From SecretGeek.net:

You do not have to comply to every standard, achieve the perfect balance between maintainability and performance. Usability and familiarity.

How true. Maintainability often means better organized, more object-oriented (in most cases) and more abstracted code which in almost every case means slower code. But how about his second point…

Usability vs Familiarity

Are these two really competing objectives? Lets break it down. Familiarity in applications is when a user has seen a concept in the past and therefore is more comfortable with it. Usability in applications is based on how well the user can use the product. That may include prior experience and training or may not.

So can an application be both usable and familiar? Of course it can! But can that be difficult to achieve? Of course it can! Let’s dive into some examples…

Familiar, Not Usable

There are many examples of familiar, but not very usable applications. Microsoft Word has been around for 25 years now. Everyone knows how to use it:

You type text. You select text. You hunt through every menu until you find the option you want. After 25 years of bloat and feature creep, it became a little unbearable:

Usable, Not Familiar

That’s what lead to the design of the ribbon:

Of course the ribbon is at this point in time an example of an unfamiliar, but very usable concept. At first glance of the ribbon, I pretty much had no idea what to do, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. However, one great feature of the ribbon is that it’s discoverable. After a little playing around, you totally get it.

Familiar AND Usable

And what’s great about it. In the not too distant future, for most people the ribbon will be both usable and familiar which is the goal of UI design. Where I work, we’ve already started throwing around the idea of using the ribbon. It’s simply a great concept whose time has finally come. Dealing with thousands of options can be pretty agonizing, but having a tool like this to easily group and dynamically resize the groupings when the application itself resizes will be a boon to my group.

However, the ribbon won’t solve all of our UI woes. So if it took Microsoft 25 years to finally get to a good interface…

…what chance do we have?