Re: [IxDA Discuss] FW: Office or Vista - That is the Question
I agree with you Katie, with one exception: if the company is a small software vendor with a strategic partnership with Microsoft, then doing the whole Office 2007 Ribbon thing may get your program shown off by a very large distributed Microsoft sales team. If I was deciding based upon usability and user acceptance, traditional Windows-style wins, but there may be business reasons for a small vendor to go the other way. Large well-known software houses, specialist leaders in their verticals, web shops, or in-house work can probably safely ignore the '07 Ribbon forever - it's only the little software startups on the edge who may want to take the dare and hope that the Microsoft sales force benefit outweighs the '07 Ribbon annoyance. Michael Micheletti On Dec 11, 2007 3:16 PM, Katie Albers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At the moment Vista has a very low adoption rate and a very high Oh, my God -- let's go back to Windows! rate...So, I think that at this point it makes a lot of sense to stick with the Windows standards...generally speaking. *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] FW: Office or Vista - That is the Question
My team just finished a project were we implemented the Ribbon bar using the DotNetBar Suite: http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar/. We are currently conducting training sessions and I haven't seen any major problems besides the file menu. No one wants to click on it. Hmmm... maybe because all your other features are clearly pointed out on the ribbon, so why hide others under a big round button? The contextual ribbons which only appear when certain items are selected are great. I have noticed if you include more than 2 sub-tabs within a contextual ribbon it causes some confusion as to which features appear on which tab. I will warn you that it took a LONG time to organize everything correctly. Some users would get very annoyed from having to click back and forth between the tabs. Try to keep items that they use frequently on the main tab to avoid this. *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
[IxDA Discuss] FW: Office or Vista - That is the Question
Thanks, Jennifer, and hello, all; I've just joined your list. I'm wondering if the ribbon is a solution for a large (overly complex) set of features where the speed of user performance is not a primary design driver? Also, I don't yet have Vista installed on my computer, so I confess I'm not really sure what my Dev team (which is 16 hours ahead in Australia; I'm in Canada) means when they say Vista menus -- is this just a menu bar? My original question: One of my design teams is asking me: Should we follow the Office standard of the ribbon, the Vista standard of the drop-down menu (menu bar), or a hybrid of the two? Wow, just what I always wanted: a vague question about standards that has no right answer and huge consequences. -=- Jerome -Original Message- From: Jenni Merrifield Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 9:30 AM Cc: Jerome Ryckborst Subject: Office or Vista - That is the Question Yesterday, the following message came in on a local, but low bandwidth, UE list I'm on: One of my design teams is asking me: Should we follow the Office standard of the ribbon, the Vista standard of the drop-down menu (menu bar), or a hybrid of the two? Wow, just what I always wanted: a vague question about standards that has no right answer and huge consequences. I thought the question might get more traction here, seeing as the IxDA list has a much larger membership. I've CC'd Jerome, the original poster, who you might want to include on any replies as I don't know if he's on this list. :-j(enni) *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] FW: Office or Vista - That is the Question
Hi Jenni, It is certainly an interesting question. I am using Office 2007, but not Vista, which is just the way I like it. The move from [long, textual, multi-level menus with auto-hiding and cryptic icon-only toolbars] to a [tabbed arrangement of combinations of icons with text, and one level deep sub-sections, optimized around common actions] seems like a clear step toward making complex applications more usable to novice or irregular users. The toolbars were an advanced user feature, which supported very rapid activation - IF you could remember what the icon meant, and you could click the small button, and the function you wanted was there to begin with. I've often spend long periods of time (in old menu-style apps) trying to find features in menus that I knew must be there, but with several levels of embedding, and no graphical cues they can be very hard to find and remember the location of. So, in some cases the new ribbon will be slower (particular for transitioning users struggling to find the location of features they are used to using). However I think it represents a better balance between novice and advanced functions. I'm not exactly sure which vista menus you're referring to, but textual menus will always suffer from the usual problems of not explaining their content well, little graphical guidance, and the potential of multiple levels increasing cognitive load for the user (which is why the Start menu is so poorly designed). Also, I think any Fitt's law gains that would have been gained by not using the ribbon will be lost due to the slow response times of Vista. =) -Jeff On Dec 11, 2007 10:50 AM, Jerome Ryckborst [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks, Jennifer, and hello, all; I've just joined your list. I'm wondering if the ribbon is a solution for a large (overly complex) set of features where the speed of user performance is not a primary design driver? Also, I don't