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Microsoft Ignores Usability With All-Caps Menu in Visual Studio
mikejuk writes "The recent release of Visual Studio 2012 contained a UI element that few believed could make it into the final version — ALL-CAPS menus. After lots of user criticism and disbelief, Microsoft has moved swiftly to do something about it — by tweaking the typography. '... we explored designs with and without uppercase styling. In the end we determined it to be a very effective way of providing structure and emphasis to the top menu area in Visual Studio 2012.' This must be a new meaning of the word 'structure,' because putting the menu items into all-caps means that they are all the same height. When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item. The idea that putting a menu into all caps adds structure is something that is very difficult to see. If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color? Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color in favour of the 'everything-is-grey UI.' Developers are the people who invented CamelCase to make sure that the structure of run together words would stand out better — and now we are asked to believe that making a menu all-caps adds structure. I don't think so."
As I understand it road signs (or many of them) in the UK used to be in caps but studies showed that mixed-case was much easier to read (which mattered more as cars got faster) since we're looking for familiar patterns.
Looks like Microsoft will need to re-learn this lesson...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item.
Call me blind. But this rant is blown out of proportion. He's complaining about structure, yet there is a very clearly delimited blank space between menu items a blank space which is much large than present in the mixed case version. In fact, I find it a lot easier to read the menu item word in the all capital version compared to the mixed case most based on the large spacing alone.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible. They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes. Whatever your beef with Redmond, the UI is the one thing that I will wholeheartedly disagree with you about in almost all circumstances.
If they dropped the ball here, then that's absolutely amazing. Literally amazing. They've built a company and made some of the richest people in the world on how pretty and easy to use their software products are, at the expense of what those interfaces run on for lower level code. If they're losing touch with UI now, that doesn't bode well for them for the long term. They certainly won't disappear, but their non-OS products would lose market share and once people stop being locked in to their non-OS products, they have little reason to stay with the OS itself if other vendors have multiOS versions of competing products.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
How come they haven't created a 'ribbon menu' for Visual Studio? Perhaps this is tacit admission that the Ribbon Menu sucks and is inefficient.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Totally agree.
I think it's being driven by the cell phone / tablet craze. Everyones trying to make their desktop look like their cellphone. I too think it's a major step backwards.. and I think a lot of the UI design guys are out of touch with what people actually want.
Not everyone does the job for fun.
I have been doing all my development work in Eclipse for the last 5-6 years. However for this specific Windows C++ project I needed to use Visual Studio. Like it or not I have a life to manage. Otherwise why would I do programming day and night at the age of 40, with a PhD in computer science? Salary of a PhD university staff is less than $1500/month and that's not enough (considering that I spent savings of 10 years of my hard work to reach the PhD dream of mine).
When I turned into Visual studio 2012 RC hoping that it will provide better compiler, error messages, error preview and editor, I could not bear it even for 20 minutes:
- The error list uses dark gray texts on gray background (my almost old eyes could not bear it...). ...
- Clicking on an item in errors list would open the source on bottom output/error dock! in a new tab.
- Tabs were on bottom (like the class and solution explorer), now they occupy additional space on top.
- Menus are caps
- You feel bored in a gray and flat environment after 12 hours of programming daily
I understand that if you are someone who knew exactly where every option was then the ribbon would be a step back. But from my point of view it makes it much easier to find features that were previously buried in the menus.
The point of the ribbon is to expose useful features to the user so they actually use them.
UK road signs were changed to their current style after testing in 1958, there's a nice summary on the BBC. This new mixed upper and lower case style became legally required on 01 January 1965.
So yes indeed, typographical designers understood this in the UK quite a while before it was a widely discussed computer interface debate..
Part of GP's complaint is that he doesn't necessarily know or can discern the meaning of the symbols. Also, it took me roughly 20 minutes to find the icons on the title bar the first time I used 2007 because I was not expecting there to be icons on the title bar.
He effected a bored affect.
The ribbon bar in Office 2010 is the most unusable piece of crap ever. I had to memorize where all the stuff was before, now I have to re-memorize where all the stuff is because everything is in a new location that is not very intuitive.
How hard is it to make an interface where I can just TYPE what I want to do? I want to type "line spacing" and have it bring me to the place where I change line spacing. Microsoft with their billions of dollars can't figure out how to do that? Is this a joke? So instead I have to press F1, type "line spacing" and have it show me the tips on how to do the special dance to get to where I want. In a world where the computer has 3 billion cycles per second I shouldn't have to waste my cycles trying to remember what awkward button sequence I have to perform to get the reward.