MS Office is much more usable now than it was in 2000. Consider a new user, with no experience in office software at all. They're presented with either two rows of incomprehensible buttons, no logical order, and additional features hidden in the menu bar, compared to having features (reasonably) logically organised behind tabs and grouped into sections and frequently with labels.
Sure, for power users, some things take two or three clicks which required one previously and I understand that's frustrating, but Office's old interface was a complete mess which got by on inertia - and there are still keyboard shortcuts and the customisable hotbar.
I hate this trend. Do people design soldering irons or cars to cater for newbies who didn't spend even 5 minutes trying to learn how it works? Programs like MS Office or Google Maps are tools. By dumbing them down, companies are making them less and less useful. And apparently nobody cares about power users (i.e. people who will actually use your tools) because there's more money in throwaway users.
Google, could you please make Google Maps Pro, with consistent interface and advanced functions available all the time? I'll be a paying customer.
MS office post 2007 is an utter mess for novices and power users alike. I say that as a "power user" who used office apps 8 hours a day pre-ribbon and post-ribbon and has to help people who don't.
The ribbons manage to unify the drawbacks of both the button bar and the menu bar that you mentioned:
- it is composed of "rows of incomprehensible buttons" with no logical order (Where is the most-frequently-sought insert-column button in Excel? Hint: not in the "insert" ribbon tab, that would be too easy. Where is the function to create collapsible rows/columns? In the "Data" tab...)
- it has additional features hidden so well that nobody can find them without googling - Excel's most powerful features like creating named cell styles are now only reachable by clicking through several layers of unintuitive unlabeled mini-buttons tacked on as an afterthought. Yes, I have the muscle memory for remembering half a dozen triple-chord keyboard shortcuts like Alt-D-F-F, but nobody who didn't use Office 2002 will be able to use the new version at anything approaching full speed - that is exactly the opposite of UI discoverability.
>Consider a new user, with no experience in office software at all.
But is that even a reasonable share of the market any more? I'm hardly a spring chicken and I was exposed to Office in elementary school. I would imagine that the proportion of people who've never used an office suite (and can't use Google to search for answers for how to do things) is fairly small at this point.
In my experience, adding the Ribbon was a huge step backwards in terms of usability, not because the Ribbon is inherently bad, but because it was a very big, very abrupt change from the File | Edit | View ... menu system that preceded it. I was working on an IT helpdesk at the time the Ribbon rolled out (with Office 2007), and the backlash from users who couldn't apply the same set of steps that had always worked for them to do things like adjust paragraph spacing was immense.
I feel like Microsoft was blinded by its focus groups. Perhaps the focus groups included people who weren't familiar with Office, or with computers at all, and that skewed the results enough to make it seem like the Ribbon was a good idea. But in practice, the cost of adopting the UI is not just the cost of learning the new UI, but also the cost of forgetting the UI that preceded it. The Ribbon might be great if you're starting from scratch with a new UI, but the existing Office 2000 UI was so entrenched, the cost of forgetting was huge.
The problem is, new users are "new" for a few weeks or months at most. After that, they join the massive groups of people that have to spend years using tools.
New users should be given tutorials, online help or other kinds of training that successfully bring them up to speed. Those kinds of materials are then cleanly separated, and they get out of the way forever once the user is acquainted with the system.
Sure, for power users, some things take two or three clicks which required one previously and I understand that's frustrating, but Office's old interface was a complete mess which got by on inertia - and there are still keyboard shortcuts and the customisable hotbar.