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The Condescending UI
theodp writes "Paul Miller has some advice for user interface designers: Don't be condescending. 'The Ribbon in Microsoft Office products,' complains Miller, 'is constantly talking down to me, assuming I don't know how to use a menu, a key command, or an honest-to-goodness toolbar.' Miller's got some harsh words for Apple, too: 'And of course, there is the transgression of the century: Apple's downward spiral into overt 1:1 metaphors. The physical bookshelf, the leather desk calendar (complete with a torn page), the false-paginated address book...these new tricks are horrible and offensive [and likened to Microsoft Bob]. They're not only condescending and overwrought, they're actually counter-functional.' So, how does Miller cope while waiting for his UI knight in shining armor? 'I recently switched my Windows 7 install over to the Classic Theme', Miller explains, 'which is basically Windows 95 incarnate, just with all the under-the-hood improvements I've come to rely on. I really like it. It feels right, and if it isn't beautiful, at least it's honest. I wish there was a similar OS 9 mode for OS X.'"
Many people like how easy and straightforward Mac OSX is. I didn't like Ribbon first either, but after getting used to it I like it much more than the previous Office UI's. It does take some adjustment if you've used the old ones, but that's true for every kind of change. And people don't like changes, but the truth is, Ribbon is much better interface. It would be stupid to drag using bad interface because old users hate change. Everything is displayed much more clearly. I noticed this especially when I used Office products I haven't really used much before. If I had used them, it was always more work adjusting. But when they were new to begin with, there was no problem. I think Ribbon is still a great idea, especially for non-geeks. I guess they could include both interfaces though, like Opera does (not with Ribbon, but with hiding menu).
We're back to this discussion again.
Unskilled Users (not necessarily new!) like the new Padded Rails simplicity. I have advised a couple of such users now and they really do like things being as "Safari is the internet". They don't know what a web page address is. They just type words into the search bar until it (hopefully!) shows up.
So if companies would quit playing Proprietary Lockdown games, we really do need "Basic / Advanced" versions of a UI at the click of a button.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
it's not condescending. it assumes you have memorized dozens of little one-letter commands.
I've spent a decade in the firing line (developer exposed directly to users), and this goes directly against everything we've heard from the vast majority. Yes, your power users are going to be frustrated by simplified UI, sorry guys, you're not our main audience. The average user does not want to spend time learning the UI, they want to pick up the app, do what they need to do and move on with their life.
And most of us have absolutely no problem with the "For Dummies" theme that's skinned over so many products today.
The problem isn't even if it's the default look and feel.
The problem is generated when frustrated (and experienced) users cannot change it to suit their liking.
And while you may be doing your job to address your "main" audience of "I'm-too-damn-lazy-to-learn", I wonder if they recognize the irony of the downward spiral they're helping perpetuate by forcing you to placate to the masses that continue to lower the bar. You know what they say when you constantly try and make something idiot-proof. Someone usually comes along and builds a better idiot.
We keep this up, and computers are going to look like Babys first cell phone because people don't want to spend more than 17 seconds learning anything these days.
which is exactly why the new UIs are so poor.
Remember when Windows first came out, it has menus and every app had the same menu bar. Everything had a file menu that had new/open/print/etc items on it.
You could open any app and instantly know how to create a new document - because there was the file|new menu item, every time. You'd received training for all apps, instant familiarity, instant productivity.
Fast forward to today and we have different interfaces for everything. The new UIs with shiny orbs and animated transitions mean you have to figure out where all the new bits are for each app. Then some of them start working differently (eg Excel that has multiple icons in the task bar, but they're all running in a single instance so you close 1 you close them all kind of bo**ocks), and some don't even have menus - well, they have menus, but they're tucked away behind a little coloured icon so they appear when you click it, if you can find the f***er in the first place (eg the new hide-everything-away browser interfaces). The the ribbon comes along (which is a fine toolbar repacement BTW) but is used as a menu replacement too - with loads of bits hidden away in little menus behind tiny ">" icons.
