Right back where they started in having to find where to add new features to the already-bursting-at-the-seams menus.
But I don't need any more features, what compelling features have been added to spreadsheets and word processors in the last 20 years?
Actually, try using Office 97 and then come back to comment. You'll find tons of little things missing — it feels like death by 1000 paper cuts.
And regardless, just because
you don't feel you need any new features doesn't mean that nobody does! Harsh truth, man: Microsoft isn't designing Office for
you. It's designing it for
everyone, and that means some compromises. One could argue (quite convincingly, frankly) that trying to be everything to everyone is a bad thing, but let's face it, the overwhelming majority of document creation is done in Microsoft Office (and much of the balance is done in open-source apps that are shitty clones of MS Office). As such, it has to be usable by novices (who make up a huge percentage of the user base), yet also contain tons of very niche features for power users and business workflows.
In doing the research for Office 2007, MS collected millions upon millions of user data reports ("telemetry") from Office 2003 users who participated in the telemetry program, which gave them info on which features were used, in what order, and how (menu, toolbar, etc.). They learned tons of useful stuff from that, and one interesting nugget is that just as they expected, about 20% of features got used 80% of the time — but that contrary to their expectations, among the remaining 80% of features that get used 20% of the time, there were no clear "winners". (They'd hoped to jettison rarely used features, but nothing stood out as particularly unused.) The upshot is that even the features that any given user thinks are useless fluff are in fact regularly used, when all users are taken as a whole.
I'm not bothered by clutter in the menus
But most users are. They have trouble finding what they need.
in fact I absolutely hate "personalized" menus that try to guess what I want and hide everything else unless I click again.
Everyone hated the personalized "smart" menus, which is why they only stuck around for one or two versions of Office.
The menus are far higher density than the stupid ribbon which is a cluttered mess that takes up a huge chunk of precious vertical screen space.
It takes up less space than the menu bar
and the toolbars that most users kept around. Remember that you can double-click the Ribbon tabs to collapse it, at which point it's basically a menu bar. In that state, it uses no more space than the traditional window title bar and menu bar together.
I just fired up my trusty copy of MS Word 2003 and the longest menus stretch only about 1/3 of the way down the screen when active,
Average screen sizes have grown a lot since 2003. Back then,
less than half of users had 1024x768 or higher, meaning that
over half were on 800x600 or 640x480!! So you'd very easily be running into long menus that had to scroll, and many users have trouble with that.
they could easily double the number of items in each menu without running out of space
But ultimately, it's not about space, it's about being able to find things. Real users were consistently having trouble finding things. And despite individual reports like yours, the user research showed that on average, users have less trouble finding things in the Ribbon. To a large extent, this has nothing to do with whether the commands are housed in menus or toolbars (the Ribbon being, in essence, a glorified toolbar), but rather how the commands are grouped.
In Office, the menu commands had accreted over 20 years, and their groupings were often really haphazard. So when they did develop the Ribbon, it was to a large extent merely about re-grouping commands into better groupings. In all likelihood, it is
this change, and not the visual presentation, that bothers you more. (The groupings in the Ribbon are designed for efficiency in command chains, that is, putting commands that are frequently used in sequence onto the same tabs.)
and it would still be much quicker for me to find what I'm looking for. Instead there is a huge measure of arrogance them deciding what is best for the user instead of acknowledging that not everyone's mind works the same.
It's not arrogance when it's founded in really solid user research. I'm not even a fan of MS (I'm a Mac guy!), but as a UX professional, there is nothing to fault in MS's methodology in the Ribbon.
Is it not arrogant of
you to expect that MS bow to your needs, even in light of evidence that most users benefit from the newer system?
They could have kept offering the traditional menus for the millions of users who strongly prefer them
Again, the menus had long ceased being effective. But regardless, developing two user interfaces in parallel is, well, dumb. That's already what menus+toolbars were, and part of the goal of the Ribbon was to unify, rather than to further replicate.
but instead forced us to look at alternatives like OpenOffice if we are not fortunate enough to have a copy of Office 2003.
I HATE the ribbon
I hadn't noticed!
I've had more than a decade to "get used to it" and it still takes me twice as long to find anything and just generally frustrates me.
You aren't
alone in feeling like this. I've met a few (very few, but non-zero) who feel this strongly about it. However, the goal of the Ribbon wasn't to make it better for
you specifically, but to make it better for
most users, and it succeeded at that.
It is vastly inferior for the way my mind works and to insist otherwise is pure arrogance.
It would be arrogant for anyone to suggest how your mind needs to work — and nobody has in any way.
All you need to understand is that it's not a custom product for you, it's a mass-market product that has to work well for
most people.
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