What is the correct way to organize the Buttons of the ribbon when there are not too many buttons and most overlap for different Views?

Question

I am working in an application that didn't have a ribbon before. We are making major changes in the way the functionality of the application can be accesed, but not in the functionality itself.

The application offers functionality that can be inserted in other applications, so when a Tab of our application is active we want a contextual tab to be shown.

When the user selects a tab of our application a Contextual tab will appear "My application" and it will have the buttons for the functionality.

Our problem comes because, most of the "tabs" or reports are of 3 different types.

Most of them are "Viewers", they just display the information, so the buttons available are like "expand sections" and things like that.

Then we have tabs that are "Editors", that allow to see the information but additionally you can edit it. So we would still have the same buttons than for the "Viewers", but additionally there would be "Delete", "Save" and such, that get enabled depending on certain conditions.

And finally we have one Tab that when it shows, has the same buttons than the Editors (Viewers + Special Buttons of the Editors) plus some more with functionality specific just for this tab.

The distribution would be something like:

7 Viewers => with 8 buttons

7 Editors => with 3 additional buttons (plus the 8 buttons of the Viewers)

1 Special Tab => with all the buttons of the Viewers and Editors plus 4 dedicated buttons.

I have been reading here, to try and decide what would be the better way to organize these buttons on the ribbon, in a usable way and compliant with microsoft guidelines, but I am confused.

Depending on how you see this there are several posible ways of organizing the buttons on the Ribbon.

• The easiest way is to always have all the buttons, and enable them for the corresponding Reports. But this would cause that in many cases there would be many buttons that do not apply to the View that is selected.

• We could have several tabs: Have the buttons of the Viewers, that are common for all the cases, in a tab. The "Editor" dedicated buttons in another tab. And finally an additional tab for the Special report buttons. But I feel that since they are not too many buttons, this approach would force the user to do unnecessary clicks, which is not very usuable.

We can not change the underlying functionality (the separation in all these different reports), since we are just encapsulating a legacy application.

Any advice you can give me in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I followed up this question in other places and I finally I got a Microsoft Answer on their position over this issue. You can find the whole thread here

The Guidelines in this case are not inclined towards one thing or the other. More specific usability studies can be used by the testers to determine which is better in a specific scenario.

Although the answer basically is what I would have guesed (to do what best fits your case), The reason I opened this question is because part of the License agreement for using the Ribbon says that you have to follow Microsoft Guidelines to create the Ribbon. And It was not clear to me in this specific case what was the path suggested by the Guidelines.