yet have Vista installed on my computer, so I confess I'm not really sure what my Dev team (which is 16 hours ahead in Australia; I'm in Canada) means when they say Vista menus -- is this just a menu bar? My original question: One of my design teams is asking me: Should we follow the Office standard of the ribbon, the Vista standard of the drop-down menu (menu bar), or a hybrid of the two? Wow, just what I always wanted: a vague question about standards that has no right answer and huge consequences. -=- Jerome -Original Message- From: Jenni Merrifield Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 9:30 AM Cc: Jerome Ryckborst Subject: Office or Vista - That is the Question Yesterday, the following message came in on a local, but low bandwidth, UE list I'm on: One of my design teams is asking me: Should we follow the Office standard of the ribbon, the Vista standard of the drop-down menu (menu bar), or a hybrid of the two? Wow, just what I always wanted: a vague question about standards that has no right answer and huge consequences. I thought the question might get more traction here, seeing as the IxDA list has a much larger membership. I've CC'd Jerome, the original poster, who you might want to include on any replies as I don't know if he's on this list. :-j(enni) *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- Thanks, Jeff Jeff Axup, Ph.D. Principal Consultant, Mobile Community Design Consulting, San Diego Research:Mobile Group Research Methods, Social Networks, Group Usability E-mail:axup at userdesign.com Blog: http://mobilecommunitydesign.com Moblog: http://memeaddict.blogspot.com Designers mine the raw bits of tomorrow. They shape them for the present day. - Bruce Sterling *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] FW: Office or Vista - That is the Question
At the moment Vista has a very low adoption rate and a very high Oh, my God -- let's go back to Windows! rate...So, I think that at this point it makes a lot of sense to stick with the Windows standards...generally speaking. However, if you're building an internal app for a group that will be required to use Vista then, I'd use the Vista standardsand... If there's anything in the Vista standard that you think is done better than it's done in the Windows standards, you might want to take this chance to incorporate it. ...or you can design for another operating system all together: *nix, OSX, CP/M ;-) kt At 10:50 AM -0800 12/11/07, Jerome Ryckborst wrote: Thanks, Jennifer, and hello, all; I've just joined your list. I'm wondering if the ribbon is a solution for a large (overly complex) set of features where the speed of user performance is not a primary design driver? Also, I don't yet have Vista installed on my computer, so I confess I'm not really sure what my Dev team (which is 16 hours ahead in Australia; I'm in Canada) means when they say Vista menus -- is this just a menu bar? My original question: One of my design teams is asking me: Should we follow the Office standard of the ribbon, the Vista standard of the drop-down menu (menu bar), or a hybrid of the two? Wow, just what I always wanted: a vague question about standards that has no right answer and huge consequences. -=- Jerome -Original Message- From: Jenni Merrifield Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 9:30 AM Cc: Jerome Ryckborst Subject: Office or Vista - That is the Question Yesterday, the following message came in on a local, but low bandwidth, UE list I'm on: One of my design teams is asking me: Should we follow the Office standard of the ribbon, the Vista standard of the drop-down menu (menu bar), or a hybrid of the two? Wow, just what I always wanted: a vague question about standards that has no right answer and huge consequences. I thought the question might get more traction here, seeing as the IxDA list has a much larger membership. I've CC'd Jerome, the original poster, who you might want to include on any replies as I don't know if he's on this list. :-j(enni) *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- Katie Albers [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] FW: Office or Vista - That is the Question
Might be better to classify Office's old icon toolbars as intermediate aids, since experts I have observed (admin assistants, typists, etc) have most of the common toolbar action keystrokes memorized, and only use the toolbar and text menu for items that don't have an shortcut key, or whose key isn't obvious. At any rate, your statement is still true, but perhaps the above (if you provide shortcut keys) will mitigate the loss from switching to ribbons. I just got Office 2007 myself, and appreciate the improved information architecture, although I think displaying 15 different cell-box styles right there in the ribbon makes Excel 2007 seem more feature-rich than it really is (I rarely use pre-built styles, but have begun using theirs more, which I guess is a win for Microsoft =]). Bryan http://www.bryanminihan.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeff Axup Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 6:10 PM To: Jerome Ryckborst Cc: discuss@lists.interactiondesigners.com Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] FW: Office or Vista - That is the Question The toolbars were an advanced user feature, which supported very rapid activation - IF you could remember what the icon meant, and you could click the small button, and the function you wanted was there to begin with. I've often spend long periods of time (in old menu-style apps) trying to find features in menus that I knew must be there, but with several levels of embedding, and no graphical cues they can be very hard to find and remember the location of. *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
