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?
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.
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.
o no
The Ribbon is much better, and has been a part of the Office suite for over a decade, easily.
Poor examples aside, designers and engineers are rarely given a seat at the table in big tech companies. Most tech CEO’s were either tech managers or sales people at some point, and are so far removed from IC work or valuing specific crafts for their user value that someone on the UX side probably doesn’t get a say in how this shit is built.
Some UX designers either work to very specific business constraints, or work on stuff that has zero benefit to the end-user. Some engineers work on stuff that solely provides metrics for shareholders and leadership.
I’m tempted to set up a blog just to post about this subject, because it’s everywhere, but big tech is now so top-heavy that for years many huge decisions have been made on a whim by execs. Tech has grown so large and powerful that tech execs (and those clinging to their coat-tails) put themselves outside of the echelons of what an IC can reach, and far above the user. Years of MBA double-speak and worshipping the altar of guys like Gates, Bezos, and Jobs means that it’s “good” to be opinionated and ignore fact over your own judgement. This results in senior management deciding “let’s put AI here” or “the colour scheme should be mostly white”, despite reluctantly paying hundreds of people many thousands of dollars a year to KNOW about this stuff.
That, in essence, is why everything feels shitter nowadays. It’s because some fifty-something MBA cunt believes that you need AI, or a good UI needs more buttons - stuff we’ve known for decades is fucking stupid. That’s irrelevant though, because by being “General Manager of UI at MegaCorp” and having an assistant to arrange their Outlook calendar, they know more than you, pleb.
UI designer here - people are simply getting dumber, tech-wise at least.
That being said, there have been a lot of improvements in UI and UX world in the past 20 years the problem is that many users are so technically inept the drag down the entire curve all the way down.
I feel like I belong to one of the last generations that had to figure stuff out on our own when it came to computers back when I was a kid.
I was born in 87, my first computer ran Windows 3.11, I remember installing Windows 95 from floppy disks.
The whole “it just works” part of tech is both fantastic and horrible, fantastic in that it works, horrible in that when it doesn’t you get way fewer tools to work with.
The decline is all around us.
Apparently, now wifi is synonymous with internet service.
Think I kinda agree with this. Yesteryear’s software took training and experience, and business either hired or trained that experience. Now businesses don’t want to waste time or money on training, so thy hire experience, contract it out, or find some kit that is “easy” with minimal learning curve.
Because everyone is switching from a custom ui to a css standard so they can have a web app that is also a desktop app.
To sum up, your app became a web page.
Well more your program became a web page, that is now an app.
So even worse.
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.
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 think the 2013+ design was fine at time but 10+ years of doing the same flat minimalist design over and over makes me hate it now!
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?
I bet it’s capitalism.
The answer for enshittification of the entire reality seems to always be
capitalism.
Ohhh I have a feeling you will enjoy this video:
It’s about a dofferent piece of software, but still highly relevant.
30 seconds in and subbed because “man rants about DAW UI/UX” is a genre of video that I never knew existed but suddenly can’t live without.
Funniest thing is, this video series ultimately landed him the job as lead UX designer for Musescore, lol
That’s actually amazing! Maybe I should start ranting about stuff that annoys me in software I love. Wouldn’t mind being lead dev on something I’m an active user of.
I have no problems with it, so I guess I’m some sort of savant? There is such thing as good and bad UI, but I think this is a case of ‘what you’re used to’ causing problems with ‘what is.’
I don’t want to insult your intelligence, but you may just be tech-savvy, or at the very least, tech-literate. I also don’t have a problem with either because I simply follow the UI logic as the average Jane should.
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?
To me, buttons and icons provide the visual cue that “clicking here does something”, without having to mouse over them to discover that they’re clickable.
It’s the unadorned text strings that aren’t as obvious.
Probably so since jackass in a suit could double his annual bonus.
I always hated the ribbon context menu system. It ruins the way I learn watch involves where something is just as much as what it’s called, kinda like remember where on a physical page something is even if you don’t remember the page.
Static, nested menus are superior.
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.
The ribbon is one thing, the flat design and obfuscating tools/settings are a far bigger issue.
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.
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
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.
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).
