Will the ribbon work in mac? Design clue…
Microsoft was under no obligation to build a ribbon component, similar to the one premiered in Office for Windows, for the Mac. That’s especially true given the fact that the menu bar is such a prominent element of the Mac user experience. Ever since System 7, the menu bar which remains fixed to the top of the screen indicates which application is active. In Windows, applications have their own menu bars, if they have them at all; and starting with Office 2007, the ribbon replaced the menu bar.
In Windows, the replacement of the menu bar for Office apps was one of its design goals: a way to reduce screen clutter and minimize the steps or clicks required for a user to find a function. At least that’s how Microsoft presented the original idea back at PDC in September 2005.
In MacOS, you can’t replace the menu bar, so a ribbon would have to find some way of complementing it, sharing the workload with it, in a way that makes sense to the user. And that’s the problem: Judging from the one screenshot Microsoft released yesterday of an early development build of Word 2011 for Mac, it’s not obvious how its implementation of the ribbon will complement, and coexist with, the menu bar.
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Perhaps one screenshot isn’t a good enough clue, but that screen does show the new Home tab of Word, as it’s currently being envisioned. If a new user, unfamiliar with the word processor, were to sit down to this screen and try to ascertain how to use this program on her own, it seems more likely she’d start by perusing the menu bar than the ribbon tabs.
For three decades now, the most skilled developers have embraced and extended the principle that menus in a bar should have consistent categories whose divisions are simple for someone to intuit without a manual. When asked to give my advice on the matter, I’ve always maintained that menus should distinguish between actions and things, the same way a sentence clearly distinguishes between verbs and objects.
For instance, “Insert” is a very straightforward menu name that implies the creation of something new, typically a visual component rather than just text. “Insert” is the name of a ribbon tab in Office 2007 and 2010 for Windows. “Edit,” meanwhile, implies the changing of something already present.
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