Do you use ribbons in the applications you develop?
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Yes, yes and yes. We are development whores, and will do anything for the clients money. This explains why gathering user requirements feels like lap dancing a fat, sweaty bloke.
I have CDO, it's OCD with the letters in the right order; just as they ruddy well should be
Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads
Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
gathering user requirements feels like lap dancing a fat, sweaty bloke.
I hesitate to ask just how you know this, and I really don't think I want to know. I'm never going to get to sleep tonight with that image in my head... :sigh:
Will Rogers never met me.
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Just curious, based on Chris' rant. So, do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars? Do your customers demand that you create a UI with a ribbon so they feel like they are in the "modern" world? Marc
In my experience Ribbon does improve the usability of an application. It definitely lives up to the promise of making obscure program features evident. For instance, after implementing ribbon in an application people praised me about all the "new" features in the application (rather than the ribbon). In reality all the "new" features in the application were already there in the previous versions. The only problem with ribbon is that it does not make the keyboard shortcuts evident.
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Just curious, based on Chris' rant. So, do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars? Do your customers demand that you create a UI with a ribbon so they feel like they are in the "modern" world? Marc
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Just curious, based on Chris' rant. So, do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars? Do your customers demand that you create a UI with a ribbon so they feel like they are in the "modern" world? Marc
Most of my clients find "ribbon bars" confusing space-hogs.
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Yes, you are not the Jedi I am looking for. I will move along.
wow! the Force works very well here! :omg:
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In my experience Ribbon does improve the usability of an application. It definitely lives up to the promise of making obscure program features evident. For instance, after implementing ribbon in an application people praised me about all the "new" features in the application (rather than the ribbon). In reality all the "new" features in the application were already there in the previous versions. The only problem with ribbon is that it does not make the keyboard shortcuts evident.
The only implementation of ribbons that I liked was in SolidWorks. They also kept the menus. But you can completely change the ribbons and what buttons are on what ribbons. I don't think it would be that hard to implement either. I know that adding your own ribbon and buttons through the SolidWorks API is 1000 times easier than adding buttons to Excel through the its API.
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Just curious, based on Chris' rant. So, do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars? Do your customers demand that you create a UI with a ribbon so they feel like they are in the "modern" world? Marc
I never cared for the ribbon myself, that's why I've stayed with Office2003 (which I keep under lock and key). In my small development business I have even standardized on O2003 because of it's relative simplicity and mandated that my partners do the same. It just works. As for the software we develop, we're deliberate about keeping the interface as SIMPLE as possible which means NO ribbon. Some screens have a simple toolbar, others a few menus but even there we keep the UI as conservative as possible so the user can really focus on the data they're dealing with. -Max
modified on Thursday, December 2, 2010 9:07 AM
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Just curious, based on Chris' rant. So, do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars? Do your customers demand that you create a UI with a ribbon so they feel like they are in the "modern" world? Marc
Yes I wanted to rewrite my file sync app and I thought that users would view the ribbon as being a very modern and appealing look. The tabs/toolbar design also fits my app very well. After releasing it most users love the new look. Only 2 or 3 users objected and that is because they just hate the ribbon - it does not seem to matter to them that it fits well with the app. See for yourselves here: www.ajcsoft.com/AJCSync.php
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Just curious, based on Chris' rant. So, do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars? Do your customers demand that you create a UI with a ribbon so they feel like they are in the "modern" world? Marc
Yes, we use ribbons in all our applications. When DevExpress released their first ribbon control for WinForms I was quite hesitant to use it. So I created a customizable interface to allow the end-users to switch between the ribbon, standard menu/toolbars or a sliding/dockable navigation bar. After several months virtually all of them were using the ribbon bar with only a few using the navigation bar. All subsequent applications are ribbon only. With the DevExpress ribbon, keyboard navigation is very easy and it also includes the quick-launch bar like Office (their favorite feature). For those that complained it took up too much space, it was a training issue....they didn't know how to minimize the ribbon. Once trained though they were actually more receptive to the Office ribbon. Cheers!
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Yes, yes and yes. We are development whores, and will do anything for the clients money. This explains why gathering user requirements feels like lap dancing a fat, sweaty bloke.
I have CDO, it's OCD with the letters in the right order; just as they ruddy well should be
Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads
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Just curious, based on Chris' rant. So, do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars? Do your customers demand that you create a UI with a ribbon so they feel like they are in the "modern" world? Marc
We switched to a ribbon in our product. We've had almost no complaints from users, and many compliments. A well-designed ribbon exposes the application's most-used functionality with fewer clicks--sometimes many fewer. Our users can get to our most-used functionality with a single click, and they very rarely need more than two. I use the app myself many times a day, and I absolutely hate it when I have to work with the old menus (yes, we do support both UIs, although we no longer update the menus with new functionality). The hard part of ribbons is the design, not the coding. If you just take your old menus and translate them to a ribbon, you're wasting your time. You have to view the app functionally: What do the users do most often, and how can we organize our functionality most logically and conveniently? Were our users asking for a ribbon? Absolutely not. Does that mean we shouldn't have done it? Absolutely not. Sometimes users don't know that they want something until you've shown it to them.
