Ribbons and bows

The first time I saw a screenshot of the Ribbon, I immediately thought to myself, that right there may be a helpdesk worker's worst nightmare. After using it a few times and showing it around the helpdesk we came to a somewhat different conclusion. The idea of a toolbar, if you will, that changes as you move to different commands in the interface actually seems like a decent idea. Instead of having something buried 3-4 menus deep, it'll be much easier to find it when you're not sure where it is. In fact, I think the location of certain features actually make a whole lot more sense. Things like bullets, symbols and watermarks make more sense where they are than trying to go a couple of menus deep to get them formatted correctly.

Of course, what this UI assumes is that you understand the context of what you're doing. You need to understand that a watermark is a page layout option and be in that ribbon. Not too difficult for long time Word powerusers, and probably much more intuitive for a new user, but for users who simple know what they need to know because they've picked up the routine of doing it, this is going to be a major problem. This is where I think IT support folks are going to run into problems. We all have users who know how to do what they need to do, without much of a contextual understanding. These are the folks who call the helpdesk repeatedly when you make a slight change to a template, or move an icon on a customized toolbar. The slightest change throws them off their game. This may be too much of a change for these folks to cope with very well.

The bottom line, I think, is that the Ribbon is a step up in UI. It's more intuitive and useful than the standard Office menus have been. It simply makes more sense. But in the corporate world, this upgrade is going to be a mucher tougher sell because some of your staff is going to be hard-pressed to learn the new interface and still be as productive as they have been using 2000 or 2003. It's going to take a commitment to education and training to be a successful upgrade.


posted 9:22 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

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