During PDC 2005, Microsoft previewed the UI for Office 12. It sure cleared up the question/worry of “whatever happened to a proper menu bar in Windows Vista’s Explorer”: As Gates said, the menu bar is dead.
I remember the last “death announcement”: it came from Steve Jobs regarding Mac OS 9, and it made perfect sense.
Bill Gates’s announcement, on the other hand, doesn’t. Decades and billions of UI research, it appears, are void now, just because one software manufacturer mistakes their radical UI change for a “big step forward”. A big step forward, for Microsoft, would be to at long last treat the menu bar properly, which they never did. They cluttered it with unimportant functions, then, upon realizing that, added features such as “personalization” that boiled down to shortening the menu bar and making it even more confusing.
The lesson learnt should have been: we cannot get this UI element right; maybe we should hire people who can. Instead, they decided to ditch the element and replace it with, uh, a panel combining buttons, links and other widgets in such a confusing, cluttered way as to make UI zealots cringe.
My worry is that other developers will eventually pick this horrible idea up and transition it from Windows Vista to KDE; perhaps even GNOME.
Too bad, really — the menu bar was a fascinating concept for its simplicity.
Others' Thoughts
Comment on September 18th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
pissed
Gates is a dick.
Comment on September 18th, 2005 at 7:34 pm
Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft Research.
So let’s not restate history. If you go back through the annals of those decades of UI research, you’ll find that the classic drop-down menu was designed and proven to be highly effective for 7 plus or minus two items per menu. And it was proven to only be effective for 2 levels of depth. Why? Because menu navigation is a combination of short-term and spatial memory.
Old arguments about whether Word or any other major application (e.g. Photoshop) is too bloated with features, people want their applications to do a lot, and that often scales beyond what the classic menu paradigm can do.
The new Office UI was designed neither haphazardly nor capriciously. It’s been user tested to death (and continutes to be tested, and tweaked) and many of the UI zealots you are thinking of have actually been consultants on both the Office and Windows Vista UI’s. To be sure there are going to be people who don’t like it, and it won’t be perfect right out of the gate (it’s almost by definition impossible to do longitudinal studies over the course of a single development cycle) but at least give them credit where credit is due: instead of trying to continue to stretch an old UI paradigm beyond its practical limits, they got creative.
Comment on September 18th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
Maybe, then, it was time to split the application as a whole and e.g. move publishing-related features off to Publisher? Microsoft appears to have a tendency to fill one application with multiple distinct feature sets; Apple, on the other hand, uses stand-alone applications. (As an example, FinalCut Pro ships with multiple related applications — Soundtrack Pro, LiveType, Compressor, all of which could have been integrated into the app itself, but instead live their life on their own, thus not cluttering the main application’s space.)
Nothing against creativity, but this change, from the way marketing presents it, seems more like “we’ll try and be different just for the sake of being different”. You obviously present a different view; I respect that.
Still, I have used the new-style mixture of menu bar and toolbar in Windows Vista beta 1’s Explorer, and it just didn’t feel right. Office 12’s path seems to be taking this even further. Just judging from screenshots, you have cluttered multiple types of widgets together not only horizontally, but also vertically, and in an unpredictable order.
Either way, it would be unfair for me to judge a product that’s not even in its final state, so I suppose I’ll wait until Office 12’s release to fully discuss this.
Thanks for posting here, Kevin.
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