Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness.
Feels like the opposite to me. Modern mobile style interfaces feel extremely hostile, designed to minimise the amount of information the user can extract from the application (and maximise the amount that can be extracted from the user and sold to the highest bidder) and our control over it.
Classic desktop interfaces (and no, the stupid office ribbons are not included in that), even when poorly designed, are many orders of magnitude easier to use and navigate, and provide a lot more tools and information.
Agree with you on all of it, but the office ribbon I think is actually not bad design. Especially if you use alt shortcuts, you can get pretty quick at accessing a bunch of options via the keyboard.
The little stupid arrow to show more options notwithstanding.
They waste three or four times more space (in the direction in which screens have the least!) than menus, while having much less space, and they are almost always much more poorly organised (and are often contextual, which makes it even harder to learn where everything is; if I want something contextual I’ll fucking right click).
Even ALT shortcuts are much easier with menus: press ALT, keep pressing the underlined letters until you’re where you want to be, or use the arrow keys. With ribbons you have to try to find the key amongst a mess of randomly thrown together icons, labels, and occasionally dropdown boxes. Utter madness.
Thanks for the video, I’m currently on the bus going to work and I don’t have headphones, but I’ll make a note to watch it once I get home.
EDIT: That was indeed entertaining, in an infuriating and depressing kind of way. Thanks!
Feels like the opposite to me. Modern mobile style interfaces feel extremely hostile, designed to minimise the amount of information the user can extract from the application (and maximise the amount that can be extracted from the user and sold to the highest bidder) and our control over it.
Classic desktop interfaces (and no, the stupid office ribbons are not included in that), even when poorly designed, are many orders of magnitude easier to use and navigate, and provide a lot more tools and information.
Agree with you on all of it, but the office ribbon I think is actually not bad design. Especially if you use alt shortcuts, you can get pretty quick at accessing a bunch of options via the keyboard.
The little stupid arrow to show more options notwithstanding.
Here’s a very entertaining video on how bad ribbons can be: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI
They waste three or four times more space (in the direction in which screens have the least!) than menus, while having much less space, and they are almost always much more poorly organised (and are often contextual, which makes it even harder to learn where everything is; if I want something contextual I’ll fucking right click).
Even ALT shortcuts are much easier with menus: press ALT, keep pressing the underlined letters until you’re where you want to be, or use the arrow keys. With ribbons you have to try to find the key amongst a mess of randomly thrown together icons, labels, and occasionally dropdown boxes. Utter madness.
Thanks for the video, I’m currently on the bus going to work and I don’t have headphones, but I’ll make a note to watch it once I get home.
EDIT: That was indeed entertaining, in an infuriating and depressing kind of way. Thanks!
I agree, but we have two have different meanings of user friendly here.
You: The thing makes it easy to do what I want, to understand what it can do.
Them: The thing makes it easy to do what the designer wants, makes it easy to understand what the designer wants me to do with it.