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To cut or not to cut - The lousy MS Office ribbon

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AndyM:
The other thing is that you cannot customize the ribbon unlike the old toolbars.-zridling (April 13, 2007, 01:27 AM)
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Why do people keep saying this? Right up above in this same thread I debunked this: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=7991.msg57106#msg57106
-CWuestefeld (April 13, 2007, 05:24 AM)
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Like you said in your post:  "requires manipulating XML files that describe the content of the ribbon, and probably not appropriate for anything less than an extreme power user", this is not customization the old way, and the new way is way too technical for the average user.  So you are not wrong when you say the ribbon can be customized, but the reason "people keep saying this" is that MS has made the customization much more complicated.

I won't have Office 2007 for quite some time, so I don't know what's involved in editing the XML file, but I'm guessing it won't be something done as quickly or easily as Tools>Customize, and dragging some icons around.

CWuestefeld:
Naturally you're free to dislike the Office 2007 UI, and it's really none of my business whether or not you use it. But it really bothers me that people seem to be unjustly poisoning something that might be a revolution in windowing UIs. (and maybe it's not; we won't know until enough real people get to play with it)

The fact is that the O2K7 UI is customizable. Extreme changes require power-user expertise, but simple tweaks are actually easier than ever. And MS's user research (which agrees with my personal experience working with users) agrees with this:
Looking across a hundred million or so people using Office 2003, here's what we found:

* In fewer than 2% of sessions, the program was running with customized command bars.
* Of the 2% of sessions with customizations present, 85% included customization of four or fewer commands.
...
It breaks down like this: in ~1.9% of sessions, buttons have been added, removed, or moved between toolbars and menus...

Of the customized sessions, around 85% of them had only what we'd call minor customizations: four or fewer buttons. Most of these are added toolbar buttons, either from the command well or from a toolbar people don't want to keep up all the time...

So, we took a pragmatic approach and decided to focus on the 99.7% case: people who don't take advantage of customization or only use it to customize four or fewer commands. Out of this goal was born the Quick Access Toolbar.

The Quick Access Toolbar is designed to make it easy to add controls, galleries, and groups from anywhere in the Ribbon: just right-click the thing you want to add and choose "Add to Quick Access Toolbar" from the context menu. We designed the customization model to be efficient but with the goal of "zero customization complexity"; it would be unacceptable for customization to cause the user interface to degrade as it did so often with Command Bars.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.aspx
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So, 98% of the users do no customization and aren't affected. An additional 1.7% do very minor customization, which is actually easier now than ever before. Only 3 people in 1000 are inconvenienced by the change in customization behaviors. This seems like a big win to me. If you disagree, you should probably take a step back and consider who the primary audience of this software is.

Nevertheless, even if it's intended to cater to the vast majority of users, there's still the possibility that the manner in which it does so misses the mark. But we should let the game play out and see how users are actually able to interact with it. Convincing them that it's bad, before they ever use it, and based on an argument that's an exaggeration at best, is not going to give us the answers we need to better design our UIs in the future.

AndyM:
So, 98% of the users do no customization and aren't affected. An additional 1.7% do very minor customization, which is actually easier now than ever before. Only 3 people in 1000 are inconvenienced by the change in customization behaviors. This seems like a big win to me. If you disagree, you should probably take a step back and consider who the primary audience of this software is.
-CWuestefeld (April 13, 2007, 11:59 AM)
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I don't disagree because I do understand the software has been (hopefully) engineered to work better for the majority of users.  I'm one of the .3%, so the inconvenience I will experience when/if I upgrade is the time I spend on customization.  I'm sure it will be interesting, and time consuming.

Carol Haynes:
Also .3% of the user base is still a hefty number of users (probably over a million) when you consider how pandemic MS Office is on people's systems.

What about other plugin toolbars? (For example how does something like MathType integrate in Office 2007 - in all other versions it adds a toolbar, similarly Adobe Acrobat)

Hirudin:
That's great! It's always nice to have some numbers to back up what you believe. Looks like MS hit this nail right on the head here.

If the menus are customizable via XML, here is a perfect opportunity for some intrepid programmer, maybe even someone here on DC, to design an "Office2007 Menu Customizer" program that will display the current ribbon, let people customize it easily, output the XML, and maybe even inject it into O2K7 automatically. Charge $5 a pop and make some quick money, or be cool and give it away for donations.

I wonder how many Office owners NEVER open Excel?

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