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Change is good only when it’s great

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I just changed from a Wintel machine, which I've used for over 20 years, to a Mac. I had dragged my feet with Office 03 so long that people were starting to notice. I no longer could put off upgrading to the "new" Office interface.

Yes, I do not like the ribbon, but that really wasn't the problem. The real problem was that the changes Microsoft made to the Office Suite accomplished nothing and yet came at a high cost.

The new Office UI is very different but is not better. That is a complaint only old farts make (because they know the old ways), so Microsoft can just move ahead ignoring it. I wrestled with it for awhile, and then I figured, if I have to learn something new, why not learn Mac Keynote? I tried it, and found it was a modest improvement over PowerPoint, but that it didn't aggravate me so much because I no longer expected it to behave the same as the old version as I did with PowerPoint.

Pip Coburn, in The Change Function, says that users will change when the benefit of changing is greater than the perceived pain of making the change. That's the operative element here. There was no benefit and lots of pain. Microsoft didn't improve PowerPoint, they just moved the deck chairs around. That's pathetic and not the behavior of a market leader. FAIL.

Just for the record, I reject the argument that it is a zero-sum game between experienced and new users. That trade-off does exist, but only when physical manipulation is involved, such as twitch games, aircraft controls, and the like. Good UI is, in general, good for both experts and beginners alike.

I do not believe Microsoft's assertions that the ribbon is easy to learn. If you feed someone rotten fishheads for a while, then switch them over to a diet of fresh fishheads, they will be happier. You can then tout the statistical "fact" that "users prefer fresh fishheads," even though the truth is that they HATE fishheads. That, I believe, is how Microsoft gets its rationale for UI changes.

9 Comments

John
new users tend not to notice the ribbon as an issue. novice users love it. In the end, how you respond to the UI says more about you than it. And just wait until you get to fuss with the Mac mouse, the hardest pressing ive ever had to do. FYI zero-sum GAIN -- not as in playing around, but in winning ... or so they say.
Anup
I do happen to like the Ribbon but the real reason I wanted to switch to Office 2007 was that Excel finally had anti-aliased charts, so some reasonably nice looking graphs (not that I needed them at a professional level) were possible quite cheaply. PowerPoint and other graphics were also improved. To me (and this is just my own opinion) Ribbon was worth getting used to for that benefit. That all being said, there was a ribbon plugin where you could type the command you could no longer find and it would help you find where it is and access it quickly... Maybe not a good sign for Ribbon, but I liked it! (Didn't use it by the time our workplace upgraded to Office 2010, mind you.)
Andrei
I completely agreed and I also wondering about your opinion about UI design and choices of leading Data Visualization Vendors (Qlikview, Tableau, Spotfire) compare with Excel 2010, which Microsoft is trying to promote as Data Visualization front-end for its BI stack (like SQL Server, Analysis Services (SSAS), PowerPivot, VertiPaq and SharePoint). Andrei, http://apandre.wordpress.com/
Ambrose Little
I gotta disagree, mainly on personal anecdotal grounds--I've found things much easier to discover, even unexpected things I didn't know about. (I was never a real Office "power user.") But I also think there's a fair bit of good rationale behind the design choices that align with well-established design principles. And they do offer data to back it up. Anyways, you could be right--it could be just "better" and not good enough, or as good as it could be. I tend to prefer a bit more of contextualization of commands and guidance; not sure how well that would scale for Office, though. I personally found Keynote much more frustrating to figure out (especially the animations bit); although I think it does produce higher quality results with similar effort. Just rambling.. :)
Jeff Harrison
I recently upgraded to 2007. I suspect that if you're not too picky about how your slides look and you tend to just pick pre-defined styles, you might like the visual display of those options in the ribbon. If, on the other hand, you know how you want your slides to look and you're looking for the specific command to get you there, you're more likely to hate the thing.
Uni
I completely agree with the thought that the ribbon bar just doesn't bring enough good to outweigh the cost of change for me. On top of that, I've found that the reason why I actually don't like the ribbon bar is actually rather simple: it is inconsistent. Whereas with menus every item is consistently the same size, the ribbon bar offers rather inconsistent item sizes. This is important, because with consistent sizes, power users to already know where to move their mouse (within a few pixels, even) after clicking a menu before having to consume the upcoming information. The effectively increased menu size is also unwelcoming to me: I have to move my mouse that much farther to select something on the ribbon versus in a menu.
Geof Harries
The ribbon in Office for Mac 2011 is worse yet. Whereas the Windows version is relatively consistent and subtle (well, all things considered) the Mac edition is loud and obnoxious, rows full of colourful and bubbly icons. I, for one, like the Ribbon. It fits my workflow and my software UI ideals much better than a gigantic series of drop-down menus, like with Office 2003. I'm happy the concept is finding its way deep into Windows 8's Explorer. Weird, I know.
Troy Scott
More deck chair shuffling and even more obtuse Help topics. I can tolerate new UI conventions so long as there's some assistance to find where a feature has been repositioned. I find Microsoft's Help implementation miserable because it lacks synonym recognition. Further pain... embedded objects like graphs do not migrate cleanly to the new databases. Work arounds are to Save As to Win95 format. When 80% or more of a user base has high familiarity with legacy software I'd say that it's foolish to abandon that expertise for the sake of a different implementation. Mature products like word processors, presentation generators, and spreadsheets should be on an incremental improvement track.
Vadim Grigoryan
"You can then tout the statistical "fact" that "users prefer fresh fishheads," even though the truth is that they HATE fishheads. That, I believe, is how Microsoft gets its rationale for UI changes." Well, Microsoft is not alone in this - GNOME 3, Final Cut X, etc. etc. - arrogance is infectious.

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