Ribbon reaching beyond Office
September 16th, 2008 | 7 Comments »The ribbon component is quickly becoming the new standard for Microsoft applications. A significant break away from the traditional menu-toolbar approach that has reached its scalability limit faced with ever-increasing amount of features in the Office suite, it is poised to become the main UI concept in the upcoming Microsoft products.
Speaking at Office System Developer Conference in February 2008, Bill Gates said:
We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent [Ribbon] UI quite a bit across a number of applications. [...] It turns out it’s a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality.
In his interview, Richard Wolf, general manager of the Microsoft Office Graphics Division detailed the plans for using Ribbon in Visio:
Well, we’ll be announcing that the next version of Visio will feature the new Office “fluent” user interface, or ribbon, which I know has been something many users have been asking us about, so again it’s a question of delivering on what our customers tell us is important to them. The ribbon is key because it allows us to expose more of the functionality of the product. [...] The other key benefit that customers will get from the ribbon is a similar way of working to their other Office tools that will make it easier for new users to get up to speed with Visio.
And the recent news confirm the words of Bill Gates. Stephen Chapman has played with an interim build of Windows 7 (next version of Windows OS), and he reports that both Paint and WordPad are now using Ribbon as the primary UI:
MS Paint: In terms of functionality, imagine a software somewhere between the currently-existing MS Paint and the wonderful Paint.NET freeware application. Make everything accessible through a ribbon bar (tabs ‘n all) ala Office 2007 and voila. [...] WordPad: Basically, imagine Microsoft taking Office 2007 Word, slimming it down, tweaking the ribbon bar UI a bit, and calling it WordPad. While not as functional as Office 2007 Word (hence, the “slimming it down” mention), this version of WordPad is coming along nicely.
And his next blog entry features a screenshot of Windows 7 Paint in action:
Windows 7 M3 Build 6780 MS Paint UI:
(Click the picture for the full-resolution image)
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Thanks for stopping by. My name is Kirill Grouchnikov and I am a user interface engineer. I have been doing client side development professionally over the last decade or so, in a variety of UI toolkits and libraries that spanned Motif, MFC, VB, Ada, Delphi, Swing and SWT. Recently I joined the
Look like Movie Maker will also have a ribbon :
http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2008/09/17/windows-live-movie-maker-beta.aspx
http://www.aeroxp.org/2008/09/windows-7-m3-hypothetical/
May be they will also use it on the explorer too …
Do you have an idea of the purpose of the blue button on the left of the ribbon ?
Well the beta is already available :
http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2008/09/16/windows-live-wave-3-betas-download-now.aspx
It’s a good thing to see that Microsoft is working on application continuity (see http://www.aerotaskforce.com/view/77)
Maybe it’s me, but I’m kinda missing the point on this ribbon thing.
Ok, I understand that the strictly hierarchical menu’s are getting rather full, so that is why they already introduced toolbars; to have “short cuts” to often used actions.
Now they are abandoning the menu’s as whole and trying to push everything into toolbars, which required them to “scale up” the toolbars to house all the actions.
It seems to me like we’re on the “all in toolbar” side of the menu-or-toolbar S-curve. There are some actions that fit nicely into a menu, like “info”. Naturally there are good reasons to put stuff into a toolbar; touch screens and all. But…
Well. We’ll see where this goes.
Christophe – the blue button has the functionality of the main application menu button (orb / diamond). See Long Zheng‘s blog and the screenshots there.
I am with Tom. I’ve been using the MS Word ribbon for some time and I still find it fairly annoying. I find it
a) Takes a lot of space (on a laptop 1280×800)
b) Minimizing it is worse – now it is very slow to get to buttons
c) It is two clicks to get to each function
d) I do not have the patience to configure the quick access toolbar for anything but 1 or 2 macros
So I suffer and I still prefer the previous version of word despite have using this for almost a year.
The things I like with the new word are the context sensitive formatting controls (which saves a trip to the toolbar) and some bug fixes with bullets
I detest how SOME things are found on the ‘start button’ like print preview.
And I detest at how many clicks I have to do for common actions like pulling up a documents properties (now advanced and buried so deep it makes me want to try alternatives).
Now that they’ve mentioned Paint.NET, I think it’s stupid how they don’t just bundle that with Windows 7 instead. At least, it’s nice to see *something* being changed on WordPad and Paint, as I think it’s ridiculous how they’re almost identical in Vista to their Win95 versions…
So Kirill, what is your opinion on this new look and feel? I’ve always thought UI design was about giving people fewer clicks to get to the desired function. Does making everything more graphical trump the additional clicking necessary?
A curious, regular reader.