This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
I bet it's capitalism.
The answer for enshittification of the entire reality seems to always be
capitalism.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably so since jackass in a suit could double his annual bonus.
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
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 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.
Padding is a very versatile thing in UI design, and none of it will make anything look terrible.
Even in your first example, the toolbar has slight padding on the edges and so do the buttons.
The reason there's more padding now is because it makes it easier for new users to process everything.
I like the ribbon personally
Yeah, I have no preference. Both are nice for very different reasons.
Btw, just so you know, Libre Office has multiple UIs, incliuding a Ribbon-like variant. View > User Interface.
But they let you choose.
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.
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?
And you can't have legible icons, as they must be as small and cryptic as possible. They should also all look alike at first glance if possible.
I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.
There's a point where it's literally TMI and it becomes hard to find what you need unless you spend a lot of time training on it
You are among the first people I've seen online who hasn't circlejerked about literally any level of padding/spacing being too much padding.
People on Reddit/Lemmy always talk about how unusably shit any modern design is, and how UX/UI from 20+ years ago was so much better.
Yet do people use ancient copies of the software that broadly still performs the tasks people need of them? No.
Do they theme their system to look like the oh-so-superior Win98? No.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes I see a design change I dislike. But as a general rule, UI has definitely got better over the years.
And don't get me wrong, part of me feels great nostalgia at seeing old UX's, because it reminds me of the "good old days" when I bought my first computer in 1999. It's fun to Go back and use systems from back then. And at first you think AAAAA this is so cool, I remember all this, this looks neat, but after that nostalgia wears off you think *"thank god modern UIs aren't inconsistent, cramped and cluttered like this"
Nostalgia goggles are a powerful thing.
These people have no idea what constitutes a good user interface. Just because they’ve taught themselves how to use the one from 1998, does not mean that grandma of 78 would find it as intuitive. Applications like this have to accommodate so many different types of people and somehow the neckbeards seem to forget that. Can’t imagine why.
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
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.
