The Ribbon is still possibly the biggest piece of shit design ever. The stupidist, though, isn’t a single design feature, but a tendency: trying to turn desktop software into dumbed-down mobile OS software sucks. Outlook, for example, used to be the best single piece of email client software ever. Every release in the last 10 years takes away features and makes it dumber and dumberer.
This x 1000. Pisses me off, since (like many) I live in Outlook.
A line I quote all too frequently: “A user interface is like a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not very good.”
I was a technical writer for a number of years. I wrote user manuals. As time went on, more and more software applications had built-in manuals–that is, they were not published on paper; they were bundled with the software. No problem, though there was always some paper printed instructions that were necessary. Minimally, but still necessary.
One time, maybe in the late 90s or early 2000s, I was asked to do a project for a software company. Their software did not automatically install when the disc (Floppy? DVD? cannot remember) was inserted, but they wanted everything in the user manual to be a part of the software, so all the user needed to do was to click Help, and the manual would pop up. I protested–there had to be some instructions on paper–but they said Nope, we want to go paperless and include the manual with the software. No paper.
Well, okay, they were paying me to give them what they want. And what they got was a piece of software for which you could not read the installation and configuration instructions until after you had installed and configured the software.
I run Linux at home. I use LibreOffice for my word processing and spreadsheet needs.
I teach part-time at a community college. I do most of my prep and grading at home. I would do all of it at home, but I’m required to put in two “office hours” per week.
The computers at work run Windows, of course, and Microsoft Office, with all of the glorious bloated-ness therein. When I work on one of my files in ods/odt format, every time I save it, Office yells at me about it not being in their docx/xlsx format. Every. Goddamn. Time. And there’s no way to turn these stupid “warnings” off. Unless it can be done in the registry, but being a lowly user, I’m not granted access to regedit on the work machines. The reason my files are in od* format, Microsoft, is because this format is SUPERIOR to yours!!
F’in pisses me off.
And speaking of Microsoft Office …
That asinine “ribbon” is why I’m still running Office 2003, with a plugin to support the new document formats. I know that there are (or used to be) add-ons for Office 2007 and perhaps later versions as well to restore a rational proper UI, but I can’t be bothered.
The only way to account for the “ribbon” is some pointy-headed software geek at Microsoft wanted to earn brownie points for being “innovative”. Instead of brownie points what he deserved was a smack on the head. It was just change for the sake of change, and a worse experience. What makes it doubly stupid and annoying is that one of the important features of the windows paradign is a consistent UI across all applications. Microsoft, in their wisdom, thought it would be a terrific advance to expend a lot of development effort to deliberately make the UIs different in different apps because … I dunno. Because a confused user is a more profitable user? Hard to say what these dunderheads were thinking.
I’m sure it has to do with making money.
Please tell Outlook that I don’t want to automatically include a Teams meeting. My company requires us to be in the office, so knock it off!
Not to mention Word and styles. No one understands it, so even if there was a template at the beginning, the people working with the file will change it, and add more styles. Which is fine. As long as that file never has to be translated, or changed to another format. Styles in Word are like Inception - you never know how many levels there are.
Absolutely! It’s the same reason that cars of a certain era grew fins and other gaudy features, and then shed the fins and got new gaudy features. “New and different” sells. “Improved inside but looks the same” does not. Microsoft is very much a marketing organization. Which also explains why much of their software is so shitty.
Dear God, I hate that, and the stupid comic character pictures.
I worked somewhere that used an HR system for booking leave days and the like. It was web-based and its UI featured the following:
- A thin menu strip at the top of the page, which only held one menu item, rendered in a small font. This exploded out into many nested choices, several levels deep.
- Literally nothing else.
The body of the page, apart from that menu strip was completely blank. No footers, boilerplate, legalese, logos, nothing. If you didn’t notice the little menu at the top, you’d assume the page hadn’t loaded yet.
