One area in the eagerly awaited Wave 4 updates to the Essentials Desktop Applications that I would love to see applied is a consistency across the User Interface wherever possible. As many users who have been testing Windows 7 are well aware, the user friendly Ribbon Interface has been applied to the new version of Paint and has also been added to Windows Movie Maker which is currently in beta.
The Ribbon User Interface is all about making your application easier to use for any newcomer trying to ‘get to grips’ with a particular programs many features and it obviously works best when applied to the more complicated and feature laden program which contains many different choices for the user to make. In my humble opinion, another application in the Essentials Suite that would greatly benefit from having the Ribbon user interface applied to it is Writer.
Of course current users of Writer will be aware that it already presents some of its choices in a similar way already. Take the Picture Menu in the sidebar as an example. If you click on a picture that you have inserted into your draft post, the sidebar instantly changes to the PICTURE MENU which contains all the choices that you the user might wish to apply, and only those choices are presented to the user, which then helps to ‘declutter’ that Menu thereby making it easier to use. However, at the moment the present Writer interface also duplicates a lot of the choices available to the user as well.
INSERT for example is both available from the INSERT tab in the top Taskbar, its also available from the COMPOSE screen taskbar and its available from the Sidebar Menu as well. That’s three separate places just for INSERT!
Click on the FORMAT tab in the Taskbar Menu at the top of the writer screen and you can set up your Fonts, numbering, bullets, block quote, but……you can also do this from the Compose Screen Taskbar as well. And I could go on. All of the choices for the user could be made much simpler and therefore easier to learn and use if Writer employed the Ribbon Interface in my opinion, and this would render the Sidebar Menu currently positioned on the right hand side of the Compose window surplus to requirements.. The Compose window itself could then be expanded to the full width of the screen.
What would the Ribbon Interface in Writer need to contain? Well, I think it would end up looking rather similar to the Ribbon interface in Word seeing as both of these programs do have lot’s of similar functions in common.
The HOME tab would obviously need to contain FILES, BLOGS, FONTS, FORMAT and all the other items that you would need to begin to write a post and/or switch to another Blog Account, although perhaps in the case of Writer, the inclusion of a BLOGS tab would be more prudent to enable all users accounts, view blog, edit blog, edit settings, add blog account, etc to be easily accessible.
INSERT. When this tab was selected, the Ribbon contents and choices would then change to show all the items to the user that they might which to insert into the post including the ADD A PLUG IN feature. This tab and its corresponding Ribbon contents would contain all the items that the user could INSERT such as Hyperlink, Picture, Video, Photo Album, Table, Map, etc etc.
There could be a TOOLS tab as well, which could contain all the settings that the user needs to have available to them in order to configure WRITER’s default options to suit them, such as whether or not to remind the user to insert TAGS, CATAGORIES etc before publishing and any other preferences that they might like to set up.
PREVIEW and the SOURCE features could be available under the VIEW tab Ribbon as could EDIT and I am sure that you will all have your own ideas on how using the Ribbon Interface could enhance the beginners ability to make full use of Writer easier.
Of course all of this is just wishful thinking on my part, but I do think that there needs to be more consistency across the user interface in the Essentials suite of programs. The use of the Ribbon Interface is not suitable for all applications of course, only those which contain a lot of choices to be made by the user, but I know that making any application easier to use for everyone is surely an ultimate goal that everyone strives to achieve, and in my view, Writer is an ideal candidate for the Ribbon Interface.
TG 
What do you think?