The old interfaces were fugly, but functional. They made us productive and really that's what is needed for line-of-business apps. No-one really cares that excel looks cool, not when you're typing in the accounts.
I look at it like training wheels on 2-wheel bicycles. They definitely make it easier for a beginner to make it down the driveway and back, but at some point they become a hindrance and you'll want them off.
This isn't about old geezers pining for the UI they used back in the day; they're used to changing UIs and have been through many. This is about not being able to remove the training wheels, or to get a bike without them.
I'm not defending the ribbon, but as for the screen real estate issue with Ribbon, you can improve that by double clicking on the "Home" tab (or any other tab). The meat of the ribbon will be hidden, and now it's more like a good ol menu (gosh!!). Double-clicking on Home again restores the ribbon to it's full, bloated glory.
To paraphrase you:
"Ribbon is better, and if you don't like it, that is because you are resisting change"
I think that's the biggest mistake the designers and proponents of the new UIs are making (mind you, not all of them, but it is widespread to the point of being annoying).
This article is terrible.
People don't like the ribbon because it sucks, not because it's condescending. It makes doing the job HARDER for both new users AND experienced users.
The bookshelf/faux leather metaphor is simply that. It has no functionality. It doesn't get in the way, so it's a complete non-issue. It is slightly offensive to anyone with a design-sense, but the world doesn't end because of it.
The fact that geeks like this author feel like they are being talked down to is why the millions of other non-geeks call us geeks. Computers aren't the sole domain for us. Companies have to make money, and when there are millions of more computer-challenged customers than experts like this guy, so they'll make their product for them. The fact this guy is mad about that tells me somebody should give him a Linux build.
I honestly am waiting for Windows to rename "control panel" to "shiny stuff" in windows 9.0
With the long term trend in the groupthink arena toward icon-ization, we are nearing the point where there will no longer be words or names. The inability to discuss the interface is an advantage for marketing, to some extent. It is 1984 new-speak like.
So, click on the shiny ball (color depends on your local theme). Then click on the paradichlorobenzene molecule, don't know what that is, well tough cookies. Then click on the smiley face. Ta da you're now upgraded. Whatever you do, don't click on the icon that looks like two mating centipedes. And the Cthulhu icon, thats not a good choice either. Who knows what any of this will do, and if it doesn't do what you wanted it to do, thats because you're using it wrong; the user is always to be blamed either for being too much of a power user or too much of a noob. Our UI did great in the focus groups; everyone knows focus groups are never wrong; after all they brought us Palin, Hillary, and Britney Spears; our UI is proven perfect QED.
Think about even simple stuff like replacing the "my pr0n" directory with a wordless ribbon-like icon... we probably won't be able to agree on an icon of exactly what body part, nor agree on female or male, nor even what species.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Apple's downward spiral into overt 1:1 metaphors. The physical bookshelf, the leather desk calendar (complete with a torn page), the false-paginated address book
Only part of the population can think abstractly. The exact percentage differs somewhat depending on what standard you use, but about 40 to 60% of the population is able to think using purely abstract models in well developed countries, without a good education far less. The rest may be very smart if they're dealing with physical objects or people, but the less it works like the "real world" the more lost they get. I've noticed this myself with simple cubes for reporting. Once you pass three dimensions that you can draw up physically, people start to zone out. Programming is dark magic, as is writing an SQL query - for me I'm just making an abstract skeleton where "The hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone is connected to the leg bone" and so on.
In theory, that sounds like a huge market but just because they can do it with some effort, doesn't mean it comes easily to people. The people that can easily, effortlessly think in the abstract and would like to do it in their daily computing is probably in the single digit range. And most of them are here on slashdot and swear by the CLI, which is the ultimate in abstraction. No graphical hints, no feedback, just type in a command and abstractly understand what it and any switches you apply will do, particularly if you daisy chain it though sed, awk and grep. You might argue that there should be a middle ground here where the UI is both powerful and easy to understand, but the people on either side aren't going to see it that way.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A delay that long would drive me completely bonkers. I don't need my eyes to catch it, I'm not reacting to the computer, the computer is supposed to react (preferably instantly) to me. It is my servant, not the other way around.
