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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#361

Post by oblio »

wolco wrote: post #359
oblio wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. Microsoft did massive amounts of user testing, just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not there. This is a good starting point if you have about 20 spare hours: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ They also backed their tests with a ton of data and metrics.

Testing and metrics can be wrong like in this case. A ton of data can be too much where we find patterns to reenforce what we want.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but what Microsoft was doing is closer to science than what HN does every time an article somewhat related to the Ribbon is posted.

I'd bet on Microsoft's approach over these rants, every day of the week.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#362

Post by jodrellblank »

mucholove wrote: post #352
jodrellblank wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's absolutely no evidence for this" "yes there was, here's what to look for" "downvote". HN.txt. Top level menus full by Word 95. Office 97 added command bars. Nested menus and toolbars full by Office 2000. Office XP added Task panes, full of features by Office 2003. " the Task Pane was the last attempt to find a way to scale old-style UI to programs as full-featured as Office. Although it was a successful stop…

So much bull crap stuff. The fastest way to find something is to search for it. And...search for a menu item is a 2nd class feature on the OS. I wish I could click a text field on the menu bar and find stuff. I wish the actions were indexed with the documentation. Oh—and I wish that the keyboard shortcut for that was standard. Not on my Mac, but I’m pretty sure that I had to type it in from a Mac productivity magazin…

> So much bull crap stuff. The fastest way to find something is to search for it.

Faster to search for "save" or press Ctrl+S? Faster to search for "save" or click the save icon at the top of the screen? Searching is slower, clearly. Even if searching was always faster, it doesn't refute "bull crap stuff" because there was no claim that the Ribbon is the fastest full stop, it's a balance of discoverable and usable; search requires you to know the right search terms to use, and it suffers the problem of the old Office self-customizing menus - the results aren't always in the same predictable order - and if what you want is not in the top few results, you don't know if the feature doesn't exist, does exist by another name, or is in the hundreds of results you aren't going to read. And it has no way to surface features and make them discoverable.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#363

Post by wolco »

oblio wrote: post #361
wolco wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing and metrics can be wrong like in this case. A ton of data can be too much where we find patterns to reenforce what we want.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but what Microsoft was doing is closer to science than what HN does every time an article somewhat related to the Ribbon is posted. I'd bet on Microsoft's approach over these rants, every day of the week.

Each person who voices an opinion is a real value and a real data point. What Microsoft is doing may look like a science but they are not asking the right questions so they get misleading results.

Reminds me of when facebook pushed autoplaying ads. A/B metrics when through the roof. Sales never saw so much engagement. Every slapping each other on the back. Ask a user they didn't understand what was happening, there was a fear that was introduced around scrolling your own feed.

Science is great but only attempts to answers the questions you give it.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#364

Post by bluedino »

ako wrote: post #138
edoloughlin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I…

The key question is: would somebody who learned to use office after 2007 with the ribbon interface appreciate moving back to the pre-2007 interface? My guess is that more people learned to use office after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no problems using the ribbon. I still yearn for ms-word on dos, and oracle forms on terminal interfaces, once you learned the keyboard shortcuts, nothing was faster.…

I learned on the pre-2007 interface, and (at least for Word) I would go back to the Word for DOS keyboard-based interface including the little template you put on your keyboard.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#365

Post by michaelmrose »

oblio wrote: post #361
wolco wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing and metrics can be wrong like in this case. A ton of data can be too much where we find patterns to reenforce what we want.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but what Microsoft was doing is closer to science than what HN does every time an article somewhat related to the Ribbon is posted. I'd bet on Microsoft's approach over these rants, every day of the week.

I recall the first time I used the new windows 8 UI. It was absolutely horrifying. There were 2 different control panels with different settings sometimes overlapping. The traditional UI in which you could start apps by clicking on desktop shortcuts and manage traditional windows but certain apps including the start menu put you seemingly randomly in the weirdo new app experience where the window took up the whole screen. This was also true of clicking a url link in a different app.

It was bar none the worst desktop interface that anyone has ever released for a computer.

You have asserted without evidence that MS's UI is driven by science and you are assuming that Microsoft's research is in fact any good. Based on consistently mediocre results I have reason to doubt that. To support your position I suggest you actually cite some research instead of assuming it has been done competently.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#366

Post by barrkel »

oblio wrote: post #350
shawxe wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this completely. It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category than it is for me to scan through a bunch of irregularly sized tiles for the icon and description of the configuration I need. For me, all of the pictures just lower the density of the information and cause it to take longer to parse every single time. I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is…

> Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. Microsoft did massive amounts of user testing, just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not there. This is a good starting point if you have about 20 spare hours: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ They also backed their tests with a ton of data and metrics.

I read those blog articles as they came out, and bought into the same kool aid as you did, but when time came to use it, it just didn't work as well as menus.

The contextual toolbar is one of the better ideas though.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#367

Post by kayodelycaon »

Someone wrote: post #212
sp332 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, the ability to customize existing tabs, and make new ones with whatever commands you want on them, is insufficient? Or is this only a complaint about the defaults?

For those who don’t know: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-rib... : “What you can customize: You can personalize your ribbon to arrange tabs and commands in the order you want them, hide or unhide your ribbon, and hide those commands you use less often. Also, you can export or import a customized ribbon.”

Thank you! I didn’t even know this was possible.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#368

Post by barrkel »

Spooky23 wrote: post #173
Jonnax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X…

There is a population of people who just hate the ribbon. In my experience, they are usually attorneys talking about word. It's the same argument that their attorney ancestors made about Wordperfect 5.1 keystroke commands. Personally, I don't see the big ribbon issue. It's easy to search for arcane features in the help menu. IMO, they really need a Mac where you get the top menu bar and a ribbon-like thing. Or some s…

I suspect it might be dependent on whether someone is stronger visually or spatially vs textually.

I find ribbon interfaces highly irritating anywhere I find them, which is rarely - they haven't really caught on outside a couple of MS apps, AFAIK.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#369

Post by [deleted] »

angus-prune wrote: post #201
HeckFeck wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I installed Office 97 onto Wine just for curiosity. I could still do much with it. The only feature I really missed from Word was academic references. I could create documents indistinguishable from modern Word using the old drawing features combined with modern fonts. The drop down menus, combined with the floating toolbars were much more intuitive than clicking up and down some "ribbon". The drop down men…

> eg "Insert -> Image -> From File". In the latest version of word the progression is: "Insert > Pictures > From This device"

[deleted]

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#370

Post by glitcher »

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

In high school they taught us Lotus 123 spreadsheets, oh my do I feel old! Never used those again afterwards. I agree about the proprietary software gripe, but it could have been worse.
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