First of all, loving this program! Its design is very clean and has all the functionalities I typically want from an office suite, so I’d love if it could be my daily driver; I just need to gauge where the development status is of a couple features holding me back.
The ribbon tabs feel cramped, especially Home. There’s a poor handling of screen economy. On my laptop I’m accustomed to UIs making excellent use of limited vertical space like Google Docs and LibreOffice Writer’s “Single Toolbar”, but on OnlyOffice several icon design choices are making the ribbon needlessly spill onto a second line.
I’ll mainly talk about the document editor here. If a toggleable new View mode called ‘Compact’ or ‘Single Line’ or an experimental redesign opt-in was only implemented there, I’d be happy.
Home tab
The most actionable change is to the Styles graphical selector of the document ribbon’s Home tab. It takes up fully half the screen width right now! Yet it’s a feature I rarely use. Only enough to warrant it being a dropdown, like it already is in the previous mentioned examples. (On top of that its white background is garish in dark mode so I have no sympathy for it.)
If Styles were a dropdown, you’d be 90% of the way to having a single-line toolbar. Next would just be to bundle alignment-justification as a single dynamic dropdown icon, and that’s probably it. You could also bundle superscript-subscript and reconsider why text direction and select all warrant appearing on Home, but I won’t get ahead.
Other tabs
Some tabs would just need to be made icon-only to become single line. Others would just need to be made text-beside-icon rather than text-below-icon. A couple more would need deeper consideration like I just gave Home, but it’s easy to start imagining.
I’d love to see this sort of ribbon redesign for screen economy considered as an optional compact View mode, so that I can have a cleaner look on my limited display space, for especially the document editor’s Home tab (or beyond)!