere along the line i switched over to one of those ergonomic keyboards which was curved to improve confort. it pretty much over night destroyed my typing skills. when i switched back to a normal keyboard i was worse still. i dont think i ever recovered from that. nobody ever thought to change over to devorak keyboards for much the same reason. it would render something which was automatic into something you must dedicate brain power to, and away from the task at hand.

now the little changes really dont concern me, what concerns me is that in the fast moving technological world, things change faster than people's skills do. users will be forced to relearn conditioned responses more frequently. change too much in a short enough span of time, and you will just slow down the users. seems like pissing in the wind.

[Bobboau]

eventually though you will adapt (or die of old age) the question is will the increases in productivity outweigh the loss of productivity in the long run, and unfortunately the answer is yes, if it is conclusively faster, then it's just a matter of time until it has paid for its self and then it's granting more productivity.

[karajorma]

Not if they keep changing the UI and everyone has to relearn everything every couple of years.

[Iss Mneur]

Not if they keep changing the UI and everyone has to relearn everything every couple of years.

And who did that?