[abanana]

No, they did not (or if they did, they didn't publish it). If I'm wrong, please give me some links because I'd genuinely love to see it.

Microsoft did those usability studies on the versions of Office that were current before the ribbon. The ribbon followed those studies as their attempt at a solution.

A few times over the years I've tried to search for usability studies of the ribbon interface because I've never got on with it myself. I find plenty of others asking the same thing online, and everybody points them to those same earlier studies from before the ribbon, while wrongly telling them it's a study of the ribbon.

Those studies are unable to tell us whether or not MS's attempt at a solution actually fixed the problems.

I believe the ribbon was a downgrade in usability terms (but people expect it in office suites, purely because it's seen as looking more modern). And I'd love to see real intensive research to tell me whether my belief is right or wrong.

[oblio]

The studies I can't point you to, but there were lots of blogs by the lead Office UX person at the time, Jensen Harris.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/

Unfortunately those blog entries have been destroyed because the images are no longer there.

I read all of them, they were at least 6-7 and quite detailed and I remember thinking that the thought process behind the ribbon was very solid.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ye-o...

etc - you can find all of them there plus many other related blog entries.

[abanana]

Yeah, that's exactly it - there were all those history blogposts, full of very interesting stuff, but all about before the ribbon was in active use. (Pity about the image rot.) No usability studies of the ribbon itself.

Parts of those blog posts were unintentionally revealing of the groupthink of an enclosed bubble of people who couldn't see the wood for the trees. A great example is this piece about moving menu entries around so you couldn't build muscle memory, and had to take the time to look for what you wanted:

> First, remember that we're analyzing this with 20/20 hindsight... there was a lot of excitement (not just at Microsoft) about "auto-customization"... to present exactly the right UI for the person at hand. Now, it's easy to say that today people are generally against this idea... but we know that mainly through trying... the adaptive UI in Office 2000

As I recall it, the vast majority at the time - users, reviewers, UI/UX writers - considered its downsides to be completely obvious and were firmly against it. Its designers were apparently the only ones who needed 20/20 hindsight to see that.

> I remember thinking that the thought process behind the ribbon was very solid

I agree, the historical research, and the work on identifying the problems, was very solid. But the massive criticisms of the ribbon suggest it was not an entirely successful attempt at a solution.

I've seen it said that there's no way Microsoft would have neglected to carry out major usability studies on such a major UI change, and that the fact that nothing's been published, after all the blogposts and talks beforehand, suggests they chose to bury a bad result. No idea whether there's any truth in that of course, but it does sound plausible.