Microsoft's ribbon interface draws frowns, smiles

Microsoft's Office 2007, and to a lesser extent Vista, is bringing a radical change to the desktop user interface. The Office Fluent UI feature -- the ribbon interface -- introduced in Office 2007 is Microsoft's attempt to help users get more out of Office applications. For nearly two decades, apps have relied on the menu interface to collect and expose features, but as programs' capabilities have ballooned, the menus have gotten overloaded. Software developers have tried various supplements, such as Office 2003's approach of hiding infrequently used menu items automatically, and Adobe's use of floating multi-tabbed feature panels -- approaches picked up by other developers as well.

But the ribbon interface is perhaps the most radical UI change since Windows 95 and the Mac's System 7 from the early 1990s. The ribbon presents commands organized as a set of commands most relevant for each task area. For example, Word has a tab labeled "References" for working with Word documents. The ribbon replaces menus and toolbars.

Its reception has been mixed.

[ See what InfoWorld SMB IT blogger has to say about living with Office 2007 ]

Why Microsoft made such a radical change

Microsoft officials, of course, laud the technology. In a presentation at the Microsoft's 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. last month, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates characterized the Office Fluent UI as a success and said the company would be adding its capabilities to other systems. "We usability-tested it massively and, fortunately, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said. The older interface obscured functionality, with Microsoft getting requests for capabilities that were already there, he said.

In developing the Office Fluent UI, Microsoft was looking for a way to handle the growing number of commands in Office, since the menus and toolbars couldn't handle them any longer, said Mark Alexieff, a senior product manager for Microsoft Office. "We got to a point where 10 years after [applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint] were released, the applications had 10 times more commands than they had at the beginning," he said. Users wanted to spend less time looking for features and figuring out how to use them, said Alexieff. "We shifted the focus to what are the ways we can most directly get people to the results they want," he said.

The use of an icon-laden ribbon also helped reduce screen real estate taken by the UI. "The design of the ribbon gave us the ability to use graphics [and] icons much more efficiently to help label commands," said Alexieff.

Why some people dislike Office Fluent

But there is a groundswell of opposition to the Office Fluent UI, despite Microsoft's testing.

"I dislike it. My wife dislikes it too," said Markian Zadony, who works at a financial services company. The Fluent UI is too radical of a departure, he said: "It's being forced down your throat, in essence."

His frustration centers around the fact that the ribbon tries to assume what a user wants to do, Zadony said -- often incorrectly. "It’s really trying to be smarter than you," Zadony said.