I may not as an interface designer have much in the way of professional experience in this field, but nonetheless, as an end user of countless hundreds (probably thousands) of programs along with associated interfaces, I do believe I’m qualified to speak about failures when I see them. This is a little piece about the UIs of four programs; Microsoft Office 2007's 'Ribbon' UI (Specifically Word), Serif's PagePlus X2, ATi's Catalyst Control Centre, and Abit's abit EQ. 

I’m actually currently writing this is Microsoft Word 2007. Office 2007 introduced the new ‘ribbon’ style of menu bars. I believe the aim was to make it easier, more logically laid out for the end user, but given the relatively lack of change with Office’s UI over the years until now, this has risked alienating and confusing existing or long time users.  It’s also interesting to note a few days ago, a relative was using one of the PCs in the house to look at a document for work. She accidentally deleted a line and ah, couldn’t find the undo button. I looked through all of the available ribbons, but alas, couldn’t find the undo button. I just said, “Press CTRL+Z”. Of course that worked, but umm, where was the button in the logical layout (I’ve since found it lurking at the top of the screen in something called the “Quick-Access Toolbar”. Besides this, I would say Office otherwise has a rather elegant and simple (if sometimes too simple) interface. There’s also “Hide the Ribbon”, whereby associated menu tabs show when clicked on, with a nice, subtle fade. It gives Word a very effective minimalist UI. No clutter, although functionality if needed. Office rates highly as a result.

Office Screenshots: The Ribbon, Standard UI, Minimised Ribbon

Next up, PagePlus X2 by Serif. It’s an excellent piece of software I use regularly, not just for the DTP it’s designed for, but for various design work. It’s great with vectors and makes a fine piece of software for composition. Anyways,  the UI is more classical than the radical ‘ribbon’.  Save buttons are where you’d expect them to be, menus hold sensible choices, and the whole thing is entirely customisable. Right hand panes can be enlarged/reduced in size, similar to Photoshop, and can be floated out of the application (very useful for dual screen setups, giving a very uncluttered workspace. Sizing is perfect, with my only complaint being the wastes of space in places. Still, I like it, and X2’s interface is great, being sensible, non intrusive and having everything you need. It also comes preset with workspaces (similar to Dreamweaver’s Designer/Coder choices), with a range of options suitable for graphic design, DTP, and where it wins points, presets for “How To” (gives screen real estate to the help system), and a layout preset to match how PagePlus 11 (the previous edition) was set out. This is kind of clever, even with minimal differences in UI (bar the flexibility X2 has over 11), it’s nice to have the option to keep things like they were. Microsoft would have been onto a winner with ribbon if the option was there to keep it 2003 style, choice is great. X2 rates nice and high, with a good design.

PagePlus Screenshots: Main View

ATI’s Catalyst Control Centre comes under the guns next, as a bit of an example of trying. The default is to use the system skin, which is plainly, fugly. It’s not especially awful, it just looks...dated. It’s all boxy and square against the rounded curves of Vista. Kind of shabby, with pieces of the UI simple lacking functionality you’d expect (it has a two-pane layout, with selections on the left, and options for selections on the right. Most two-pane programs, you’d expect a slider to control the size of both panes. Not with CCC. You also can’t resize the application. However, CCC does come with a selection of skins. It uses Stardock’s skinning system, although I’m none too sure who designed the actual skins. These unfortunately go to the other extreme. They can’t be accused of boxy/square fuglyness, more so excessively large, chunkiness. Buttons are too large with poor contrast, and it suffers worse from the pane limitation. Still, the fact its Stardock powered skinning suggests ATI are aware its fugly. AMD/ATi (well mainly the ebil AMD) have some master plan to integrate Catalyst with all AMD drivers for some world dominating unified drivers, for motherboard chipset, graphics card, and probably AMD powered microwave. I’d imagine then, they realise there’s definite room for improvement. It’s only saving grace, moreso from an application point of view than a UI perspective is the excellent integration with Help with the application. I found some LCD overdrive thing, and without an internet connection (Help is offline), it popped up a page with a nicely detailed description of what it is. Which is nice, but the UI still fails it.

Catalyst: Standard Skin , 'Crimson' Skin

Finally, Abit’s “abit EQ” program comes in nicely as a complete and utter failure of interface design. It actually looks like Abit are attempting to make their program for their motherboards friendly for five years old. Hello? How many five year olds know about vague principles of electricity let alone understand what the voltages on various components are. Absolute failure. In fairness to Abit, its hardly like they’re the only criminal in bundled motherboard utilities. Nearly all software that comes with motherboards has disgustingly awful interfaces. Abit’s blue-truck UI is hardly the worst, but far from the best. Motherboard manufacturers, if you’re listening, fire your interface guys monkeys and hire someone with an age above five. Please. Secondly, people actually don’t want to use your downright nasty apps anyways. Some kind of standardised protocol that makes the information available for other uses (even XML wouldn’t make me cry), is far better than fugly applications. It’s just a good job programs like Speedfan can pickup the data off the sensors anyways. You’d save money and please more people not releasing this trash. Honest.

PS: the temperature readouts for the cores, clockspeed and equalizer is several times more useful, and uses a grand total of 2mb of ram. Abit EQ uses 7mb of ram. Stupidity.

Abit EQ: You only need one screenshot.