New Ribbon interface, what do you think?

Hi Everyone,

Just jumping in to see if I can help explain the thinking behind our Ribbon implementation.

The primary reason to adopt a Ribbon is that it's a familiar design pattern to standardize on.
If we made 1 application, it would be a different situation, but when you look at a suite of products used together with a mix of Ribbon, Task, and Toolbox approaches - we needed to take a step to increase the common ground.

A while back I emphasized that we didn't just "do a Ribbon". We added key enhancements which will only be defended once they prove themselves in production workflows.

In fact, there's a key question I can ask to lead our discussion to explore this deeper...

"Do you use shift+right click to access view tools?"
(and yes I realize common view operations are directly mapped to the mouse)

Best regards,

Gino

Gino,

I don't use shift+right click to access view tools but will start using it from now on! I'm not quite sure what KEN-T is on about when talking about the shortcut: Press Shift (1st action), right click (2nd), click Window Area tool (3rd) VS Press ESC button/home focus(1st action) press 4 - View tools(2nd), press 4 Window Area tool (3rd). Or am I missing something? 

I would have to say that the CE ribbon is larger than other ribbons I'm used to, and does slightly take up more screen real-estate, but my main issue is it's responsiveness. It always seems to take a second between my clicks to access the tool and actually opening the tool.

Best regards,

Liam

P.S microstation has been in need of an interface update for years but you're never going to please the anti ribbon clan, 

As others have mentioned, the ribbon takes up too much real estate. Programs like Word, Excel, Outlook are fine for a ribbon interface. How often do you change the tool you are utilizing at any given time in those products? How often do you need to change tools to zoom in/out or pan around? Not very often. The beauty of the Task Menu is that it is relatively small & can be docked along the side of your screen where we have move room. I was able to customize the task menu so that all of the tools that a drafter will use is under 1 tab. No flyout menus, no switching from tab to tab. Everything needed on a daily basis (+ some) are right in front of you. Nothing is hidden. I have not used Connect very much and from what I see, if I tried to create a Ribbon in the same manner it would take up have of one of my monitors. The position mapping & task menus have been the best improvement in the GUI as far as I am concerned. Do we really need to "Keep up with the Jones's". Hey everyone else is doing it so let's jump off the bridge with them!

Quit changing the way we access our tools! There is no other software that I am aware of that used the Task based interface as v8i. It is unique, works extremely well in a production environment, is very efficient & customizable.

And yes, I know you can still access the task menu and position mapping in Connect, but it is not nearly as user friendly.

It's unfortunate that Connect has already gone to the Ribbon menu as Bentley will not abandon the idea give the R&D already invested.

Unknown said:

Programs like Word, Excel, Outlook are fine for a ribbon interface. How often do you change the tool you are utilizing at any given time in those products? How often do you need to change tools to zoom in/out or pan around? Not very often.

The ribbon is done well in Autodesk Revit, I use it just as much as MicroStation and I need access to the Revit tools just as much as the MicroStation tools. The issue is not that there's a ribbon, (unless you're part of the anti-ribbon clan) the issue is that the current CONNECT ribbon is not executed correctly. Which, if I'm honest, isn't surprising as most software that migrated to a ribbon didn't have a perfect interface off the bat.

Can we please stop looking back and focus on improving the ribbon? Or is that beyond the realm of possibility for some?

LF

Hello Gino,

I'll comment more about the ribbon later when time permits, I would like to hear your views on the size of the small icons used in the UI, the lack of medium sized icons and of course the over the top giant icons which take up too much space. Please take a look at these in light of todays hi-res monitors.

Regards Ken

I don't like the ribbon in any software so you can categorize me as part of the Anti-Ribbon Clan if you like. If you stop looking back you will forget what was good and you continue to repeat bad ideas. It seems Bentley stopped looking back at all the problems that still exist from Microstation J as those problems keep caring forward.

Gino,

The layout of these panels are a big problem. I find these ribbon panels a lot harder to read than

 

the good old-fashioned menu style

The panel shows a tip that may very well hide what you're looking for and the tooltip doesn't even work (maybe it does on QWERTY, but that doesn't help me any for now).

I'm sure the tip thing will be sorted out some day, but panels are, to me at least, harder to read and use than menus.

Is there a way to make these grouppopup panels appear in menu style?

instead of "ribbon grouppopup", "ribbon menupopup" since inputmanager seems to be tied to the taskbar.

Could it be done? The zigzag big/medium/small, text or not mishmash is just never going to make sense to me.

Gino,

The layout of these panels are a big problem. I find these ribbon panels a lot harder to read than

 

the good old-fashioned menu style

The panel shows a tip that may very well hide what you're looking for and the tooltip doesn't even work (maybe it does on QWERTY, but that doesn't help me any for now).

I'm sure the tip thing will be sorted out some day, but panels are, to me at least, harder to read and use than menus.

Is there a way to make these grouppopup panels appear in menu style?

instead of "ribbon grouppopup", "ribbon menupopup" since inputmanager seems to be tied to the taskbar.

Could it be done? The zigzag big/medium/small, text or not mishmash is just never going to make sense to me.

Unknown said:

Is there a way to make these grouppopup panels appear in menu style?

Yes. In the preferences under the ribbon section you can change Position-Mapped Groups setting:

For reference this is the ribbon layout I use (it is a custom one I made):

If set to Group Popup taking the text group as an example if I press T on my keyboard the following will appear wherever my mouse cursor is:

If set the Menu you would get the following:

Unknown said:

Koert

Is there a way to make these grouppopup panels appear in menu style?

Yes. In the preferences under the ribbon section you can change Position-Mapped Groups setting:

*snip*

David,

that looks promising, but after having tried it, a few observations:

1. It only seems to work with position mapping, so it's tied to the active tab. Hence you lose the option of using keyboard shortcuts to retrieve any popup you want without needing to navigate tabs as well. So again: Is a key-in available to show any ribbon panel popup in menu-style?

2. It doesn't work on the locks or snap icons at the bottom of the screen, it would be better if this preference was a more general setting that worked on all "ribbon grouppopup" actions and replaced those with "ribbon grouppopup menu" actions. A key-in option to force panel or menu style would also be nice for the odd exception like the spacebar popup that you wouldn't want to have follow this preference.

3. This "Position-Mapping" option is unfortunately not available in MicroStation PowerDraft CONNECT Edition. This wouldn't be a problem if  it wasn't tied to Position Mapping at all, see previous suggestion. Having convenient menu style popups, without having the option of also having these in PowerDraft is highly impractical for people who switch between the different products, and doesn't help PowerDraft users in general.

Thank you for looking into it though.

Best Regards,

Koert

David, How do we get that bar under your ribbon?

*Edit* Nevermind, figured it out.. Right click the toolbox under customize and click Open as toolbox... this combined with the task navigation and I can get this looking like V8i!

Limitations with the task navigation I have noticed:
1) There is no more Show/Hide Tests
2) You cannot shrink the width of the task bar as much as in V8i.