Thanks in advance,

Regards,

p

I, like many others, am not visual by nature. Menus provide a text-based contextual path to the specific function I want to use. I can always find what I need using the classic menu design. I have been using Office 2007 since it was released and I still can never find the same command twice on the Ribbon. Often I am staring right at the icon and don’t see it–not because I’m blind but because the collected icons create a visual soup that essentially blurrs to one big picture making it hard to find the specific icon.

Your effort to clean up the Ribbon would certainly help, but for people like me, the real solution is replacing the Ribbon with a menu system–which I have done with ToolbarToggle (see ToolbarToggle.com).

Re the glow feature. In previous versions, a selected option appears as a depressed button, or as a checkmark next to a menu item, and in 2003 there is also an orange highlight on the depressed button or checkmark. A “highlight: is reasonable, while “glow” may be a bit excessive, though we’re getting stuck in the land of semantics.

By the way, one complaint about Excel 2007 is that the light light gray highlighting of selected cells is hard to see on some screens, and is particularly hard for vision-impaired users and middle-aged users. I would suggest a more pronounced highlighting for your selected vertical alignment button.

I understand the issues you have with the organization of the commands of the ribbon. Its simply unacceptable to have such an important command like Paste Values three mouse clicks or three key strokes away, it shouldn’t be more than two mouse clicks. Let me think how this could be reorganized and / or how this would fit into another tweaked Ribbon.

I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing having large buttons. Usability studies are indicating that is makes a lot of sense to have larger icons for more important commands and smaller or no icons for less important functions. Also having a mix of small buttons, large buttons and controls might look like unclean design, but helps you to remember and memorize the position of commands. They serve as a visual sign posts. Like the trees, and houses all the non-uniform environment elements that makes it easy to orientate in a new city, whereas it is hard to orientate in a city with a clean, uniform architecture, where all streets looking the same. It’s also a supporting Jensen’s design decision to not to make the Ribbon customizable (well, via code you can). These visual sign posts that help you to learn the ribbon need be stable. Imagine how confusing it would be, to go to work and to discover, that half of the city was reconstructed over night.

I hardly can see where a glow effect can be useful in the user interface of a production tool like Excel. All the reasons why we remove the visual clutter from Charts apply for User Interfaces. I changed the un-pimped ribbon so that it indicates the selected vertical alignment setting via a darker border and a slightly darker background color.

Andreas

In their efforts to reduce complexity, the UI team did two things. They reduced flexibility. And they didn’t remove complexity, they distributed it among the various tabs, making experienced users work harder to do what for them are routine tasks.

I like your efforts here to clean up the ribbon (is that Andreas? your articles should have a byline). I would have “MicroCharted” the ribbon (and I still may, if I ever use 2007 enough to want to customize it), by shrinking the huge ugly buttons, to allow more buttons to fit. For example, that Paste monolith could be shrunk, and in addition to Paste, you could fit Paste Formats and Paste Values in the same space. I can feel the excess mouse clicks melting away.

I don’t mind the glow effect, as long as it is useful. In the ribbon, it indicates the selected option (in the ribbon clip above, it shows that the Align to Bottom of Cell vertical alignment option is selected) and it indicates which button the mouse is hovering over. The un-pimped ribbon in contrast doesn’t indicate the selected vertical alignment setting.