Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in old mode - it's just better)
I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.
I personally think "mobile first" should mean we force the devs to use a mobile device as their work computer until they all realize how fundamentally crippling mobile UI is and we all agree to stop shoving it on everyone.
It kinda does though, because modern software companies tend to shift focus away from projects before they get completely "done". The whole reason for "mobile first" is the tacit admission that whatever is not the primary focus will often get drastically less attention because there's already something that sorta "works".
There’s truth in what you’re saying, especially in the “things mostly suck, so expect that” world.
But in the ideal world you’re wrong... it’s fundamentally easier to start with a mobile design and make some specific interventions to make it work well on desktop than to do the opposite.
Whether anyone actually makes those interventions is, as you indicate, somewhat unlikely.
Yeah, but surely the vast vast majority of dropbox's business has to come from PCs. Given how hard (and wrongly) they are pushing to be a collaborative space for work documents, I think I must be correct about this. I know it's cool and all to imagine everyone working on their phones, I just can't see that as a viable work process atm.
I use it to sync the pictures and videos from my phone, which is then synced to my desktop at home, and then deleted from dropbox and thus also the phone. Automatically. If my phone gets stolen (or data deleted by some overzealous border patrol goon) it doesn't matter as much as it would have otherwise.
I do, because all the people at my office using the desktop app complain about bad syncs, sudden filling up of the local hard drive and general slowness
Sarcasm is hard. Unless I'm mistaken, you're imitating Blizzard and Diablo Immortal. If not then I think your comment comes across as extremely blind to a large segment of users.
At least Dropbox hasn't gone full in on the Heiroglyph side of the fad, they still have text labels for buttons, so you can understand what they do by looking at them and reading them.
The hieroglyphs are beyond me. It's literally making up your own alphabet not to mind language. Might be the ultimate sign of the over indulgence of developers/designers. Each gets their own perfect world which we must spend the time decrypting
That is pretty easy - you don't need to support text in multiple languages, which is both difficult, a tad expensive, and slows down your velocity (I think the last on is the biggest issue).
I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless.
> I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless.
Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do and brake it beyond all repair.
> Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do
Microsoft Office switched to the "backstage" menu in Office 2010, long before full-screen menus became a popular pattern. Office 2007 had the app menu, which is the same as the File menu in the Windows File Explorer. In my opinion, the app menu is far superior simply because it doesn't change the context and it's easily dismissable.
> The new way to have fun is to be in a meeting and see the presenter trying for 5 minutes to find something in the ribbon menu.
The Ribbon is far superior to the old teetering tower of random menus, toolbars, and panels. Everything is in a single logical place, with (almost) every button having a text label and many having intuitive icons. And now it has a search bar.
I'm fine with the ribbon, but good God do I hate the full screen save & open menus.
They've obscured the "save as" functionality and really push one drive saving. Even as a one-drive user, oftentimes I just want to save a file on my disk in a specific spot without backing it up to the cloud.
I really wish Libreoffice Calc was a better Excel replacement, because it feels like Excel gets more dumbed-down each year. I get a UTF-8 csv emailed daily from a vendor, and I still can't get Excel to treat it properly. It only applies that setting to that specific file, I can't change it system-wide. Maybe it's possible, I found it easier to just write a python script to convert the files to windows-1250 like it expects.
The ribbon is far superior to the old menus though, this week I needed to create a shudder PowerPoint presentation. Don't think I've needed to do that in 5 years, but it was easy enough to find all the functionality I needed. Plus, the search box actually shows where the buttons are located, so you actually learn how to use the program instead of relying on search. I remember the mess the Office 07 menus were, any time there was a need to use a feature that wasn't familiar was a chore. I remember actually needing to Google for some excel feature and needing to rely on screenshots of the menus to find what I needed. I don't get it, since Visual Studio has far more complexity buried in it than Word, but I've never had anywhere near the difficulty finding features than I did with the old Office menus.
There hasnt been a good excel released in 20 years. Libreoffice is pretty hideous, gnumeric is maybe a bit better. I rely on excel key shortcuts which didnt change even when the menus they referenced disappeared. Libreoffice has some but not all of them. Google sheets does better but my dev network is airgapped so that doesn't help.
effectively as the only "obvious choices" with two different wordings (why?) and with a lot of "stuff" left and right "Properties" "Related Dates" "Related People" ? It's specifically not obvious that the "menu" is in the blue area on the left and that the three buttons are... what are they actually? How come these three came to be the major actions one would want to do in the File menu?
