[kiawe_fire]

One of the many paradoxes that I’ve found (but never figured a reason for) is why I’m able to quickly memorize and find my way to common functions via text-based toolbar menus, but to this day, I STILL have to click through each ribbon menu multiple times, study each icon and struggle to read each label, before finding what I want.

Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.

[jwells89]

I think this has to do with the varying designs of each ribbon. Menus and their submenus are more like an index, closely following a particular pattern. Ribbons are more like grocery store layouts with variations that shift around and sometimes seem to not follow any rhyme or reason. It's not too surprising that the former of the two is more easily memorized.

[syntheweave]

Motion patterns in toolbars are strict: you have to start at the top and drill down. This seems like a hindrance, but it means that the motions develop into stronger muscle memory. If you know the names of what you are looking for, you can usually develop the entire shortcut pattern through everyday use, without setting aside practice time(as in a setup like vim or emacs, where you aren't given sufficient prompting to discover and train new interactions automatically).

Ribbons surface more elements to browse in a freeform context, which is correct if you need to discover features...but also conflicts with the goal of a toolbar to be a thin layer over the shortcuts.

[WorldMaker]

One possibility is Mnemonics. You were memorizing the important letters in a text-based menu. Possibly even the keyboard shortcut mnemonics themselves. That's said to be one of the biggest losses in Windows user experience that keyboard mnemonics used to be highlighted at all times with an underline in text menus and then Windows UX switched to only highlighting them when Alt was pressed.

It's something I think about a lot with the Ribbon because it has some really good keyboard mnemonics in Office applications, but mostly only Power Users think to press the Alt button to let them "bubble in" on the Ribbon. The keyboard mnemonic bubbles make great landmarks, and I think that remains one of the reasons I rather like the Ribbon (as a power user) that a lot of people never discover. (In part because I was there a million years ago when Word first lost the underlines and was used to even then pressing Alt on its own just to see them so that behavior carried over to the Ribbon just fine for me, luckily enough.)

[lmm]

Text is more usable than icons. That's one of the few clear-cut results from scientific UX research.

[wolpoli]

One reason could be that the ribbon resizes/hides/collapses buttons depending on the size of the Window. I resizes my word/excel window as I work and it's an ordeal to find the option I want.

[marcosdumay]

I'm on the same boat.

This and the hidden ribbons completely ruin the thing for me. But I do tend to like megamenus on other applications, so the problem is probably office, not the ribbons.

[giantrobot]

Toolbars have text labels. Ribbons have a bunch of small shitty icons on a flat UI background. I can memorize toolbars because it's a set of motions, words, and visual cues. With a Ribbon UI it's a mad search for what I want, hovering over dumb icons to see a label, and repeating that process until I find something. The damn search and rescue process totally blows away my working memory and I won't remember where the button is next time I need it.