“Post must be at least 5 characters”
I know that this is a rant thread, but I “grokked” the Ribbon when someone at Microsoft UX published a video explaining why they introduced the Ribbon in Office. It was simply that the number of commands in Word and Excel had been growing for about 20 years, to several hundred, and the menus and toolbars were just getting to be unusable. There were so many commands that even the user’s ability to customize toolbars was itself getting unpleasant because the user still had to select which commands went into which toolbar, and there were so many of both. And they had gathered voluntary usage data showing that 90% of commands were almost never used, and some commands had not been used once by any of the X thousands of participants. Office 2007, of course, was set to introduce even more commands and make this even worse. So the Ribbon was intended to make all this less unwieldy by showing simpler context-sensitive menus, with the most-used commands most accessible.
I hated it for a while, now I find it quite acceptable… for Word and Excel. Yes, sometimes I end up googling where a command is, but I did that with Office 2003 too.
I’m not happy that they think a Ribbon is appropriate and necessary for every dialog box in Windows itself, or that non-Microsoft applications whose regular menus are still quite OK have been moving to Ribbon-like GUIs over the past… has it been 16 years?
But mobile applications are even less intuitive and less consistent and require even more googling, much of it ineffective because they change more than Office for Windows does.
One thing that does bother me in Windows is the taskbar. Yes, the thing we’ve all been using for 28 years. It was fine in Windows 95: you want to see a certain application, you click on its tile and it’s brought to the front.
But since Windows 98, it’s been behaving differently: when the application is already visible, you click on its tile and the existing window becomes invisible (it may minimize, we’re still not sure, but at least it’s not visible). If you click it again, the application returns, so you often end up clicking it repeatedly.
This happens very often in today’s 3-screen setups, when you have 5 or 6 windows open across your field of view and it’s difficult to recognise them – especially browsers.
As far as I know, the reason they introduced this minimize-from-taskbar abomination was for consistency with Windows CE, their mobile platform of the late 1990s, where this trick had allowed them to save a few pixels on the tiny screen by removing the Minimize buttons. Windows CE is dead, we have 4000-by-2500 screens, and this is still with us in Windows 11 and not even configurable.
I have a very well made book scanner from a company called CZUR.
CZUR Document Scanners
Their hardware is the bee’s knees. Everything about is solid, even the box it comes in, designed to be used as a storage case for the device.
The software, however, is abysmal.
Among many software transgressions, their greatest sin is forgetting the target audience of their product: This is a machine that is designed to allow you to scan magazines and books quickly. Someone who is using this machine will be sitting at a desk, scanning hundreds of pages at a sitting.
…so why not add “Are you sure?” and “Confirm?” prompts to every single action. You never know, maybe after 600 pages the person forgot that clicking the “Save” button will save something.
This makes what should be a two or three mouse-click process into a several dozen mouse-click process.
Another issue: there are many customization panels, such as what DPI you want, how you want to handle color, what language for OCR, and so on. None of these remember all of their settings between runs, so you need to go into each one and re-apply your settings without forgetting something important, for each magazine or book.
A third issue: as you scan you see the pages appearing in a list as files. If you find you accidentally scanned a page out of order, there is no way to drag the page up or down in the list. You either delete it and use the “scan page before” or “scan page after” options to put a new one in the right place (a clunky workaround), or you wait until you are generating PDF output, after you have scanned the whole book, where there is a drag-and-drop reordering screen.
First on my list of requests would be “Remove all of the useless hand-holding dialogs”
Second would be “Add a ‘Custom Settings’ mechanism,” to allow me to save a set of settings for, say, magazines.
Finally, there is a “feedback” button on the user interface that allows you to send feedback. I have tried it a few times with the aforementioned requests, and I got zero response. Surely they aren’t even looking at what people send them.
They did, however, send me spam asking me to rate their product and so on and so forth.
The hardware is so good that I accept all of the software faults.
And that itself is a problem. The mad rush to keep adding features whether anyone needs them or not has made Office applications complicated, bloated, and buggy. It’s also made them hard to maintain – Word, in particular, because of the ad hoc way in which it’s been developed, is such a mess of spaghetti code that bugs are impossible to eradicate without introducing new ones. I’m not the only one who has had the experience, when working with a large document in Word with complicated formatting, of making some minor edit and having the entire document suddenly and inexplicably reformatted.
This is an example of Microsoft’s shitty approach to software development. There’s a way to build word processors and other office applications that provide all necessary functionality for 99% of users, have an intuitive UI consistent with the rest of Windows, and are efficient and free of bugs. And it sure as hell isn’t the way Microsoft is doing it.