And why the document disappeared like I'm on the small mobile screen? I'm aware now they did that for many years, still... it's... confusing on the big screen.
> I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless.
That's been the case for I think a decade now. Maybe longer.
To be fair, now days they make really good use of that space. Earlier iterations of that UI were pretty bad, but a giant list of recent documents, a list of recent document templates, and all the main commands to do things (save, open) are positions to the left where they have always been.
Given that Word now days auto-saves (about time!), the main thing I'm going into the File menu for is to switch to a different file, at which point the file menu showing me a list of, well, files, is pretty useful to be honest.
Also it has a search box, and search boxes are nice, I welcome UI changes that allow for more search boxes in the world.
I think it auto saves only for Office 365 or SharePoint based documents. It definitely doesn't auto save my documents when they are local or on a network share.
Strange it doesn't do local, but I imagine there are legacy reasons for that. Everything in Office is old. Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on.
Well engineered and coded decisions made in the age of single user desktops are still well engineered. Hard for someone in 1995 to predict the need for a file format that supports real time coauthoring with automatic saving and complete revision control of every edit.
Esp. when the target machine the code had to run on was a 486 with a slow hard drive and a tiny bit of memory.
Of course Office updated their file format, but they probably did it a little bit too soon. I always wondered what would've happened if they had waited a few more years, released in 2007, so probably design started a few years prior. Talk about just being a smidgen too early for a world of unlimited(-ish) data and always on internet connections.
I went to Dropbox to try this out but got redirected to "Dropbox Business" which doesn't have a hamburger.
And then spent nearly 5 minutes trying to get back to "Regular Dropbox".
But wait... I'm at the root of dropbox.com. Is... Dropbox "non-business" dead? I stopped using it a while ago because of their inexorable push into "enterprise" features that I didn't care about, but I never expected them to outright kill the product.
Oh you're right. Interesting. My browser is 1134x1080. I guess maybe in today's world of super high res phones that could be considered a "mobile display".
The media query for the hamburger button is max-width: 1366px, so you just met the cut off. I couldn't find a media query for the menu itself, but I suspect since the hamburger button is what allows it to get created, they didn't feel the need.
I don't really understand what's wrong with a full-screen modal menu, or how that means "this is for mobile." It's true that it looks a bit stark on their homepage where there are only 2 links, but it's probably a fairly sensible extensible design that works well when there are many more links or things to see.
It's fair to criticize specific visual and UX design details, but it's a bit much to take this as any indication that Dropbox doesn't care about desktop users (especially Dropbox) or that everything is being "mobilified."
> I don't really understand what's wrong with a full-screen modal menu, or how that means "this is for mobile." It's true that it looks a bit stark on their homepage where there are only 2 links, but it's probably a fairly sensible extensible design that works well when there are many more links or things to see.
You never used a computer? There is a thing called a mouse which you have to move to the bottom of the screen to select the bloody thing. I'm shocked that Alan Kay did had the glorious idea of the full screen menu.
> It's fair to criticize specific visual and UX design details, but it's a bit much to take this as any indication that Dropbox doesn't care about desktop users (especially Dropbox) or that everything is being "mobilified."
How to say it without resorting to medical condition: to throw away years of working things in GUI and to come with an "UX" which has the functionality of windows 1.0 shows some mental development problems to say the least.
Because I'm trying to read off some details on a document I have open on the side while interacting with the menu and then it goes full screen and obscures everything.
In fairness, Dropbox's primary interface on desktops is "my files are there" and nothing else. I can understand why they'd spend most of their UX effort concentrating on platforms where it's not as transparent.
you used to click on the icon in the taskbar and get a menu only. Now you get a full popup with a home screen , advertisements and "notifications" (even though windows has integrated notifications. Never used it
I have never clicked on this before, but mine on Windows 10 isn't what you described, and even if it was... why would I ever click on it? My files are backed up and show up on other machines. They could put animal porn in the UI and I don't think I'd notice.
Isn't is beautiful? How the image layer is put over half of the text line?
Oh, and the right part (white background) only appears after a couple of seconds. At first it shows the continuation of the blue background scree, with 2 'menu' items: "Se connecter" (log in) and "S'inscrire" (sign in). So if you try to click on "sign in", by the time your click is registered, it ends up on the white background item which appears at the same place: "Télécharger" (download).
