> The Ribbon is unspeakably messy, and unspeakably large, and as I said I am not going to attack it in detail because this is a long-running Microsoft hobby horse. Suffice to say I feel it is a usability disaster and does not belong in any program let alone Explorer, however, it has the one saving grace that it is both collapsible, and defaults to that state, so most users almost certainly never even found out it existed, making this a lean, usable Explorer wrapped in a weirdly noisy border.
I always find this ribbon to be incredibly ill-designed, may it be in Explorer or in MS Office : the biggest icons I almost never use whereas the ones I use most are painfully small (font management in MS Word to cite but one).
I find the Ribbon's contextual options perfect. When I'm at the root of My Computer, it's useful to see "Map Network Drive". When I'm in any other location, I don't care about that, so it's gone. When I click on a ZIP file it's useful to see options for extraction, etc.
The Ribbon is far more useful for new users. It's true that if you memorized the Excel 97 menu layout you may not find things exactly where they were, but most users would never have been able to find things they wanted in the menu anyway.
My experience is that people who complain about the ribbon largely use keyboard shortcuts (which still exist) anyway, if they've even used Windows in the last decade.
The ribbon replaced menus. These menus no longer exist. The sidebars also no longer exist, but they didn't have as much functionality as the menus did.
I get a sense the ribbon design is a bit aspirational, with emphasis on the things they think you should use instead of what is actually used. For example, I’m sure they feel you should be using styles instead of fonts, and so the styles control takes up a lot more real estate than the font chooser.
Some of the Ribbon Designs are aspirational, but also some of the Ribbon Designs are simply telemetry-based, with an emphasis on the things users do most. I'm rarely surprised how many people complaining that the things they use most aren't well emphasized are also among the first to disable telemetry.
The intersection of the aspirational and telemetry-based approaches is something of the "Office 20% Rule". The long standing aphorism is that everybody only uses about 20% of the features of a given Office application, but that everybody's 20% is different. That "Rule" is exactly why the Ribbon will never be "perfect" in what it emphasizes, it can only aspire to try its best given the goals it has (aspirations) and the data available (telemetry).
I've found it to be great for mouseless control. Try hitting Alt to get the vimperator-like navigation based on labeled popups.
I think this approach is much better for power users than the old combo hotkeys - it's explorable, customizable, and memorizable at the same time, so you can both learn it easily and be productive.
Maybe somebody here knows - is there a ribbon search that shows you where to find something in the ribbon (especially in Office)? It has a search box that lets you just run the thing you've searched for, but that doesn't really help you find it in future. It at least shows you the icon, so you can then hunt through all the ribbons for that icon, but that's hardly ideal.
After reading this comment, I opened up my explorer to notice, there is a ribbon there. In the default overview it actually has some buttons I would use (but it's the small ones) as I don't regularly add network mounts or addresses.
I think I ignored it after having no use for it in the beginning (and as my usual operations in the explorer are mostly navigation based).
> The Ribbon is unspeakably messy, and unspeakably large, and as I said I am not going to attack it in detail because this is a long-running Microsoft hobby horse. Suffice to say I feel it is a usability disaster and does not belong in any program let alone Explorer, however, it has the one saving grace that it is both collapsible, and defaults to that state, so most users almost certainly never even found out it existed, making this a lean, usable Explorer wrapped in a weirdly noisy border.
I always find this ribbon to be incredibly ill-designed, may it be in Explorer or in MS Office : the biggest icons I almost never use whereas the ones I use most are painfully small (font management in MS Word to cite but one).