Do you use ribbons in the applications you develop?
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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