That's not true, their desktop breakpoint is 1024px. If the window is wider than that, there's no hamburger menu, and clicking "Sign in" reveals a menu that takes up 1/3 of the right side of the screen.
For me the hamburger button's media query is set to a width of 1366px.
I don't have a dropbox account. I do notice no matter what I always end up at `https://www.dropbox.com/?landing=dbv2`, so I may somehow be being put into an AB test. Even an incognito window does that. The name `dbv2` might imply a new version of the site that is in the works? Shrug.
How is that not pancakes? But ye, it's way to big. If they have to do it fullscreen, atleast put the menu options in the centre of the screen not downwards ...
Incessant hamburgerization is something that I also find annoying. Any time I have to set up Firefox, the very first thing I do is enable the menu bar.
My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!
I can see why they did it. Now that screens are ~universally 16:9, vertical space is at a premium. It would be nice if the hamburger menu actually replicated the same functionality though.
I think that if vertical space were indeed the reason, then we wouldn't have huge, touch-sized widgets everywhere and 32-pixel titlebars. There are applications where simply reducing the padding on most widgets to sane values wins you 3-4 menubars' worth of space.
I'm sure vertical space is the most often-repeated argument, but I'm skeptical that it's indeed the reason behind this trend.
16:9 is a ratio whereas the amount of vertical space is an absolute amount. I don't think the two are related, unless screens got wider at the expense of height, which surely is not the case.
They did lose height; 1600×1200 → 1920×1080. For a while you could find 1920×1200 if you looked hard and spent more, but at the next increment everything is 16:9.
I have 2 1920x1200 and there is no reasonable upgrade except maybe something like 40" 4K (and not in retina/high dpi mode). 2560x1600 would be ok, but it's too expensive.
3440x1440. Less pixels overall than your current setup, but incredibly nice to use. Also affordable, you can get them for under $400 during sales / end of year clearance.
Seriously, for coding I absolutely love a 1920x1080 screen rotated 90°. Still wide enough to see an entire (sane) line, but more vertical space is just wonderful. Can't watch video, obviously, but for a work computer the vertical space is the absolute best. Improves web browsing as well for most sites.
I tried a 36", I can't stand it as a display. Fine for a TV, but it's a little much for a monitor. Although I can't stand more than 2 displays, so YMMV.
They did get wider at the expense of height. Monitors are sold by diagonal size, and a 15" 4:3 monitor is 9 inches tall while a 15" 16:9 one is only 7.4" tall.
I rarely use the menu bar so I just hit alt when I need it. I'd bet lots of users don't even know it exists though. Especially with Chrome hiding so many of their options
It's interesting that you turn on the menu bar. To me this isn't a "tablet" feature at all--it's just a "screen real estate is precious" feature. Even when hidden it's only an Alt press away.
We've got bigger higher resolution screens for every device, screen real estate is only getting less precious and we're still losing affordances like scroll bars and being able to see the top level of the menu hierarchy.
The screen real estate isn't particularly precious on a desktop / laptop with a large, high-resolution screen (much less precious than mobile, for sure), but I also like to get rid of menu bars, tool bars, etc. just because they're visual clutter, and like you say, a keyboard makes up for them.
Ironically, I do enable them on my tablet, because I don't always have a keyboard attached to it. Tablets generally have enough space for full menus / toolbars, and lacking a keyboard they're arguably the form factor most in need of them.
I use three 1440p 27" monitors and vertical real estate is still something I'd seriously inconvenience an adorable puppy for more of. If my desk was a little better-shaped for it and I didn't need a place to put speakers, etc., I'd go back to using at least one vertical display.
What I really wish for are 2000x2000-ish square screens, ~20 inch diagonal with minimal bezel, so that I can stack 3x2 of them and get to work at last instead of flipping wasting screen space and head movements on overly wide screens.
I always turn on the menu bar on the desktop. Screen real estate is valuable, but using some on a menu bar is a very worthwhile expenditure, in my opinion.
I know about the "Alt" key, but I find the need to press that to pop up the menu to be incredibly annoying.
I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for? I ask because I literally can't remember the last time I did in Firefox; everything's a keyboard shortcut. Fullscreen is F11, inspector is F12, refresh is F5 (even go-to-URL-bar is F6).
> I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for?
