I read recently that the current trend in user interface design is to make important buttons big; this makes them easier to find and easier to click with the mouse cursor (more landing area). In contrast, dangerous ones are made harder find and to click.
Sounds reasonable, and we see the effect of this new design philosophy embedded in the much-disparaged ribbon invented by Microsoft. "Much disparaged." Now why would that be?
It does not take long to figure out the flaw fundamental to this philosophy. Who gets to decide which buttons are important? Not the Microsoft Office user, who is not permitted to monkey around with the ribbon — making it near useless.
Let's take the ribbon in AutoCAD 2011, for example. Of AutoCAD's 14 Clipboard-related commands, I use two: CopyClip (copy graphics to the Clipboard) and CopyHist (copy text from the command line to the Clipboard). No points for guessing which command Autodesk programmers think is the most important.
By making the Paste button bigger, Autodesk makes the important button smaller — and harder to read on today's extreme-resolution monitors (which have the unfortunate side effect of miniaturizing user interface elements). In contrast, toolbars have a sensible Large Buttons option for the over-50 crowd, like me; ribbons do not.
I recognize that Autodesk feels it needs to slavishly follow Microsoft's bad example, but just because Paste is the command most-used by Word users doesn't mean it is common among CAD users. I like to think we are more original.
At least Autodesk allows us to modify the ribbon, and — even better — lets us take back the time-tested and user-validated menus and toolbars; Microsoft takes the Apple approach and considers us too stupid to mess with their paragon [an ideal instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept] of a user interface (other than on the Quick Access toolbar).
PS: What does format painter (MatchProp) have to do with the Clipboard?
