Most software companies ignore user behavior

Re:Most software companies ignore user behavior by nxc18 on Wednesday August 28, 2019 @06:40PM (#20824797)

There’s a lot of interesting history that I think this comment ignores. The office 2007 project was one of their more heavily feedback-driven initiatives; had they been paying attention the same way for Windows 8, it likely would have looked a lot more like Windows 10.

Really interesting talk: https://youtu.be/AHiNeUTgGkk

They had really good reasons for using the ribbon, not the least of which was that people weren’t finding the features they needed. That was all driven by telemetry back before it was considered the evilest of evils.

I’m amazed that you’re still bitter after 13 years. Afaict actual user preference is strongly for the ribbon, minus a very vocal minority that were bothered by the change. Office 2007 was in fact not the boon for OpenOffice that was predicted.

edit: tone, realized it came across as not as respectful as I intended

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Re:Most software companies ignore user behavior by dzdt on Thursday August 29, 2019 @07:15AM (#20828451)

After 13 years there are still things I have trouble finding on the ribbon that were easy with the menu. And the ribbon totally kills the menu item->keyboard shortcut learning path to efficiently activate things you use in your personal workflow. I am bitter about this one too!

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Re:Most software companies ignore user behavior by nxc18 on Thursday August 29, 2019 @01:17PM (#20831549)

Everything in the ribbon has a keyboard shortcut. Just type 'alt' to see the guides. You can also see traditional shortcuts in the tooltips.

The new 'Tell me what you want to do' search bar should help you find everything else obscure, but that unfortunately doesn't show keyboard shortcuts.

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Re:Most software companies ignore user behavior by Agenttin on Thursday August 29, 2019 @10:32AM (#20829814)

I think that's the difference with a lot of these things. If you are a primary keyboard user you tend to rage against a lot of these changes.

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Re:Most software companies ignore user behavior by dzdt on Friday August 30, 2019 @12:16PM (#20839984)

That may be a good guess: people who prefer words to pictures and keyboard to mouse would prefer menus to the ribbon. That pattern holds for me anyway. And I would believe that word/keyboard people are in the minority, so a UI study would identify the ribbon as superior.

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