I use the menu really frequently -- for pretty much anything that isn't a toolbar button.
I tend not to use keyboard shortcuts generally, but particularly if I'm just reading a website -- in that situation, my hands are on the mouse, not the keyboard, and moving to the keyboard to type a shortcut is more inconvenient than just being able to use two clicks on a menu.
I pull down the History menu reasonably often. I'm one of the few people who still uses bookmarks too. I found that hitting alt was annoying and I'd forget about the menu and try to find stuff on the Hamburger menu instead and get annoyed.
Now that you mention it, I also use the history menu pretty frequently. I don't use the bookmark facility in browsers, though, because I run my own bookmark server (so I have access to my bookmarks no matter what computer or browser I'm using).
Maybe you know this already, but Firefox has shortcuts for both of those. History is Ctrl+H and bookmarks is Ctrl+B. Ctrl+Shift+H and Ctrl+Shift+B to get them in a separate window.
The Ctrl-H history opens up the annoying sidebar though, and then you have to click to expand. It's not as ergonomic as the menu. The Bookmarks have the same problem.
On Macs the menu bar is intact, same place it ever was, detached from the firefox window at the top of the screen. The hamburger menu on macos is basically redundant.
Agree! "Mobile First" design thinking should not mean "Mobile Only." What was supposed to be a call to consider all of the devices your users may be utilizing, it just transferred the preference from one type of device to another.
Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support?
> Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support?
Indeed. There seems to be a weird idea that it's possible to make a UI that works well on all form factors. I don't see how that's possible, and I've never seen it happen in practice.
What actually happens is that you have a UI that works well on one form factor and badly on the others, or you have a UI that works poorly on them all.
I think NYTimes.com is a good example. Theres a hamburger menu that expands to the whole screen when on mobile or tablet; its a sidebar on desktop. The whole arrangement of articles becomes linear on mobile; it isnt on desktop. It looks like someone figured out how it should look at every state, and then developed a way to gracefully switch between them -- not that it was a mobile UI that someone decided to enlarge on desktop.
This is one of my favorite parts of OS X, and it's sad that there aren't many Linux DEs doing it: the persistent menu bar. It's always expected that it be right at the top of the screen, and utilized. Firefox and Chrome, by default, have survived hamburgerization...because it can't be hidden. Sure, an application that doesn't use it at all (yuck) can just not implement anything beyond the application name menu, but something like a browser has no choice but for the bar to be visible.
I guess, we may be confident to see the menu bar dissappear in a not so distant future iteration of OS X. With a bit of bad luck and some rather cynical retroverse distortion, it may be replaced by a Hamburger (as in the Xerox Star Interface, which introduced it to indicate the anchor for the single menu in the entire system.)
Placing the cursor in text by imitating the new cursor catch and place game of iOS will be also fun. Probably so much fun that quite a number of people will stay longer in the office to play with it.
That said, the menu bar has already taken serious damage by the introduction of OS X, when the first menu item became the variable width application name. Before this, the File and Edit menus and their essential menu items were exactly on the same place in every application, rendering the most essential commands a matter of muscle memory, quite like a guesture.
Yeah, I always use desktop old reddit on my phone... I like small text I zoom in on.
What I hate even worse though is endless scroll... give me damn pagination with buttons! So I can reload the page and not worry about losing my spot, or accidentally scrolling away... let me use the back button on my browser!
oh yeah. i get that with twitter. view a video, close it and you ve lost your page . i dont know why this even happens but it s more annoying than i could ever imagine. My solution is to switch to chronological-view-only, so at least i can tell whether i ve seen my whole feed
Oh yeah, i was pressing all your buttons randomly because none of them were obvious what they do. I was surely engaging with your app very much, while swearing.
But then we actually had a 13% decrease because our test was fundamentally flawed. Also, we don't really understand the statistics behind a/b testing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Meanwhile it seems like very few people in the industry actually understand statistics well enough to not shoot themselves in the foot. The number of times I've seen accidental p-hacking is absurd. Having to explain to people why they can't stop running a trial as soon as the numbers look good is like pulling teeth.
I think the biggest culprit is "tap targets", meaning that everything has to be bigger than your fingertip so that it's easy to select on a phone. It leads to crazy amounts of white space around everything. This ruined the presentation of tabular data on the internet, like stock financials or nba.com box scores. They're waaaaaaay harder to read than they were 10 years ago.
