A study from 16 years ago is hardly relevant anymore. Back in 2003, people were still familiar with Office 2003's layout; most people have long since forgotten that layout or never learnt it in the first place.
The author doesn't discuss users' existing familiarity with Office 2003 and they only mention the word 'training' once, that "software design to interact with technology should require the least amount of training as possible" whilst never acknowledging that training in, and even qualifications in, the use of the Office suite was very much a thing in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Even then, the most problems were had in Excel. Advanced usage of Excel is done by technical people who would have had some training. Word and PowerPoint weren't shown to have significant difference in usability; arguably, Word is the program most people forced to use the Office suite spend their time in.
Never mind the ways by which the Ribbon and computers have changed since Office 2007. Options moved around, the Ribbon height reduced, screens having gotten wider to compress fewer options into submenus…
The author states at the end of their conclusion:
> In order to determine if the result of the study with respect to the Excel 2007 application persists and are not due to the learning curve the experiment can be repeated with users having at least three years using this version.
Do you know if the author or anybody else followed up?
It would be more interesting to see a comparison between Office 365 now that the interface has effectively become the de facto standard (same as Windows, macOS, mobile, tablet, and the web version) and Google Sheets (which retains the menus, toolbar, etc.).
I'm no lover of the Ribbon myself but I feel like there's better evidence for it not being the ideal interface than this which wouldn't have convinced me even at the time.
This isn't the proof that'll bring down the titan.
>> the study with respect to the Excel 2007 application persists...can be repeated with users having...years using this version.
> Do you know if the author or anybody else followed up
I would love to see more recent and similarly thoughtful work on the exact same subject. If I find more, I'll try to remember to come back here and comment. Definitely, I am interested in the clearest evidence regarding whether either paradigm is "actually" more usable, and not just the result of some confounding variable(s).
With a null hypothesis that the classic toolbar is no better than the ribbon, I just wanted to see some data (instead of assuming that what users have now has to be more efficient for those users just because it's what the market-leading product has been giving users for about two decades).
Yeah I realized that only now, for some reason when I was on mobile and I was looking into this the demo video was not loading at all. I would love to retract my comment :(
All of the things on this website have affected my experience of macOS and iOS for a long, long time.
I definitely go straight to the Gmail website when I need to search for anything on my work account. Yes, I've got it set up to cache all the emails locally indefinitely. Have done for years. Even did so when my workplace used Office 365 instead of Google.
On Hacker News, of all websites, giving yourself the "Works on My Machine" badge is not a worthy contribution. It's dismissive of any experience other than your own.
He had it down as Mail search never works at the time of my comment. Never.
Don’t appreciate the drive by “that’s okay because it doesn’t work for me, btw, works for me is bad”. It’s fallacious. I’m not ignoring your lived experience. I’m calling out slop.
What arrogance?
Is hyperbole a literary device, or genre?
What’s the difference between hyperbole and making stuff up?
When is it okay to say it’s making stuff up, when it could just be hyperbole? How is “you said it works for you but I say doesn’t work for me, trumped!” calling out arrogance?
The terrible UI of a straight-forward document separated into distinct blocks, paragraphs and charts that are easily read, that scrolls from from top-to-bottom? Yeah, awful.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, my comments are in the context of the OP's article which is specifically about a scenario where you lack control in macOS. If you're someone who doesn't care about being able to do what the article wants to do, then your use case doesn't fall within the scope of what I'm referring to.
The author doesn't discuss users' existing familiarity with Office 2003 and they only mention the word 'training' once, that "software design to interact with technology should require the least amount of training as possible" whilst never acknowledging that training in, and even qualifications in, the use of the Office suite was very much a thing in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Even then, the most problems were had in Excel. Advanced usage of Excel is done by technical people who would have had some training. Word and PowerPoint weren't shown to have significant difference in usability; arguably, Word is the program most people forced to use the Office suite spend their time in.
Never mind the ways by which the Ribbon and computers have changed since Office 2007. Options moved around, the Ribbon height reduced, screens having gotten wider to compress fewer options into submenus…
The author states at the end of their conclusion:
> In order to determine if the result of the study with respect to the Excel 2007 application persists and are not due to the learning curve the experiment can be repeated with users having at least three years using this version.
Do you know if the author or anybody else followed up?
It would be more interesting to see a comparison between Office 365 now that the interface has effectively become the de facto standard (same as Windows, macOS, mobile, tablet, and the web version) and Google Sheets (which retains the menus, toolbar, etc.).
I'm no lover of the Ribbon myself but I feel like there's better evidence for it not being the ideal interface than this which wouldn't have convinced me even at the time.
This isn't the proof that'll bring down the titan.
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