[ethbro]

I used "smart" because ML / AI seemed overly charitable for what was going on behind the scenes. And it's certainly distinct (or tries to be) from "you must type in exactly and only the name of the thing you want to find".

The issue with MS post-ribbon, and I would say this applies to Settings as well, is that I've yet to see them form a good answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the Ribbon?"

Strictly heirarchal menu items were an initial GUI effort I remember, begat ribbon "everything available behind the scenes / set up your own menu bar", begat "let us find it for you".

The issue being there seems little thought in intelligently mediating a discovery action, to wit that I can describe the thing I'm looking for but the system lacks a representation in which I can do so in.

Magical search box discovery affords no such path, because the functioning of the system is deliberately obscured from me. I simply have to try guessing another key phrase associated with the thing I want.

And therein lies my gripe: I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.

[WorldMaker]

The driving guideline behind discoverability in a ribbon (and to a lesser extent the Settings) is to balance a combination of the most common tasks and the most powerful ones front and center. The answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the ribbon?" is sometimes "Maybe there's a more common way or a more powerful/capable way to do it" because sometimes "it's no longer meant to be discoverable". (Though sometimes its simply it was underestimated to be a common need, maybe because its primary users opted out of telemetry.)

Personally, I think most of the ribbons are extremely discoverable, but obviously your mileage may vary. I agree though that the search boxes for ribbon functions should offer a "teach me to fish" moment of maybe somehow helping you see how you missed that option in the ribbon. Office at least uses the same icons consistently between search and the ribbon so you could potentially get used to the landmark and eventually figure out the sign posts along the way (and Help documentation still exists and is also in the search results).

> I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.

The Ribbon (and most everything else in this post-Ribbon era) was extremely influenced by user telemetry to figure out what users were actually using day-to-day. It was designed in coordination with user studies to observe how to make it as discoverable as they could. It didn't just come out of thin air in some ivory tower specification, it was prioritized as much as anything else by telemetry from users.

Similar for Settings, I'm sure the things that are moved into the new application and out of the old Control Panel are being prioritized by telemetry. It never surprises me that the users that most often complain about their "favorite" most commonly used settings not getting migrated most often don't have telemetry on.

[ethbro]

I'll shortcut my rant about the focus on cheese and moving thereof by noting that we're talking about two different things.

If any option is buried in an archaic path, that's not a well-formed system of discoverability to me.

I could care less that the top 90% of functionality is front-and-center, because I'm still going to use the remaining 10% once a week. And if it takes 100x as long as finding something on the ribbon and requires non-intuitive logic (because see previous comment about deprioritizing deep discoverability), then that's what I'm going to remember.

[contextfree]

I'd say the Office ribbon is still sort of hierarchical, just laid out differently. tab -> section/group -> item -> submenu/subdialog.

If something isn't on the ribbon or in any of the subdialogs it's almost certainly because it's deprecated and only still exists for some obscure compatibility reason.

As for Windows Settings, it's unfortunately weird not for some principled or philosophical reason, but just because they're still not done reimplementing all the features and use cases they want from Control Panel into the new framework.

In spite of my nitpicking I agree with your general point.

[ethbro]

> If something isn't on the ribbon or in any of the subdialogs it's almost certainly because it's deprecated and only still exists for some obscure compatibility reason.

Am I using it wrong then? I don't dive into Office if I can avoid it, but just yesterday there was some Powerpoint function I needed that didn't appear on the ribbon.

Had to pull out the "everything" right/left boxes, add it to the ribbon, and then I could use it.

I know they've been trying to fix that with context, selected-object specific tabs that appear, but it still has a ways to go.

[WorldMaker]

I'm curious what that function was? In PowerPoint especially the last time I used something that wasn't on the ribbon was years ago. What were you trying to do?