When Microsoft first
revealed
that the Explorer file manager would be outfitted with a ribbon-style
toolbar in Windows 8, responses were loud, passionate, and
frequently negative.
The company recently
described
changes that it has made to Windows 8's Explorer in response to the
feedback. These include some small modifications to the ribbon
experience along with some other refinements of Explorer's new features.
Though the changes themselves have been welcomed, the continued
hostility toward Explorer's redesign remains.
Since its introduction in Office 2007, the ribbon has been a
polarizing user interface. The ribbon's purpose was to make a package
that was feature-packed but unwieldy more approachable—to enable people
to
find more of those features when they wanted to use them. Microsoft says that it has broadly
succeeded at this goal, and there is
evidence that all but the heaviest Office users regard it as an improvement.
But those heaviest users have bemoaned the way the ribbon has moved
options from familiar places, and they have criticized (especially in
Office 2007) the lack of customization options. While Office 2010 has
reinstated much of the configurability and customization, the other
complaints remain. With the ribbon expanding into such basic software as
Explorer, the old complaints are being reheated. Do they have any
merit?
Relight the fire
While the Office ribbon has largely been met with
acquiescence—Microsoft was resolute about not providing a "legacy" user
interface in Office, giving people little option but to like it or lump
it—the decision to include a ribbon in Explorer has reawakened much of
the anti-ribbon feeling. Windows 8 provides a new battleground on which
to repeat the conflicts inspired by Office 2007.
Adding fuel to this anti-ribbon fire was the level of explication and
detail that Microsoft included in its original descriptions of the
ribbon. The ribbon's design—the placement of the buttons, the grouping
into different categories, the decision to place things on the default
tab or some other—was fundamentally not driven by taste or aesthetics:
it was driven by empirical observation.
The ribbon does include some kind of logical categorization,
especially for the "contextual" tabs that aren't permanently
enabled—things like the "table tools" section in Word 2010, for example,
that only appears when the I-beam is in a table. Still, the most
important section, the catch-all "Home" section that's displayed by
default, is driven by something much more basic:
how often people use the feature in question. If a feature is important, it goes in the Home section. If it isn't, it doesn't.
Microsoft collects data from a broad subset of the Windows-using
community through its opt-in, optional Customer Experience Improvement
Program (CEIP). With this data, the company knows which Explorer
features people use most often, and how they access those
features—whether it be through the main menu, the context menu,
toolbars, or keyboard shortcuts.
This data has been instrumental in creating the Explorer ribbons,
with often-used items given prominent placement. For example, in Windows
7 some of the most-used options, including copy and paste, are not
found on the toolbar-like "command bar" at all. Instead, they're
accessed through the context menu. Windows 8 puts them on the ribbon's
Home tab, right at the left, making them the easiest-to-find buttons in
the whole interface.
Data-driven design
More than the use of the ribbon itself, it is this explanation and
the data used that have generated criticism. Some of that criticism is
off-base: for example, in this
widely Tweeted and Tumbled
post, the complaint was made that some of the Home tab's features had a
usage of zero percent, calling into question their inclusion. The
reason these features have zero usage is because they don't exist in
Windows 7, however; that Microsoft has collected no usage data about
them is not at all surprising. They are, however, reasonably logical
extensions of other features, so their inclusion is not indicative of
any particular problem.
Other criticisms are more on point. Microsoft's own data shows that
people use the context menus extensively and barely touch the menus and
command bar. This in turn raises an implicit question: if people are
finding the features on the context menus, and they are happy to use the
context menus, does this not mean that the context menus are a
perfectly appropriate place to stick such options? The ribbon could be
seen as streamlining something that's already streamlined and
accessible.
The ribbon might even be seen as illogical. There's little to link
the items on the home tab, for instance, other than the fact that
they're used regularly. This is not an intrinsic property of the items
themselves, and it will not make sense to users of the software.
Known unknowns
The CEIP data also offers no insight into the things that people
can't do, or don't
realize
they can do. Perhaps some feature would be commonly used if it had been
clearer from the start. Other avenues can provide information about
such things—support tickets, customer feedback, feature requests—but
nothing compares to the CEIP data. So in the end, we have a lot of data
about the features that people can already find and know how to use, but
much less data about things that people can't find or don't know how to
use.
On top of all this, the most recently announced changes seem to
render the entire "accessibility" issue irrelevant. Microsoft said in
its latest post on the subject that the new ribbon will be collapsed by
default, so it's likely that for most people, most of the time, the
thing might as well not even exist (which makes one wonder why the
company is bothering to include the ribbon at all).
