The Browser Software Era designs are idiomatic. They're based on (CD-ROM era) multimedia and adventure games, not desktop apps.
The earliest, most influential web designers had been doing multimedia. The earliest creation tools were tailored for them.
That aesthetic has been carried forward, for better or worse.
(Actually, the more the merrier!)
Browsers, OTOH, used to dsplay content to be copied and pasted everywhere. Nowadays there are silos everywhere, and interoperatibiity sucks.
Personally, I think the Windows OS itself is one of the most problematic offenders. How can you expect better from third party developers, when MS uses at least 3 different UI paradigms for system settings? And F1 doesn't bring up help - it brings up a web browser!
And this is why I DO feel differently about Word, which does take up way too much space with a ribbon full of tools that really aren't of interest. In word, I'm usually writing something, and then spending a small percentage of the time changing formatting. Quite different from Excel, where it's more often than not working with large datasets pulled either from a csv online or directly from a SQL server and the various tools and functions are central to the task at hand.
I guess the point is, it really depends on use case as for whether the ribbon makes sense, and it should be left to the user to decide to use the old menu based system or the new ribbon based system based on how much time is spent composing vs. manipulating the existing data. Right tool for the job.
This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well designed, they can do their own thing. I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. It's great that you can immediately tell which app you're in just from a glance. And also it's more interesting when applications have their own character.
I would say idioms should maybe play a role at a company level, i.e. it makes sense that Google products will share design principles. But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
Exactly for the same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards. Same set of reasons I would even say.
> But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
This is because design choices are more important to you than users' comfort and productivity. Some argue that it should be the other way around, though.
and the same reasons are there why humanity has come up with the idea of breaking or ignoring bad standards
You can't resolve these type of issues in the abstract, some olden design paradigms are better than what we have now, but then there were plenty of awful decisions "standardized" as well
> I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom.
> But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
> You should not "innovate" just for the sake of innovation
But you can innovate to fix "bad UI practices standardized by ignorant people of the past"
They are almost never well designed. Devs, particularly those who get excited about “clever” UX don’t care about usability.
> I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom.
Because I don’t want to learn dozens of keyboard shortcuts to do the same thing just because a random dev thought it was clever to have their own thing. Because I don’t want to spend hours navigating “clever” menu layouts and figure out whether the settings I am after are behind a hamburger, in a sub-sub-submenu, in a contextual menu, or hidden behind arcane commands (hello, Chrome). I don’t want some stupid software forcing down on me metaphors from another stupid OS, either.
I do want text fields to support the same operations everywhere; I want menus to be used the same way as well, and these are the most egregious.
OS provided widgets offer baseline functionality the users expect to find. Re-implementing your own widgets is fucking stupid: you are spending a lot of time to re-invent the wheel, and in the end it does not even work.
It’s just like cryptography. Don’t roll your own. Your users will thank you.
Personally I blame the shift to mobile as much as the shift to web for this - that's what drove the much-hated Windows 8 interface (leveraging the desktop computer monopoly to try and give the Windows Phone offerings a familiarity advantage), all coinciding with Gnome jumping the shark and Ubuntu shifting to something new. Ironic that during the end of the 'naughties' Apple were the pioners of touchscreen UI on commodity devices, but seemed to be the only player who understood that the desktop was a completely separate space, and should remain so.
This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that.
Menus removing "unused" items must be one of the worst UI decisions of all time. Imagine how many user stories, thousands of tests and interviews resulted in that abomination.
Sometimes you just can't beat common sense. Problem is to know when you can and when you can not.
I believe that's Word 2002 in the article.
At the time, people complained about the menus popping out button-like borders on hover[1], which indeed no other menus did at the time, and about the un-buttony buttons on toolbars[2], which indeed directly contravened the Windows 95 HIG (unlike those in Word 95).
Not all moments of peak Office happened at the same time. Word 95 was the last to be mostly HIG-compliant. The macro functionality only matured with Word 97—but once you were trying to do moderately fancy things like use Microsoft Equation more than a couple of times, it crashed multiple times per hour (and of course ME’s typesetting was absolutely awful). That gradually improved until it became stable somewhere about 2003 (the weird blue UI) or 2007 (the OOXML/Ribbon release)—at the cost at no longer being usable in the rest of the system using OLE (IIRC).
What makes me genuinely conflicted is the contemporary rant against the Win95-style file dialogs[3]. I’m very used to them, to the point of finding it difficult to imagine anything else (I’ve encountered the vestiges of the old two-listboxes dialogs from Win95 on, but that’s all they were, vestiges). And yet I can agree with most of the criticisms! I just can’t see how to resolve them.
(Office never left those dialogs intact, though, not in any version, although they tried damn hard to make their custom versions look like business as usual.)
[1] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36