Google is to blame for this. If you run your site through their usability wizard, it will warn you when links or buttons are too close together, along with insinuating that you won't rank highly for mobile devices if you don't fix it.
The vast majority of the world use mobile devices as their only computing device, and the office workers and power users such as us are minority users and thus get minority attention. I think something like iPad OS getting laptop features and everyone targeting one or two mobile OS targets will be the future in 10 years.
It's like proliferation of electron apps, or how even the prosumer SLR / MILC camera market is dying as smartphone cameras get better and better.
> The vast majority of the world use mobile devices as their only computing device, and the office workers and power users such as us are minority users and thus get minority attention. I think something like iPad OS getting laptop features and everyone targeting one or two mobile OS targets will be the future in 10 years.
If you consider that a tablet is a "computing device" then my washing machine is also one.
> It's like proliferation of electron apps, or how even the prosumer SLR / MILC camera market is dying as smartphone cameras get better and better.
They get "better and better" because they are crap. As U2 said: even better than the real thing.
I spend a huge amount of time making sure that my users get to experience fully-functioning UI on desktop, while not being overly limited on mobile. It's a HUGE part of my workflow, but honestly it's the only way. I can't stand visiting an 'app' website on my desktop only to find that it's 600px wide because it IS the app.
This is fallout with the idea of "mobile-first" development... while I get that it caters to a larger demographic, it is blinded by its own crapulence in regards to _functional_ UI/UX.
This! Somehow I feel that the desktop UX model of 90s were actually conceptually much better than what most modern apps are doing and it's a shame that instead of doing incremental improvements on that (sure, it's far from perfect) we've thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
I don't see the connection between the ribbon and the awful Metro design style. They couldn't be further apart in every way. It might look unfamiliar, but it still packs a ton of functionality into a small space, emphasizes the use of deeply structured alt menus and has tons of customizability. None of which shows up in Metro.
Also, I want to know what brain dead MS designer decided that multitasking different control panel windows was a Bad Thing, and put the whole settings section into a single window that can't be separated. Do these people even use their own OS?
The Ribbon is great. At it's heart it's like a menu and toolbar, but with big recognizable icons, differently sized touch targets depending on importance, and always-on-screen familiarity.
It would work really well as a "menu" for a touch-based OS, even.
> If there are ways to customize it now, I'm not smart enough to do it anymore.
Right click, customize the ribbon. You can set it up however you want.
Or just set it to show only tabs and treat it like a fancy menu bar.
Or hide it completely and just use the command search feature Office apps have in them now. It is like a command line with amazing auto-complete. Alt-q to jump to search.
Have you run into lots of desktop apps using a Ribbon style interface, other than Office? Microsoft didn't do themselves any favors by trying to patent the design and keep an iron fist on it.
I do see a lot of Windows software and utilities that have tried to copy it; there's a set of Telerik controls implementing most of the pattern.
It's just unfortunate, because it started the trend of reducing and hiding functionality. With less examples of what high density software looked and worked like, people don't even know what they are missing.
Then they briefly tried to push the one interface for every device holy grail with Windows 8 and UWP. Thankfully that was abortove, but it's still poisoned things more and hurt information density in its fallout.
How does the ribbon hide functionality compared to menus? I’m a big fan of it because it exposed functionality like styles, using large buttons that intuitively show how the function works, to people who were never going to independently discover them and customise their menu for easier access.
Ribbons aren't easily scannable, because the controls don't line up. Menus line up vertically, toolbars line up horizontally. Granted multi-level menus are evil because what you're looking for may be in a submenu.
Yes, I’ve been using it almost every day for a decade, so I know where everything is by this point – but even when it was released I liked it almost immediately, because it surfaced useful style, paragraph spacing and table editing functions that used to be buried in menus. I prefer the ribbon interface in LibreOffice now, too. Next time you get lost (and it still happens to me just as it did in the menu era), I suggest using the search box instead of your memory of Office 2003.
If Ribbons are implemented well, they're great. But often they're not, and then they're terrible. It takes a lot of work to properly organise a Ribbon for a complex program. Microsoft nailed it for Office, but programs like AutoCAD are still not well done.
Microsoft have put together an awesome guide to the Ribbon. Even if you're not making one, it's a great read that really goes into the reasons it exists: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-r.... I came across this page by chance when I was in high school, and I think it was what sparked my interest in user interface and user experience design.
