[siggen]

Replacing the menu interface with the ribbon interface in Win10 and Office... I am not sure what the thought process was for Microsoft to have done that. Sometimes you already have something solid and it doesn’t need change. I liked being able to navigate the explorer UI with the keyboard with hints provided directly in the UI. For example, Alt+T O opened the tools menu, then the Options dialog box. But now, there’s no menu....

[AnonC]

The ribbon came in MS Office 2007 as a result of user studies that showed that menus weren’t effective in showing the users what was possible or what features were available in an application. That’s why this new UI (“Fluent UI”) was designed for better discoverability. [1]

Once you do something new and different, I suppose it’s natural to copy it over everywhere else (like Windows Explorer).

[1]: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

[dingaling]

It was very much an attempted solution to a self-made problem. Default toolbar config in Office programs had become so overwhelming that on a 1024x800 standard-issue corporate monitor you could literally see only a paragraph of text in the content area.

The true solution to that was probably deeper than clustering toolbar items by context. The very concept of a toolbar probably needed to be challenged.

[WorldMaker]

> The very concept of a toolbar probably needed to be challenged.

Uh, that's exactly what the Ribbon did? It challenged the ideas of a traditional toolbar by going back to first principals far enough to the point where traditional toolbar stalwarts hate it on sight.

Half the reason we have debates about the Ribbon is precisely because it challenged the very concept of a toolbar.

[icegreentea2]

I understand the frustration at having changes work against muscle memory, but you can still navigate the UI as you described - it's just that "Options" is bundled under "View" now. alt,v,y,enter or alt,v,y,o will open the options dialog. The hints are now hidden until you hit alt now though =/

[siggen]

Right... it’s a solution for folks who have this existing knowledge. The aim I guess is to transition folks to non-keyboard devices for navigating the UI...

[WorldMaker]

Menus in Windows had already lost the accelerator key decorations by default well before the Ribbon (by almost a decade at that point). The Ribbon didn't cause the loss of always visible accelerator key UI, the Ribbon was built when accelerator key UI was already lost for being too noisy.