Never used ribbons... why are they so bad?
Any more examples?
As has been said, the ribbon interface
A. completely disrupts the workflow of anybody accustomed to the way Office looked for just about the entirety of its history prior to 2007, and
B. doesn't even do so to any tangible benefit - the quality of organization is middling at best and certainly not a noticeable improvement, and it nonsensically attempts to create spatial organization for a former hierarchical list of menu commands by the much-less-intuitive-than-it-sounds maxim of "frequently-used things big and in the center, less-frequently-used things small and spaced around the perimeter." It's wildly confusing, and half the "less-frequently-used" stuff (little things like, you know,
page setup) is just hidden behind teeny buttons that pop up traditional dialogs anyway. It also worsens Office's "toolbar wasteland syndrome" because you're not allowed to customize or hide the ribbon as you could with the toolbars. And worst of all, there's no option to go back to the traditional interface unless you resort to hacks.
Really, the ribbon encapsulates most of the worst developments in UI design since the late '80s: it's visually-oriented for no other reason than that it gave the design department something to do (shades of Quicktime's horrible old "drawer" interface,) it chews through screen real estate (I wouldn't
dream of trying to use Office 2007 on my 1024x768 laptop, I only
just have a usefully-sized work area on my 1280x1024 display at work,) it forces massive visual information overload on the user for the sake of "quick access" to functions that they typically aren't even
using at the moment, it displays the modern "design diva" approach to UI by not even allowing you to turn it off or rearrange it the way the old Office toolbars did, and, as bloodline says, it isn't even
consistent.
