A cool posting about ribboned interface

Yesterday I started to search user opinions about ribboned interface in new Autodesk products. As AD official forums are heavily censored and all negative opinions are cut off (censors are quite sloppy, in some places there are answers to these opinions left untouched), I started to search in independent channels and blogs. And I found a very cool and funny posting:

http://architechure.blogspot.com/2009/03/well-intentioned-road-paving.html

I think there is much to learn for UI redesigners.

Ribbons, ribbons, ribbons…

I’d like to say some words too about this ribboned interface.

• It’s OK for small applications like Windows Paint – all is visible and comfortable to handle
• It’s not OK for big applications with thousands of commands like AutoCAD or Revit – all necessary is hidden, you have to make several moves to reach elementary tools and all this works painfully slowly. Both releases with number 2010 came with ribboned interface and it was really horrible. Fortunately in AutoCAD I could restore my layout from previous version, without ribbons, for Revit I still hadn’t time to mess with this, but it is not usable at all. In meantime I made my 3D sketches with Google Sketchup which still has normal interface – and this is pretty small application.

So where is the office application in this scale? Somewhere in the middle I think. And this ribboned interface for office is really a touch-and-go thing. When you want to play around with office, it may look amazing, when you need to do your work with office, I don’t know…