Just came across another one, though I’ve seen it before.
I had to enter my name and address on a website. It was the usual “name, address1, address2, city, state, zip, country” arrangement. I filled in everything until I got to “state.” As usual, it was a drop-down with all the states and territories…except that it was unpopulated. The drop-down appeared, but it was blank. It wouldn’t allow you to type in the state. I reloaded the page and tried again.
Turns out that you have to skip the “state” field and enter your zip code in the “zip” field. Once you do that, you can go back to the “state” field and it will be populated by ALL the different states and territories, even though you just entered your zip code. No, it did not pick the right state automatically based on the zip (which would have made sense). I still had to select the state.
Turns out my Samsung Android’s number blocking feature doesn’t actually block anything. I’ve tried it on various apparent telemarketer numbers (spoofed as they likely are), to absolutely no avail. You’d think someone would have made it, you know, actually do what it is supposed to do.
nods
I’m a firmly committed Word-hater. Absolutely can’t stand it. The design philosphy has always seemed to be Kitchen Sink. If any piece of software does it, let’s make it so that Word can do it too. But don’t bother doing it well. Or doing it according to any existing standard. Or calling anything that anybody would recognize if they were looking for the damn feature. Or putting it in a predictable and logical part of the overall menu-command hierarchy.
I hated it when it was distributed on a floppy disk, version 4, when PC users were still using WordPerfect 5.1 on amber or green text screens. The rest of the Macintosh world had the established convention that boldface was invoked with Command-B, italics were Command-I. Not Word, nope, uh uh. We don’t need no steenking ‘conventions’, says Word. Use Command-SHIFT-B if you want bold. But hey, we’re a powerful word processing application that has everything! Gee it looks like you were maybe thinking of making a bulleted list, so we’re gonna give you bullets whether you want 'em or not. But not as a standard font-based character (which you would have typed with Option-8 like this • • • → if and only if you actually wanted a freaking bullet), but instead as some bit of proprietary Word-centric hidden code that affects an entire block of text. Oh, you want to turn that feature OFF? Depends on whether you wish to turn it off for all time or just for the selected block of text where it’s being bulleted whether you wanted it to be or not? In the latter case, open the format menu, dive past “paragraphs” and select “kerning”, uncheck the checkbox for “do not make coffee unless there is sugar in the office”, kiss your elbow, click “other” when it asks “are you sure”, then hit the cancel button in the resulting dialog that asks if your gun already has bullets. Then shoot yourself with the bullet. Or something like that.
But it can’t handle words. Not very many of them at any rate. Stick 90,000 words’ worth of book into this garbage heap of a program and try adding two hard returns and type a new paragraph somewhere in the middle of the book. Watch as it makes five consecutive attempts to repaginate and reflow the text you’ve got onscreen. Watch as it briefly displays the next 200 pages as centered, then justified, then single-spaced, etc before resolving it into what you actually had. Watch as it fails to echo the characters you now type for seven seconds. Watch as the line below where you’re typing has somehow duplicated itself and when you select one of the duplicates and delete it, it disappears in both places because it was really only there once.
I had the Toyota app on my phone back when I had my Corolla. It seemed like it would be a handy app to have the owner’s manual on my phone. Except:
- The electronic owners manual it provided was simply a PDF of the paper owners manual. That might be acceptable for viewing on a desktop computer, but terrible for viewing on a smartphone screen.
- The app wouldn’t remember which Toyota model you owned unless you were logged in. If you weren’t logged in you could still pull up an owners manual by selecting your model from a long pull down menu listing every model Toyota ever made. But really, the app should remember what model you have without making you log in. And since it wasn’t exactly an app I used every day, if I did log in it would automatically log me out before the next time I needed to use it. The app also had a feature to book a service appointment at your local Toyota dealer, which I never used. I assume if I used that feature it would save some personal information that would make sense to require a login for. But the mere fact I owned a Corolla wasn’t sensitive personal information that needed to be protected by a username and password.
Mazda’s app is way better. It actually provides an interactive owners manual specifically designed for a smartphone.
I can’t understand why it’s so hard to specify an end time to a YouTube clip when setting a start time is trivially easy. I still have to search for help pages on how to do this and try six or seven times until I finally figure out what I’m doing wrong, and it never gets any easier.