1) Fluent UI is not Ribbon UI; I'm not sure why Fluent is mentioned in the article headline, other than an implication there might be unspoken patents in the Fluent Design System, and that's an indirect spook from the topic at hand.

2) Corel's violations of the Office Ribbon UI licensing terms clearly happened during the time in which the Office Ribbon UI licensing was enforced (that is, prior to the most general release/retiring from those terms in 2016).

3) The article author seems to have a hard time finding resources regarding the historic Office Ribbon licensing terms, but even just using Jensen's blog heavily linked in the article you can find a relatively detailed FAQ: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/11/21/licensin...

4) The key violation of Corel for the licensing terms should be very obvious from Jensen's FAQ:

> There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff461922(v=offic...

CAD packages are a good example, really. They tend to have tons of features, which are fairly easy to find with a ribbon, but also have lots of configurability (hideable toolbars) and speed features (radial menus) for power users. But the balance is hard to strike - if anything they tend to have too many ways of doing things, and not good enough defaults.

The current incarnation of Microsoft Office products' UI is a mess too. Buttons and search bars all over the chrome of the windows (what used to be the title bar), most of the old Alt+letter codes still working, and ribbon 'tabs' that bring up full-page menus (the File menu). My answer to your probably-rhetorical question is yes, you should use a ribbon design in a windowed app, to provide a baseline level of making the features easy-to-find. The difficult part is adding more powerful power-user features or most-used features without turning the interface into a big mess.

The Ribbon UI was a huge improvement to Excel and Word. I'm kind of mixed on how it has been used in other places.

I would add to this 'and your user base already has a well-established set of paradigms in mind when using your product.' Part of the reason that the Ribbon works for MS products is that they had to make their UI backwards compatible with decades of user intuition, which required carrying forward a lot of baggage. The Ribbon is necessary because they not only have to include a huge array of functionality, they also have to include dozens of ways to accomplish the same task presented so that they feel familiar to an enormous and diverse user base. If you could design Word/Excel from the ground up to optimize for efficiency and usability, but with zero prior user expectations, the UI would probably be radically different.

Word and Excel have so many options, I am not sure if there is an intuitive way to design the UI.

At some point, software of a certain complexity is going to have a learning curve. Making it so that things are placed naturally along that curve is probably the best that can be done.

Excel also needs to be optimized for power users, and those power user optimizations align with much different UX goals than making something easy to use and discover. There is this weird cliff in the middle of Excel use, where doing basic things is pretty simple thanks to the ribbon, doing slightly harder things is frustrating, and then doing all this super cool advanced stuff really fast is actually pretty damn easy if you watch a couple hours of youtube tutorial videos, but there is no chance of figuring it out on your own!

Bad GUI design will eventually literally be against the law.

> implies Ribbon is "good UI"

o_O

I'm not saying traditional menus are the end-all-be-all of GUIs, but from there to assuming the ribbon is "good" there is quite a jump. I personally find it very difficult to locate anything on Ribbon bars.

Edit: hey, HN banning emojis?

What they actually meant: Ribbons are bad UI, so if Microsoft hold a patent covering them and enforce it aggressively then (one variety of) bad UI will be unavailable or at least expensive.

(Incidentally, I did not downvote your comment; I am guessing at the reasons others likely had.)

Where was that implied?

I use this software predominantly because of it’s superior user experience design, which involves a GUI that some would say is dated but most still agree it is great. I love everything about the GUI except the ribbon. Updating the GUI with Qt has not helped the ribbon’s case one bit.

It seems a typical side effect of ribbon application is extraneous options at ribbon’s reach which could very well be be tucked away in a preferences pane, and controls that could be more readily exposed tucked away in the ribbon. And, all of them are therefor now hard to find if not in daily use.

3ds Max users learned it serves one part of what we do decently, which is low level poly modeling where you keep switching between tools which have no great categorization and you know each of these tools like the back of your hand. Even then, most have abandoned the ribbon. And Explorer has nothing even slightly similar. The inconsistent widget display, interactivity, and functionality is a real issue.

