Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
no, I'm willing to die on the hill that the ribbon UI is one of the greatest UIs period - especially how it was done in office 07 and 10. As a computer noob at the time, it was a huge improvement over the previous office 2003 UI.
The icons always gave you a good idea what something was doing, important functions were bigger and when you for example selected a table the table tab was visible and with a different color so you knew that you could do things with that table.
I think however many 3rd party programms did the ribbon UI poorly or had not enough features for it to make sense.
I will stand with you on the hill defending the Office 2010 UI, it was beautiful, clear and easy to work with.
The flat design of 2013+ was a mistake.
I think the 2013+ design was fine at time but 10+ years of doing the same flat minimalist design over and over makes me hate it now!