Funny story, before they did the 2007 redesigns, they asked users what they wanted to be added; 95% said features that were already in Office.

The Ribbon was designed to make features more findable.

Alas.

I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.

Weirdly as someone who has used both styles heavily, I'd say the ribbon is more practical than the old toolbars. There's more contextual grouping and more functional given the tabs and search, plus the modern flat design is less distracting, which is what I'd want from a productivity application. Also for me two rows of toolbars & a menu is about the same height as the ribbon anyway, and you can collapse the ribbon if you want to use the space

Why did this happen?

The cynical but probably truer than we'd like to admit answer is "middle managers who bring nothing to the table but need to 'make big changes' to justify that promotion they've been chasing."

Source: Pretty much all corporations at this point have these people, my sister's ex-husband is one at Google.

I prefer the ribbon. It makes everything easier to discover and use.

It's also entirely configurable so i was able to tailor it specifically to my needs, even include button for my macro, logically grouped and not thrown together with no heads or tail in a "macro" submenu.

It also allows widgets with much richer informational content than menus.

The ribbon is also entirely keyboard navigable with visual hints. Which means you can use anything mouse free without having to remember rarely used shortcuts.

And if the ribbon takes too much space, and you can't afford a better screen, you can hide and show it with ctrl-F1 or a click somewhere (probably).

It's actually a much much better UX than menus and submenus and everything hidden and zero adaptability. At least for tools like the office apps with a bazillion functions.

Most copies of the ribbon are utter shit though because the people who copied didn't understand the strength of the office ribbon and only copied the looks superficially.

It's funny to see people still hung up on the ribbon 17 years later.

It's because of people like you that we still use qwerty on row staggered keyboards from the mechanical typewriter era. ;)

Honestly I like ribbons quite a lot as a design framework and hell, even padding can improve the UX, it's just a shame that neither of these elements have been used well in a decade.

It's not UI backsliding. It's Microsoft being incompetent. I have no idea how they're still in business, and astounded at their valuation. It seems like everything they manage to push out is just barely functioning

I'll just straight up say that the problem is with Microsoft more than anything else. Their UI design is abysmal. Nothing is consistent, nothing is smoothly animated, nothing is easily identifiable by its icon, nothing is glassy and good looking like Win7/macOS. Even in their peak design of Windows 7, they still had those awful legacy UI elements in system settings and the registry settings.

Even with multitouch trackpads being a thing on Windows now, there's STILL not linear trackpad gestures as of 6 months ago when I played with the display units in the store.

Padding is a very versatile thing in UI design, and none of it will make anything look terrible.

Even in your first example, the toolbar has slight padding on the edges and so do the buttons.

The reason there's more padding now is because it makes it easier for new users to process everything.

Btw, just so you know, Libre Office has multiple UIs, incliuding a Ribbon-like variant. View > User Interface.

But they let you choose.

What makes it even worse is that screens got wider and shorter, but the new designs use more vertical space than before, leaving even less height to do anything in.

Eh, I don't hate the ribbon UI. It certainly looks a lot nicer than the old ones.

I think the biggest crime is that we went towards widescreens and kept all the menus and toolbars along the top.

Another issue is complexity. In a rush to sell yearly updates, more and more features are crammed in. Most of us only use a tiny fraction of them, but there they are on the screen just in case. For everyone.

You're never going to make one UI that makes everyone happy. Most people just learn where the 20 buttons or so that they use are, and blank the rest from their mind. That's the real reason the ribbon UI got hate. Their buttons moved.

UI designer here - people are simply getting dumber, tech-wise at least.

That being said, there have been a lot of improvements in UI and UX world in the past 20 years the problem is that many users are so technically inept the drag down the entire curve all the way down.

Contrast is Satan to designers, because being able to distinguish the zones of a UI messes with their perfect colour blocking.

I like the ribbon personally

I assume the extra padding was a function of touch screens becoming more prevalent since trying to hit the 2003 style buttons with a finger was not that easy, although I don't remember offhand when touch first started becoming a thing in Windows so it might have happened the other way around. But either way it's likely still a factor in why the ribbon with its extra padding has stuck around.

The Ribbon is much better, and has been a part of the Office suite for over a decade, easily.

Poor examples aside, designers and engineers are rarely given a seat at the table in big tech companies. Most tech CEO's were either tech managers or sales people at some point, and are so far removed from IC work or valuing specific crafts for their user value that someone on the UX side probably doesn't get a say in how this shit is built.

Some UX designers either work to very specific business constraints, or work on stuff that has zero benefit to the end-user. Some engineers work on stuff that solely provides metrics for shareholders and leadership.

I'm tempted to set up a blog just to post about this subject, because it's everywhere, but big tech is now so top-heavy that for years many huge decisions have been made on a whim by execs. Tech has grown so large and powerful that tech execs (and those clinging to their coat-tails) put themselves outside of the echelons of what an IC can reach, and far above the user. Years of MBA double-speak and worshipping the altar of guys like Gates, Bezos, and Jobs means that it's "good" to be opinionated and ignore fact over your own judgement. This results in senior management deciding "let's put AI here" or "the colour scheme should be mostly white", despite reluctantly paying hundreds of people many thousands of dollars a year to KNOW about this stuff.

That, in essence, is why everything feels shitter nowadays. It's because some fifty-something MBA cunt believes that you need AI, or a good UI needs more buttons - stuff we've known for decades is fucking stupid. That's irrelevant though, because by being "General Manager of UI at MegaCorp" and having an assistant to arrange their Outlook calendar, they know more than you, pleb.

meh i like the ribbon much better.

the tools are better organized and findable.

Because everyone is switching from a custom ui to a css standard so they can have a web app that is also a desktop app.

To sum up, your app became a web page.

And you can't have legible icons, as they must be as small and cryptic as possible. They should also all look alike at first glance if possible.

The ribbon was introduced in Office 2007. The backsliding started a long time ago.

Touch screen devices.

View-> Then the little v arrow in the right. Switch to tabs only, the Ribbon UI will now only appear when you click one of the titles like home or View.

no, I'm willing to die on the hill that the ribbon UI is one of the greatest UIs period - especially how it was done in office 07 and 10. As a computer noob at the time, it was a huge improvement over the previous office 2003 UI.

The icons always gave you a good idea what something was doing, important functions were bigger and when you for example selected a table the table tab was visible and with a different color so you knew that you could do things with that table.

I think however many 3rd party programms did the ribbon UI poorly or had not enough features for it to make sense.

The Ribbon isn't the worst thing. It tried to solve the clutter of the previous interface, although I always preferred the old one.

Here is an interesting take on the problem of modern interfaces: https://datagubbe.se/decusab/

I have no problems with it, so I guess I'm some sort of savant? There is such thing as good and bad UI, but I think this is a case of 'what you're used to' causing problems with 'what is.'

I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get "the new ribbon UI!"

The answer was never, incidentally.

I would like to see them add something like the VSCode command pallette. That way if I know the name of the tool but can't remember or don't want to go click for it, I just just type the name and fuzzy find it.