It’s like having a robot vacuum. You’ll catch yourself saying “Why is it ALWAYS getting in my way??!” It’s not, it’s just that you only think about where it is when it’s in your way. When it’s not around you, you are thinking about other things.

UI is the same. People complain about any UI they actually stop to notice. If you know the UI well you don’t even really think about it, you just use it. When a UI changes you have to relearn a little bit and this causes people to have to stop and think about the UI.

99.99% of the time people seem to interpret this as “This UI objectively sucks! Any UI I need to think about must be terrible!”

But it’s not that hard to understand that a little relearning will follow change, and that things will have to change over time unless they were perfect forever out of the box, which nothing is.

But no. “The new update is horrible!” Every. Time. It’s so routine to UI designers that they totally ignore this feedback. So people really shouldn’t even bother to post it.

Flat design may be less distracting to you but that also means it's less clear, because there are fewer obvious demarcation.

I despise flat design, it's downright awful design, and done for looks rather than functionality.

to you

Flat design dominates for a reason—the less visually busy something is, the easier it is for users to wrap their heads around it. This gets proven again and again in user studies, the more busy and dense you make things, the more users miss stuff and get lost.

People's opinions on the ribbon specifically are obviously all subjective, but I would say the less distracting design would be the one done less for looks, rather it's a pretty utilitarian design if you pick it apart. This is an interface for productivity tools, and as such the interface should get out of your way until you need it—the ribbon just does that better IMO.

Microsoft also did this to obfuscate features, which is pretty apparent when you consider new users used to "discover" features via the menu system. I supported Office for MS in the early days, and this was a huge thing at the time. It was discussed heavily when training on new versions.

Why on earth would Microsoft want to obfuscate features? There's no way that motivation would ever make sense.

IIRC one of the main reasons Microsoft introduced the ribbon was that grouping functionality contextually helped users discover features, because people kept requesting features that already existed, but they just couldn't find. I remember there being a blog on the Microsoft developer site about the making of it that went into this.

How many UI/UX usability studies have you done yourself. Links to results.

Microsoft also did this to obfuscate features

lol