Haven't read the book but per your comment it occurs that assuming the reality of the 'left off 1%', it is possible that these are distinct market segments. Did Norman or anyone else ever try to correlate demographic aspects with product mis-fit? In other words, the disconnect is possibly at the market/product level and the same unsatisfied with defaults 1% may be perfectly happy with another product that is designed for them (thus having few knobs). Not asserting this but wonder if this is indeed the case.
You know the saying about how majority of users of certain very powerful packages only use a tiny fraction of available functions?
Allegedly Microsoft found out that the problem was that the features covered by that fraction were wildly different in case of MS Office. That is, any cut down, simplification, etc. would result in huge amount of disappointed users, because the used featuresets didn't really overlap outside of certain core. At the same time trying to package it into market segments might just mean you end up with too small niches.
The other problem is that each thing your decide should definitely be "this way and no other" is probably shaving off a different 1% of the population.
I maintain that the Ribbon on office is this problem writ large: I'm sure Microsoft did a lot of user studies, and I'm equally sure that by averaging out all those results they managed to prioritise nothing useful to any actual business - hence why the product feels bizarrely unprofessional these days and is now impossible to configure to suit any specific type of writing.
The real trick with Ribbon is that in MS Office it makes it somewhat easier to find functionality (the search interface helps with that) and it tries to expose keyboard shortcuts easier.
AFAIK the research behind the ribbon showed that 1) there was no way to find features easily 2) Main menu was too cluttered and undiscoverable.
Of course if you actually found the features you wanted before that, it was a big negative change.
Paradoxically the ribbon makes harder the one thing it was supposed to make easier. Nothing lines up, so a visual scan of the whole thing is very hard to accomplish.
In the old interface it may have been hard to find things. But once you found them, they were always in the same place. With modern interfaces, everything jumps around and hides itself depending on some obscure context and the window size.
> A crucial part of Ribbon, as implemented by MS Office, is a search interface.
If the search interface was what was missing, why the fuck didn't they just add that to the old menus and toolbars? (Seems to work on many Macintosh applications, doesn't it? And probably some Windows ones too.)
Because it wasn't the only thing. Ribbon specifically on MS Office was informed by a lot of data gathered from users and attempting to make functionality more visible (also, it kinda promotes keyboard shortcuts - hit alt and look at ribbon)
Of course a lot of applications later "embraced" Ribbon without all that preparation, and to be quite honest, I don't hear much complaints about Ribbon in Office - outside of nostalgia it's rare.
Yeah, well, as far as I am concerned, they pretty much failed on the other bits. You not hearing many complaints about it any more is probably because most of us have stopped mentioning it (outside of discussions specifically about it), because nobody gave a shit then either, any more than you do now.
One such example might be accessibility settings. Such settings are likely only used by a small subset of users, but it might be critical for such users.
Many modern video games start by displaying such settings. The defaults probably suit most users just fine, but being able to easily scale UI text is probably very useful for people with poor vision.