Though not an headline, Batteridge Law applies nonetheless:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

even in the more blunt form:

WHY would anyone (outside Microsoft) actually want to use the ribbon interface?

(TL;DR: Yes, using one of this set of frameworks)

Why not? What prior art are you thinking of, specifically?

- HotDog

- Macromedia HomeSite

- Dreamweaver

- Borland Delphi

all used ribbon UIs before Microsoft patented it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Homesite-2.5.png

Then again, I'm getting old so maybe people didn't use a lot of these apps.

That's incorrect. TFA has links to information about why that's incorrect.

In brief, however, the Ribbon is context-sensitive. Whether that deserves a patent, and whether any software should be patentable, IANAL.

So, context sensitivity is not in it's self novel.

EX: Only showing spells after the character learns them, or disabling Magic menu for non magic characters.

Now if they want a narrow patent that covers say hair dryers but not floor heaters that's not as hard to defend. But narrow patents are also less useful.

JRPG's had both context sensitivity and nested tabable menus.

If they have some very narrow definition that's allowed, but a wide scope invites a wider range of prior art.

----------------

1. A method for providing functionality from a software application by displaying an improved user interface at a display device, the method comprising:

organizing a plurality of software functionalities according to tasks to be performed by the software application, the tasks being identified textually by user interface tabs;

upon receiving an indication of a selection of a first user interface tab, providing a plurality of selectable controls associated with a first task, each selectable control being presented by a graphic representation and a textual representation;

grouping the plurality of selectable controls into logical groupings of the plurality of selectable controls, wherein each of the logical groupings combine a subset of functionalities associated with the selected first user interface tab;

dynamically adjusting a layout of at least one of the logical groupings to accommodate the user interface, wherein dynamically adjusting the layout of the at least one logical grouping comprises reducing a size of the graphical representation of at least one selectable control within the logical grouping eliminating the textual representation of at least one selectable control associated with the at least one logical grouping, and preserving the graphical representation associated with the at least one selectable control associated with the at least one logical grouping;

upon receiving an indication of a selection of a second user interface tab, providing in the user interface a plurality of additional selectable controls for selecting functionalities organized under a second task associated with the second user interface tab;

after providing in the user interface the plurality of additional selectable controls for selecting functionalities organized under the second task, receiving an indication of a selection of one of the additional selectable controls organized under the second task;

applying functionality associated with the selected additional selectable control to a selected object; and

when the second user interface tab is not selected in the user interface, providing in the user interface the plurality of selectable controls organized under the first task associated with the selected first user interface tab.

----------------

Does this exactly exist in the prior art? You can be sure that Corel looked. That is a, frankly, very narrow claim. It protects a rather well defined implementation, not a general idea of tab-based navigation. This is probably why they were only awarded ~$270k in damages. In patent litigation terms, that's a pittance. It doesn't even come close to paying for their attorneys to work on the case, i.e., MS lost money here. So the courts are definitely recognizing the very narrow nature of what is protected by their patents.

Source: https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/US_8255828_B2

Edit: also keep in mind that wilfulness was found, which means treble damages. I'm a little unclear if the reported $278k number is factoring that in or not, but if it is, that means the actual damages found were 1/3 of that. Which is well into mere nuisance territory for just about any corporation. Heck, that's into efficient infringement territory for Corel, if they think that redesigning would cost more than that (aside from the wilfulness aspect). I guess what I'm getting at here is that this is not something to be up in arms about.

Also, check out what Corel actually did here.[1] That's a pretty obvious clone of MS Word if I ever saw it. Say what you will about patents, but this is egregious copying and I don't think it's wrong of MS to defend themselves here.

1: https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/review-...

If you think this shouldn't be allowed then MS office should have never existed either. Excel is an egregious theft of VisiCalc. Microsoft Word is blasphemous copying of MacWrite. Windows's main UI concepts were entirely stolen from other OSes.

They are playing the hard game with patents, but IMHO not troll style.

https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/US_8255828_B2

https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/US_7703036_B2

Source: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/02/13/93710/id=93710/