A huge amount of user research went into the original ribbon. However, it looks like they decided that no further research was needed and just started moving everything into the ribbons without any thinking whatsoever.
Using the new ribbon version of office I found out that document properties could only be inspected by clicking on a golden orb and going into a menu called "Publish". Similarly most other less-often used features became impossible to find. I've refused to use office for any substantial document ever since. I can only assume that this research was targeted at new users and not existing users.
Relevant parts: by Office 2003 they had 250 top-level menu items and 50 toolbars (Part V), and this was becoming unmanageable. In Office 2003 they started collecting info on how people are using Office: About 1.3 billion sessions since shipping Office 2003, over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days (Part VI).
I won't quote the rest because it's a very good series of articles.
Similarly for editing charts in excel which became a multi-click hell. Whereas in 2000/XP office you could quickly rearrange series in charts by dragging and enable chart elements at a click now it’s a tedious unintuitive affair.
I’d be curious to see some of that research. Some technical tools I use have migrated to ribbon UIs. Matlab is one example and it’s utterly broken. Tiling the main IDE window beside a text editor (a standard way of using matlab) on a 15” MBP results in many of the ribbon sections turning into big empty gray spaces requiring yet another click into a cascading shitshow. Fortunately I rarely need to use anything in there as the wasn’t enough there to warrant a ribbon in the first place.
Another example is CAD software like Solidworks, but that’s a masterclass in awful UI design all on its own.
The word "research" implies "science", but to me is valid only if you go all the way, and publish the methods and the data for peer review. Until then my take is, someone had a bunch of opinions and didn't allow users to keep the old menu.
I think that's a very narrow view of research. There are many private for profit entities that don't publish their findings because they'd rather capitalize on their findings.
