Two of our client companies have reported a problem regarding the financial software that we are providing them. We had not been able to reproduce the problem in any of the computers in our company so we had a hard time fixing it. It was not until after 3 weeks and lots of coffee and tea, that we were able to finally solve it. The culprit? Microsoft's design of the new Ribbon interface in Microsoft Office Word.
The problem was that a piece of code, which was supposed to run when the Ribbon is loaded, had not been executing as otherwise expected. Apparently, our clients have been using our software on a small screen resolution and this has resulted in Word opening in a small window. When Word opens in a small window, the Ribbon remains "out of sight", that is, it doesn't get loaded at program startup (figure 1). It is only when Word is resized to a certain threshold size that the ribbon appears and enters "Word's mind" (figure 2).
Figure 1
Figure 2
To be fair, it was not actually Microsoft's fault but ours. We should have researched more about the Ribbon interface or at least tested our system thoroughly under different scenarios and computing environments.
Nevertheless, I still think that the decision of Microsoft to not load the Ribbon on smaller windows may not be the best design option there is. I think it's better to load the ribbon and just show it in a more compact version when viewed under small window sizes.