I think the point of the ribbon is to get rid of rightclick menus and the menu bar. This is certainly a requirement for making a touch-first UI.
That said, it will necessarily make mouse based interaction more clunky. But they are committed to touch first, so this is not negotiable.
My issue with the new explorer UI is more specifically about the choices they made within the ribbon. Why put something that provably is never used in there at all? Why not put context-aware stuff in a context aware tab like the image tab in Word (only visiblw when an image is selectad)?
Why put something that provably is never used in there at all?
It's important not to confuse "never used because it's useless" and "never used because nobody knows about it".
Of the items in the Windows 8 "Home" tab that fewer than 84% of people use, half of them appear to be new features and half are features that exist in Windows 7 but don't appear in the toolbar or any context-menu, have no keyboard shortcut, and aren't documented in the help files. People who used these features in XP could be forgiven for thinking Microsoft removed them in Vista.
Why not put context-aware stuff in a context aware tab like the image tab in Word
They do. In their blog post they have examples of context-sensitive tabs for libraries, drives, and images.
Comments
I think the point of the ribbon is to get rid of rightclick menus and the menu bar. This is certainly a requirement for making a touch-first UI.
That said, it will necessarily make mouse based interaction more clunky. But they are committed to touch first, so this is not negotiable.
My issue with the new explorer UI is more specifically about the choices they made within the ribbon. Why put something that provably is never used in there at all? Why not put context-aware stuff in a context aware tab like the image tab in Word (only visiblw when an image is selectad)?
Why put something that provably is never used in there at all?
It's important not to confuse "never used because it's useless" and "never used because nobody knows about it".
Of the items in the Windows 8 "Home" tab that fewer than 84% of people use, half of them appear to be new features and half are features that exist in Windows 7 but don't appear in the toolbar or any context-menu, have no keyboard shortcut, and aren't documented in the help files. People who used these features in XP could be forgiven for thinking Microsoft removed them in Vista.
Why not put context-aware stuff in a context aware tab like the image tab in Word
They do. In their blog post they have examples of context-sensitive tabs for libraries, drives, and images.