Usability: Why move the menu bar?

adrian@arctus.co.uk (Adrian O'Connor) — Wed, 02 May 2007 07:24:00 -0400

Microsoft released their most recent version of Internet Explorer with much fan-fare. They added tabs, made marginal improvements to the rendering engine, increased security and changed the user interface. It is the change to user interface that I am interested in here.

Back in 1995, Microsoft employeed David Cooper to design the Windows 95 interface, a design that has largely stuck until now. David Cooper then wrote a book on the matter About Face and this has become something of a bible.

The most important lessons that we learn as we design interfaces for our applications is that certain, fundamental principles must not be broken. The most important, by far, is: predictability. Our software must follow paradigms that almost all moderately competent computer users have learned.

What Microsoft did with IE7 appears to be change for the sake of change. They were clearly desperate to make Internet Explorer as visibly different to its predecessor as possible, thus creating a greater ‘feeling’ of change – if it looked the same as the previous version, people wouldn’t perceive any especially large benefit in upgrading, and would be happy to leave things as they were.

As an aside, Firefox, now that it has reached a nice stable plateau of functionality, may see this reluctance when they release future versions – even more so maybe, because the quality of Firefox 2 is actually very high, and most users will be quite satisfied already.

Why change the menu bar?

Because a web browser is little more than big blank canvass upon which the treasures of the web will be displayed, the only thing that can feasibly be (noticably) changed to any great effect is the small bank of buttons and menus at the top of the window. You can add features that appeal to marginal users, like RSS feed intergration and mail clients, but you’re getting in to feature-creep territory and that’s a losing battle – small tools that do one job and do it very will will always win out in the end.

For these reasons Microsoft, I believe, chose to move the menu bar and the toolbar to new locations compared to previous versions and other applications. They might have justified it to themselves by claiming that, since the Back button and URL field are by far the most used elements of the browser’s designed interface that they deserve the most prominent position in the window. That, of course, is nonsense.

Maybe the designers at Microsoft are paying their own special kind of hommage to the Apple designers. Safari certainly does feature a very minimal row of interface elements that are very prominantly at the top of the window. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Apple get away with this because it is central to their entire design philosophy. By placing the application menu at the top of the screen, they can dedicate this area to the toolbar and achieve extreme consistency across the board.

An Apple Mac user will automatically know where the features they anticipate finding will be in Safari. By contrast, experienced Windows users who have been using IE7 for many months now still struggle to find certain menu options – and they still don’t expect to find the menu bar half-way down the toolbar when the press alt. It makes no sense according to their expectations. It makes very little sense full-stop, but that’s a little by-the-bye.

Following on from IE7, Microsoft introduced a second major distruption to a well established interface – Microsoft Office. I haven’t used Office 2007 for long enough yet to comment in depth, but I have used it enough to form a very strong impression that even more than IE7 the changes are purely for the sake of change.

It is my opinion that Office 2007, despite its pleasing eye-candy, is significantly less usable than previous versions of Microsoft Office. This isn’t a matter of re-training, this is a matter of shifting paradigms and learning layouts that look good but make little sense. Maybe once we have learned the new menus inside out things will seem different, and maybe we will wonder how we ever coped with having all of our options available to us without having to explore a nest of panels to get there.

I think future interfaces will be much simpler than those that we are used to, but I don’t think that Office 2007 gets it right. I think that the most usable interfaces will be much more minimal, and will adapt to the current context of our document. I hope to elaborate on this soon with a future article on my thoughts on direction of design.

Until then, I think I’ll stick with Firefox and Office 2003 for day-to-day use.

Arctus Blog: Usability: Why move the menu bar?

Usability: Why move the menu bar?

Why change the menu bar?