The basic concept is a bug not a feature. No one who reads old fashioned physical books does it for the experience of the delay while turning pages. For example, I cannot go to a convenience store without an unwashed slacker taking their time at cashier duty. That does not mean that adding a USB operated B.O. generator, inserting "like" in between every three words, making it really slow, having to wait in line, and taking 45 seconds to figure out the change coinage for $1.76 would be a huge improvement to the amazon.com web interface.
IF you're using firefox, that means you can use greasemonkey to write scripts. I am not conversant in greasemonkey enough to do this myself, but I triple dog dare you to write a greasemonkey script, that wraps /. inside it, and each time you scroll down via "pg down" or wheel, it freezes for 300 ms, displays an animation of an ancient roman scroll winding up and unwinding, makes a paper turning sound, and then finally displays the next page of /.. I will make a bet that within a week you throw a chair thru your monitor, or disable that script, or admit I was correct.
This is another example where horrific UI mistakes by OS designers are "OK" because there is no competition or choice, but a website would be laughed off the internet if it tried to implement something that awful.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It was Microsoft saying "there's been a proliferation of new commands in Office and we can't just keep putting menus and sub menus like this forever"
Except that's exactly what the ribbon does, except it uses huge buttons instead of concise text. What the ribbon did was take away a static toolbar and a static menu, so you constantly have to hunt around for stuff, especially if you tend to resize windows a lot or move between computers with different size monitors (like a laptop). It is still basically a menu bar, only one level deep is constantly displayed. There are still submenus - they just look like a button with a downward pointing arrow on it now. Most of the benefits of the reorganized ribbon could have been achieved by reorganizing the menus and adding a context-sensitive menu bar (like the "Inspector" in the older versions of Mac office or the old pictures toolbar that would automatically appear when you were editing a picture).
The ribbon would have been a neat accessory, or even replacement for toolbars. But ditching the menus was stupid and hurt the productivity of long-time Office users. Since the Mac version of office still has a menu system alongside the ribbon, and it surely sells fewer units, I don't think expense of development has anything to do with it - MS is just being dictatorial.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I personally like clicking on a vague icon and not knowing what will happen. It's thrilling.
From a classic Usenet "Computing Dictionary":
Easy to learn: Hard to use.
Easy to use: Hard to learn.
Easy to learn and use: Won't do what you want it to.
I'd call it a joke, but it's really rather apt. In most cases, there are trade-offs involved in UI designs. Make something flexible and powerful -- letting people do more -- and you necessarily make it more complicated, and harder to use. The more obvious and straight-forward you make a UI, the less you can pack into it.
Designing things that fit multiple user experience levels, and which transition cleanly, is hard.
This is one of the things I think the classic pull-down menu + toolbar paradigm does well. Sort things into categories, so like items are grouped. The accelerator keys for each menu item are highlighted, so as an intermediate step, you can remember (V)iew, (Z)oom, Whole (P)age. And shortcut keys are also displayed, so very frequently used commands give one the opportunity to remember something like [CTRL]+[0]. With icons next to the menu commands, you have an alternative shortcut for the mouse visually or mouse inclined.
Sadly, some people campaign actively against this kind of design, which facilities both novice and expert users. One complaint I read is that a Product Manager at Microsoft didn't like the underlined letters, saying novice users don't understand why letters are randomly underlined. While true, it also didn't really hurt them any. Meanwhile, removing the underlined letters prevents people who wish to do better from inquiring and improving themselves.
An advantage to GUIs is it lets those so inclined explore functionality. Hiding things removes that advantage. That's a loss.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.