Should the "Ribbon" be a platform UI standard?

Brandon asked this question in my last blog entry, and it's a very sensible question to ask. Is the Ribbon general purpose enough, and a sound enough UI pattern to justify turning it into a standard for Windows?

For those of you who don't know, the "ribbon" is a new UI concept that's being introduced in the Office 2007 suite of applications. It looks like this:

The ribbon is really just an alternative view for a menu bar. It shows you the same information as the menu bar would, in generally the same fashion. The difference is that the ribbon allows you a much more visually stimulating view and yields for more immediate understanding of the functionality. What's more, since one view is always present at any given point in time, it also is quicker to access for people who use the mouse since they save at least one mouse click.

I feel that the ribbon design pattern makes for a more easily explored user interface. No matter how you slice it, the ribbon is easier for you to navigate your way through when trying to determine what functionality exists in the product. Menu items can only convey as much information as fits into one or two words. The ribbon gives you much more information at a glance. Aside from the icons being larger, and so they can convey more information, there are other improvements as well. For instance, proportional size information is a quick indicator of importance. In the screen shot, you'll notice that paste is a larger entry than format painter. And find is larger than replace. Since the element is larger, the brain quickly interprets that and you can get an understanding of importance at just a quick glance.

But should the ribbon be used as a standard pattern for any application? I don't think so.

Word (and the other Office applications) have a unique situation in that they have a huge audience which covers a wide range of computer experience. Kids type school papers, adults type dissertations and office memos. Programmers write design specs and grandmothers compose mail to their grandkids. With such a wide range of skill sets, it's very difficult to appeal to everyone. Office has to be approachable, otherwise people new to computing will find something more simple and Microsoft will lose sales. However, Office still needs to be powerful, otherwise experienced people will not be able to accomplish their tasks, and again, Microsoft will lose sales. Basically put: the Office suite is a general-purpose, all-encompassing set of applications.

Most applications are not so vague in their purpose. An IDE is aimed at programmers, while a Barney video game is aimed at kids, a time-clock application is aimed at lawyers, and so on. Most applications have a target audience where you can make some safe assumptions about the experience and comfort level of your users. You should take the time to get to know your users as that will always provide you with a better user experience in the long run. Since your target is probably not so vague, you can tailor your application's UI appropriately.

For instance, if a REALbasic user happened to make an application aimed at kids to provide them with a safe emailing experience (such as I've seen before), then a complex menu system is not a good user interface. However, a toolbar with large, colorful buttons would be appropriate. Conversely, if you write billing software which uses a lot of data entry, having textual menu items with sensible menu shortcuts would be much more appropriate.

The ribbon concept works very well when you have a wide audience with varying amounts of commitment. For someone who works in Excel all day long, I don't think the ribbon will be of much help. But for the college kid who has to enter their lab data into a spreadsheet, I think the ribbon would be invaluable. The difference between the two is in the amount of commitment to the product. The professional is going to be willing to commit a lot of time to learning how to achieve their goals perfectly and with the least amount of effort. The college kid is more interested in getting the stuff done well enough.

So I don't think that the ribbon should become a UI standard so much as it should be a UI design pattern. Under certain circumstances, I think some applications would really benefit from such a design. But under most circumstances, I think it would be overkill. So it's something to keep in the back of your mind while designing your UI, but not something you should jump all over just because it's new and shiny.