It used to be trivial to backup Office Customizations and reload them. I tweak the hell out of Visio for my own purposes, and it has gotten more arcane and not less over the years.
Sure, if I’m reimaging an entire machine, I can grab all those customizations with User State transfer, but that’s at work.
I jump laptops every month or so and I have all my data compartmentalized so it will be there. All my apps are readily available. But my damn office customizations have to be re-setup.
Bah! I say.
But, I have grown to like the ribbon for all it’s faults.
What I don’t like about the ribbon is that it’s broken up into boxes, with what are essentially lists but in a matrix format rather than a list. In a menu, my eyes just have to go down to the thing I want (which might be a submenu) and click it. On the ribbon, I end up having to move my eyes back and forth and up and down within the boxes, trying to find what I want. Then I think, is this the right ribbon? So I scroll to get the next ribbon, and repeat the eye movements. I just found it a lot harder to find stuff that I haven’t quite memorized yet.
With the traditional menu, I could find things a lot quicker, with less eye movement. And frustration.
My problem with Ribbons is that people use them to replace dialogue boxes.
And, it turns out, all of the options that used to be in that dialogue box don’t fit on the Ribbon, so they either have to include a link to open the dialogue box anyway (which is now harder to find), or some options just plain disappear.
Having a Ribbon makes finding the things they want you to be able to find easily very convenient. Finding everything else, on the other hand…
This is one of my big problems with modern redesigns - they often don’t visually scan very well, even though it seems part of the point is to make it more visual. If you know exactly where something is on a ribbon already, it’s faster, probably. If you don’t know, it’s a nightmare to hunt for the feature you want.
Hunting through traditional menus is not most peoples’ idea of fun either, of course, but I can quickly scan and parse vertically-arranged lines of text in a menu much faster than the horizontal combinations of icons and text and drop-downs and everything in a ribbon. The hard part is figuring out which top-level menu the obscure thing you’re looking for might be in.
(One must consider that we are all trained from years of use to parse traditional menus, so it’s truly hard to say what’s actually superior - I’m sure Microsoft has done extensive research, but that is certainly a tricky research problem if most people are so entrenched in the old ways.)
Apple’s word processor, Pages, is an interesting case. They went for their own design that is kind of a hybrid of the traditional drop-down menu and the ribbon - the main formatting tools and so on are in a collapsible sidebar where everything is expanded. No drop-downs, everything’s just right there. It’s similar to the interface of Lightroom (for photo editing). It actually makes a lot of sense, but in practice in Pages it feels half-baked. There are a ton of little quirks in how it works that can add up to infuriation pretty quickly if you want to do something slightly complicated (not so different from Word, I suppose). (I use it because it makes really rather nice looking PDFs with a minimum of effort, and I don’t need/want MS Office right now.)
Endless scrolling with lots of images, so if you try to read one entry the page keeps moving, and you have the scroll back and forth to find where you were.
Endless scrolling, with lots of user styles or user css applied after loading.
It would relieve the desire to take a bus ride up to Redmond in a hoodie and jeans and a concealed clawhammer. At least there’s virtual desktops now, but just like KDE you can’t just expect something to come up in the environment (deskie) you started it in. That would make too much sense. 25+ fucking years of getting beat over the head by the fact that commercial enterprise can’t really do computers gud.
Why does this sadistic site even exist? and teach people to hurt people? instead of teaching people not to hurt people, or teaching people how to protect ourselves?
:hover animations are hostile user design in general with the bonus of actively hurting you and the rest of us on the spectrum. before css :hover animations it was done in flash or javascript or ::shudder:: GIFs.
Warning: samples of the animations we’re talking about.
Microanimations and microinteractions are currently being pushed as improving usability. Personally I’ve never used them, although usually I make it so a link brightens/changes colour when you mouse over it (never thought of that as an animation though).
The default link underlining (why, Tim Berners-Lee, whyyyyyy?) decreases readability and always was a bad idea from a usability perspective.
Maybe I’m just old school but I’m not a fan of these things. Just show me what I can do - don’t make me work to figure out how to interact with UI. I realize this makes for a less “pure” presentation I’ll choose usability any day.
This is part of the reason why things like 3D touch on iOS and long taps on touchscreen devices don’t get a lot of use - they are extremely hard to discover and aren’t implemented consistently.
I like the 3D touch on the iphone. As you say, consistency is a problem. There is no consistency, or at least not enough, even within official Apple apps and the iOS UI itself, so it’s impossible to know where and when you can use it and what it might do if so.
But with the 3D touch they made the vibrations feel like you’re almost actually clicking into the screen, which is a nice confirmation that it’s actually doing what you want, and it is easy to do confidently.
IMO, the 3D touch should completely replace any instance of a long-touch, which are and have always been obnoxious and hard to do (my finger always seems to move with a long-touch). Of course, both 3D touch and long touch are used in the same parts of the UI to do different things (like on the homescreen app icons), so it’s not that easy.
In theory, the 3D touch is good user experience. In practice we’re not quite there on the software side, but it’ll come.
That’s one thing I’ve found really interesting since switching to an iphone about a year ago - the UI is very polished and nothing is ever broken or glitchy (as is regularly the case on android), but a lot of the ways you’re supposed to interact with things feel like they’re still in the drawing-board phase, or at least are implemented inconsistently (like text-selection, which should really not behave differently in different apps, but it does).
That’s what the microinteractions are supposed to do – give the use more feedback so they can better tell what’s going on. There are examples in the article.
“I’ll just copy this to my e-reader, shut down my computer, and get some sleep.”
Five hours later.
“What the fuck do I have to do to convert this page to a readable epub for my e-reader???”
P.S. I could honestly use a solution here. No malformed epubs that won’t load. No malformed epubs that will only load pages 1 and 138. No selecting chapter 3 of 18, and dropping the rest. No malformed tables. No dropping tables. No text overlapping text. No silently not doing anything, like fucking Pocket.
P.P.S. Need to be able to save multiple pages as chapters, too. Trying to merge files is a headache.
An epub is basically zipped-up HTML file(s) with attendant CSS files. I’ve cracked open a couple of DRM-free ones (which I presume these are since you can convert them) and tooled around a bit. I did manage to do some things, but it was time-consuming.
Basically it comes down to garbage in, garbage out. I can convert one of my own LibreOffice files to a nice epub in about 15 minutes: use the macro to go from Libre to epub, run the epub through Calibre, converting from epub to mobi mostly as an excuse to clean up the output, then convert the mobi back to an epub because that’s what I really wanted in the first place.
It’s a bit awkward, of course, but it works. I think it helps that ODT files themselves are zips with XML and CSS inside.
If the files are created from commercial layout software, with the original intent to print them – good luck. People will commit all sorts of atrocities when they are only worrying about print.