Even the company's own internal statistics on Windows 8 beta usage
show that 71 percent of users don't bother changing the ribbon's default
state, and this is a userbase that's skewed nerdy, and hence far more
likely to be doing complex file manipulations or "power using" their
machines. Indeed, the statistics show that most of them don't use the
ribbon much at all; 85 percent of the Explorer sessions of the
non-maximizers don't use
any commands at all. Explorer is simply used to look at and launch files.
A question of complexity
My own view on seeing the ribbon in Explorer was primarily one of
surprise. While I like the ribbon in Office 2010, I like it because the
Office 2010 applications are large, sprawling, and enormously complex.
The only applications I use routinely are Outlook, and to a lesser
extent Excel; I am not the "pro" user who spends eight hours a day in
Word, and I have certainly never memorized all its features or where
they resided. For me, the ribbon makes the Office applications far more
accessible on those occasions that I do use them.
Explorer has never struck me as complex in the way that Office is.
Microsoft says that the program has 200-odd different functions, and
this may be true, but Explorer never left me poking around the way
Office did in the toolbar era. A ribbon in Explorer felt similar to
Microsoft's use of the ribbon on WordPad and Paint in Windows 7:
something that
could be done, but not necessarily something that
should
be done. I was also annoyed that the built-in ribbon was similar to
(but different from) the Office 2007 ribbon, rather than corresponding
more to the Office 2010 ribbon.
And while I don't mind too much that Paint and WordPad were used as
"proof of concept" applications just to show people that, yes, there's a
built-in ribbon API, Explorer is a more important application that
should have the
right UI. I'm not entirely convinced that the ribbon is it.
A strange move
The desktop and Explorer aren't, of course, Windows 8's only
interface. An important part of the Metro aesthetic is that it's simple
and chromeless, using text and positioning to convey information,
eschewing ornamentation and unnecessary graphical adornments. The ribbon
is a heavy piece of interface chrome. It's full of subdivisions
and colorful graphics, with everything crammed together. Explorer as a
whole is a chrome-heavy application, with several different panels, the
address bar, search box, the status bar, and the toolbar/command
bar/ribbon.
The "ribbonification" of Explorer just makes the application even
more heavyweight, and while that might make sense in a desktop operating
system, it will make the contrast with Metro all the more jarring.
Managing that contrast is perhaps Microsoft's biggest challenge with
Windows 8, and making the stylistic and conceptual differences between
the two
bigger feels like a strange decision.
Update: the following three paragraphs were added as a response to reader feedback.
The ribbon is held by some to be more touch-friendly than traditional
toolbars. In principle, a touch-friendly ribbon application could be
written; it would stick only to the large icons (for example, the "Copy"
and "Paste" icons in
Microsoft's picture), and hence provide large hit targets.
In practice, however, ribbon applications don't stick to large
touch-friendly targets, and Explorer is no exception. The ribbon has the
small one-third height buttons (such as "Cut" and "Copy path" in the
same diagram), and even buttons that emit traditional menus (such as
"Move to" and "Copy to"). These small targets have all the
finger-accessibility problems that "traditional" interfaces suffer from:
they're small, and tightly-packed. Microsoft's ribbon API allows even
more complexity, including sets of check boxes, scroll bars, and more,
all within the ribbon—and all unfriendly to the finger.
In fact, Windows 7's textual command bar provides larger targets with
wider spacing than Windows 8's ribbon. As an effort to touch-enable
Explorer, the ribbon is insufficient.
This is not to say that the Explorer ribbon works poorly in practice.
Determining how well it really works will have to wait for the final
version to ship; the Developer Preview currently available lacks the
refinements that Microsoft has promised.
Without practical, extended usage—for real, day-to-day file
manipulations, not just clicking around for a few minutes on a test
install—judging the
usability of the interface can't be done now. And it certainly can't be done by analyzing the diagrams included in a blog post.
We'll know just how well the ribbon works when the Windows 8 beta
(likely to be called a "consumer preview") ships later this month. I
suspect that this large-scale testing will mimic Microsoft's own
findings and the reactions we've already seen. Most people won't change
the default, or even use the ribbon most of the time, but the vocal
chorus of ribbon-haters will vow to boycott Windows 8 and stick with
Windows 7 (or, more likely, Windows XP) until Microsoft relents.
And it's this likely reaction that makes the decision to add the
ribbon to Explorer particularly odd. At best, this is a decision that
will make no difference to most people most of the time, but one that
will be promoted by a vocal minority as a reason to ignore Windows 8. As
Microsoft discovered with Windows Vista, those vocal minorities can be
extremely influential at coloring the general perception and reception
of an operating system...
