I have to applaud the Microsoft Office UI team for the ribbon. It was a very brave decision, messing with their most popular software product in such a drastic way. They really did their homework well - as well as tons of usability testing beforehand. Jensen Harris has a very interesting blog about the entire design process, I encourage people who are interested in this to read it. There are many entries from 2006 that go into details of the design process.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archiv...s/default.aspx

Anyways. Application menus came in the 80's, with basically very primitive first mouse-based computers. So the presentation format of information is very simple: just plain lines of text, one under each other.

Nowadays we're in the 21st century, but almost all applications are still stuck using them. There is great power in the visual perception of the user, and the Ribbon tries to take good advantage of that. On a more fundamental level it's also a merging of application menus and toolbars. Toolbars basically overlap menus, so also in that aspect it's a very clever way to remove this duplication.

I hate to use this example - because it's something I hear too much as well as I say too much - but something like the iPhone has basically no application menus at all, in any of its application - is somebody missing them in it?

Oh you had to go and say it didn't you. I've carefully been sidestepping using the 'i' word in all my ui posts, and there you went and said it :/

It's true though. That is an interface done properly. Perfect? No. Far from it. But it is a step in the right direction. We need something that takes the same principals in mind for the ITTs. Or something better. Maybe I'm just a dreamer, but whos with me?

I like the Office ribbon too. I think its time has come.

I love contextual interfaces. I can't stress that enough. Give me what I need to do a specific task and hide the rest from me if I don't need it-- but make it damn easy (< 3 clicks) to get to the other stuff. The ribbon is pretty effective at that-- it just takes some retraining.

I went from AutoCAD design to Solidworks years ago when I was still a product designer. Sat down at a Solidworks station and in less than a half hour was expertly designing parts even though I'd never touched anything like it before. THAT is the perfect UI experience. THAT is what I have come to expect. Its biggest strength lay in what you could do with that right mouse button: hover, click, and pick from the menu a number of context-driven operations specific to your current needs.

That was 1995, by the way.

Thats a good point, contextual things are great. When I got my wm5 phone, I was prepared for the poor interface, I've seen articles about the horrors of wm5 for a long time. I think some of the articles exaggerate quite a bit, but overall the interface really wasnt that great, I much prefered my old sony's ui. But anyway, my phone has two contextual buttons, and on the home screen the left one is the start menu and the right one is contacts, and I knew you could change what the right one was, but thats how I thought it was. Untill I got my first voicemail. Whne I heard it come I was like "oh, crap, now I'm going to have to go into the start menu and try to find messaging and hope that voicemail is hidden in there somewhere, please god let it be in there..." but before I had even finished that thought, my right softkey suddenly swtiched from 'contacts' to 'voicemail'. It actually made me smile. The phone did exactly what I wanted it to. If only it was smart enough to do the same thing every time I got an sms... But still. That was such a great moment, having the phone do exactly what I wished it would and save me so much trouble. Can you imagine a world where all of our pockets are full of gizmos smart enough to do that? That'll be the day.

Bingo! That's exactly it: the device should anticipate what you need when you need it. To a large extent, that's done, but there's sooo much more potential with the tablet, to a large extent due to the touchscreen. IMO that has barely been tapped. Oh crap-- damn the pun!

I think it becomes a bit more difficult in the realm of the tablet though. The voicemail example is fairly simple. You get a voice mail. Of course it is important that you check the voicemail so give that a key. But what about when you turn on your internet tablet? Since you can run such a range of things on them, and people use them for so many, and sometimes entierly different things, and most of these things arnt nessecarily included with the tablet nor do they have anything to do with nokia... It presents a bit more of a challange I think. Some things it can assume. Just for example lets assume that the tablet has a few soft keys. When it turns on it would be safe to bind one of those soft keys to 'connect to wifi network', because before you can do most things on the tablet, you need to do that. Once you do that, it frees the key up for some task that you'd only be able to do if you were online. So maybe after wifi is online it switches to 'open web browser' and the other key that was previously blank would switch to maybe 'open pidgin', because even though pidgin didnt come with the tablet, maybe you can take a page from the windows book and the start menu's habit of displaying the most used applications right there. So the tablet figures out that you run pidgin all the time and that pidgin requires wifi, so after you are connected it binds it to a key. Something like that. Any other ideas?

In my opinion, nokia needs to throw away the stylus and make the OS completely thumb friendly by default. I would also appreciate a touch screen that can handle multiple touch areas simultaneously (think: typing with two thumbs on the keyboard, or resizing an image by dragging both corners).

Overall, I think Nokia did an excellent job with the current OS. I just don't like how everything is stylus focused. I hate using the stylus. It's a touch screen. I want to touch it.

Well, I wanna keep my stylus, but I do agree with the thumb (and finger) support. The screen could last longer using them.

... and it can do double-duty as a grease collector.

as far as the whole issue of some people wanting a simpler UI or a more complex setup , that should (ideally) be an option to the individual user