Don't panic? Windows 8 and the "ribbonification" of Explorer.

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...