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Ribbon Menus - Do you like them?

Posted May 4, 2009, by Charles Pfeil

I have been using Office 2007 for a little over a year now and as a contributor to the user interface design in Expedition PCB, I am wondering if the Ribbon Menu style that was implemented in Microsoft Office 2007 should be considered for our products. Here is what it looks like in Word.

For those of you not familiar with this style, the “normal” File, Edit, View, Tools, Window, Help pull-down menus are replaced by menus that provide a ribbon of icons as opposed to the list of menu items. My experience is as follows:

The appearance is nice - it looks pretty.
The height of the ribbon is significant and it obscures quite a bit of graphics area for edits. On a notebook, especially a small notebook, the remaining editing area is quite small.

Preparing Recommendations

It is difficult to memorize the locations of the less used functions. The ribbon menus have been completely reorganized. For example, if you want to edit your header, you would think it would be under the “Page Layout” ribbon; however, it is in the “Insert” ribbon.
When hunting for certain functions, it is not uncommon to simply not find what is desired. After looking through every ribbon, I will then go to the obscure “Options” dialog that is hidden under the “Office” button.

The menus change when resizing the application window - this makes it difficult for me to remember exactly where all the functions are.

There is only one custom toolbar where you can add your most used icons, in the lower left as shown in the previous message.

You may be getting my drift that I don’t particularily like these ribbon menus. It is true, other than the nice appearance, I don’t find other positives about them. So I am wondering if any of you have had a different experience with Ribbon menus and if you could tell me why you like them. Or if anyone has had other difficult experiences with Ribbon menus, please add to this discussion.

Regards,

Charles

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6 Comments on this Post

Commented on 7:56 PM, Oct 13, 2009
By Ilija Kovacevic

See the Ribbon menus in AutoTRAX DEX. http://kov.com/Tutorials/SwitchingMenus/ Regards Ilija Kovacevic

Commented on 5:00 AM, Oct 19, 2009
By holastefan

I realize that this blog was published a few months ago, so this comment is a bit late. At our QA software company, we did the same Ribbon evaluation, and came to the exact same conclusions (screen space and hidden commands were the biggest deal killers). It was nice to see those assessments shared by someone else. Apparently lots of us didn't get the memo that existing menus were unusable and needed to be replaced by Ribbons...

Commented on 7:39 PM, Oct 19, 2009
By Charles Pfeil

BTW, did you know that with Ribbon Menus, you can double-click on the menu title and they Ribbon will collapse and then when you click on a menu, the Ribbon drops-down? That makes it like a drop-down menu with icons. Regardless of the method implemented for a user interface, the final judgement has to be regarding ease-of-use. I have seen some very nice Ribbon Menus and some poor ones. I have also see some pull-down menus that drive me crazy as well (I happen to dislike multiple cascading menus). At some point you will see Mentor tools with Ribbon Menus. If the implementation enables more productive design, then I am confident it will be adopted in a positive manner.

Commented on 1:22 AM, Dec 3, 2009
By Luca Candela

I totally disagree with your assessment of the ribbon menu (and so does a substantial body of research). In particular, I take issue with your statement of "When hunting for certain functions, it is not uncommon to simply not find what is desired." That is ridiculous, do you think your final users would have an easier time hunting for functions in a drop-down menu? I can tell you exactly what's happening here: you were used to Word 2003, and you are hanging on your old habits, instead of trying to take in the new usage pattern. After 6 to 8 sessions it becomes a second nature.

Commented on 4:22 PM, Dec 3, 2009
By Charles Pfeil

Luca, This thread actually started in another blog and all the comments from the other blog were not updated here. Since my original post, I have found that Ribbon Menus are just fine and I now prefer them over pull down menus. I even tried a program that converted Ribbon Menus back to pull down menus; but abandoned that after a while. In fact I am responsible for the GUI design on a new product and we are using Ribbon Menus on it. Having said all that, I still have trouble finding certain commands in a Ribbon Menu - it's a problem with my mind, not so much the presentation. There are certain commands in a pull down menu that I have trouble finding as well. If you Google "Ribbon Menus" you will find that Unix/Linux users tend to hate Ribbon Menus but Windows users tend to like them.

Commented on 5:34 PM, Apr 30, 2010
By Ilija

Saying Linux users hate them is not suprising. They hate anything that is easy to use! Hence their love of Linux, or is it Lunix! Best way is to do both. AutoTRAX DEX (kov.com) lets users dymanically switch beteen them. Don't force you own ideas onto users. Leave them free to use both.

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Ribbon Menus - Do you like them?