I just couldn’t believe that in Windows 8, the Windows Explorer may get a Ribbon Toolbar. I personally think that a ribbon toolbar is the worst ever UI concept invented to present content related functionality.
Why I think a ribbon toolbar is bad:
- It wastes space. After all, it's all about content.
- It is not physically close to the content you want to work with. Moving the mouse is a time waster.
- It is placed first alongside the “reading direction” (left / right / top / down) and so it costs cognitive resources all the time. Whether you want it or not, you need to scan over the ribbon to find the actual content. And there is a lot of information on a ribbon (ghosted items or not).
- Different ribbons at the same place make it hard to remember the individual item's locations. So before targeting the mouse you need to reprocess the kind of the ribbon that is active right now, then remember or find the location of the item, then target the mouse. It's even simpler to remember an item position inside a drop-down list in a menu, because to get there, you have to consciously select its context.
I don't know why ribbons are in existence at all. Is it that some developers find them cool, merely because it was a challenge to program them? Or because developers don't want to think about how to present the application's functionality and just like to present them all.
A ribbon may fix one usability problem (the initial discover-ability of functionality), but it does that by making every other task much harder.
So what other options exist?
- Context-menus. It may be hard to discover for a new computer user, but once you get used to it, pressing the right mouse button over some content item should present all the functionality that is related to it. The problem here is that despite there are context menus in Mac OS X, some users don’t have a right mouse button. And moreover websites don’t support a context menu, because the browser took it away. Which was a very egoistic move.
- Context aware overlays. They could be either presented around the content as soon the mouse hovers over a content item for a while, or immediately in the whitespace surrounding the content (like in Twitter’s new web UI). The functions are invoked by pressing the left mouse button. If there are a lot of functions to present, a long-click (holding the left mouse button for some time) or a simple “more…” button could be used to show a drop-down menu for the expert user.
While these are not so many alternatives, they have proven to work fine for a lot of applications. I am not quite sure if they fit for applications that have a lot of content related functionality like Microsoft Word for example. But may be you can come up with more alternatives to a ribbon toolbar. If so, you are welcome to comment!
Update:
I am glad to hear that the ribbon can be turned off, but I really doubt that tablets are a proper justification for introducing them.
I hope that Microsoft considers an auto-hide feature for the ribbon. I think this would be a good compromise for tablet and desktop use. But it would scroll the content, so actually, if the ribbon auto-hides, it needs to be placed to the right or to the bottom, so that the content does not need to be moved.