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Marcus Kramer wrote:
Either way, that is a very, very disturbing thought that will take a long time to remove from my brain again.
Therapy. Lots of therapy. Alternatively, try consuming vast quantities of alcohol; I find that helps.
I have CDO, it's OCD with the letters in the right order; just as they ruddy well should be
Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads
Isn't alcohol a form of therapy? After drinking, rub the rest liberally over the rest of you. That will help cool you down.
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What's the first, Vista, .NET, or Powerpoint?
See if you can crack this: fb29a481781fe9b3fb8de57cda45fbef
The unofficial awesome history of Code Project's Bob! "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
I do remember a version of Microsoft C compiler, version 5.0 that was pretty defective. We had to wait for version 5.1.
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I do remember a version of Microsoft C compiler, version 5.0 that was pretty defective. We had to wait for version 5.1.
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We have a *very* widely used app we sell globally and not one customer has ever asked for a ribbon and we avoid it like the plague because there would be howls of indignation. People are used to and understand menus as they are. Anything else would be irresponsible. I don't know if this will change in the future but for now there's no way in hell.
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We also have a *very* widely used app that we sell globally, and there weren't any howls of indignation when we switched to a ribbon. Most of our users like it--a lot. We went to considerable trouble to ensure that users could stay with the old menus if they preferred, but metrics show that almost no one is. It's all in the design. A well-designed ribbon is faster and easier to use than tiered menus, and key functionality is highlighted. One of the interesting things our metrics show is that features that used to be buried in the menus are now getting much more use--apparently a lot of users didn't even know the features existed; now they do. We spent a LOT more man-hours designing the ribbon than coding it.
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We also have a *very* widely used app that we sell globally, and there weren't any howls of indignation when we switched to a ribbon. Most of our users like it--a lot. We went to considerable trouble to ensure that users could stay with the old menus if they preferred, but metrics show that almost no one is. It's all in the design. A well-designed ribbon is faster and easier to use than tiered menus, and key functionality is highlighted. One of the interesting things our metrics show is that features that used to be buried in the menus are now getting much more use--apparently a lot of users didn't even know the features existed; now they do. We spent a LOT more man-hours designing the ribbon than coding it.
Hmm...interesting. I guess if they have the option to turn it off then that's ok. I imagine there's something about your user base that is different than ours because ours reacts negatively to the slightest change we make. We even received complaints when we slightly changed the colour scheme of the graphics icons used in the program. Perhaps your users are pre-conditioned to use ribbons because they are high adopters of modern versions of office?
Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already. - Marcus Aurelius
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Just curious, based on Chris' rant. So, do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars? Do your customers demand that you create a UI with a ribbon so they feel like they are in the "modern" world? Marc
Marc Clifton wrote:
do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars?
I see this as a good question, but gave up on reading the replies after 20 or so content-free-spam-replies.
What CodeProject needs is a preattentively-scannable boolean tag-column, so that I can skip this trash.
Suggestion - the letter I for Informative, perhaps in a classic blue circle or some other graphic.
TRUE this IS the LOUNGE, but to my way of thinking that's a place for grand-scale questions exactly like this, which while not specific coding questions, still deserve serious thinking. Re-scan a few of the replies with the tag "Informative" in mind, so many of them are blatantly non-informative.pg--az
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Marc Clifton wrote:
do you actually develop applications that have a ribbon bar, or do you use the old fashioned menu and toolbars?
I see this as a good question, but gave up on reading the replies after 20 or so content-free-spam-replies.
What CodeProject needs is a preattentively-scannable boolean tag-column, so that I can skip this trash.
Suggestion - the letter I for Informative, perhaps in a classic blue circle or some other graphic.
TRUE this IS the LOUNGE, but to my way of thinking that's a place for grand-scale questions exactly like this, which while not specific coding questions, still deserve serious thinking. Re-scan a few of the replies with the tag "Informative" in mind, so many of them are blatantly non-informative.pg--az
pg--az wrote:
but gave up on reading the replies after 20 or so content-free-spam-replies.
Actually, I find the responses quite interesting, because there seems to be a lot of emotional charge around ribbons. There's a lot of passion there, which is interesting in itself.
pg--az wrote:
but to my way of thinking that's a place for grand-scale questions exactly like this, which while not specific coding questions, still deserve serious thinking.
Well, it takes a certain amount of effort to create a deeper conversation, and I was more interested in the raw survey aspect of the question rather than a something that could have led to some more deeper discovery about the pros and cons. :) Marc