Office is Bloated, Let’s Add More

date:2006-06-07 15:39:15 category:Culture of Complexity

“There has been a lot of skepticism about the usefulness–and necessity–of the Ribbon, and I have to admit that I was among the doubters. Why change something that works? Because, according to Microsoft, the current interface has become bloated with too many menus.”

Ugh. It’s bloated, so we’ll add features to conceal the bloat. Great approach. Feed the obese, hand anvils to the drowning, throw gasoline on the fire.

Why do we buy this?

I think it’s because we don’t see a choice. OpenOffice [link ] is risky, too new, feature poor or some such malarky. All false, but who wants to be first to jump ship? Not my company’s IT department.

I wish that “Big IT” (the architects in Fortune 500 companies) would survey users and examine documents to find out what really happens with users of MS-Office products. I suspect the 80-20 rule would apply and they’d see the following:

• 10% of the users are power-users who can do nice high-quality publication, using style sheets and other tools. These people are essentially professional layout/editor writer types or the kind of jack-of-all-trade administrative assistants who support a power user.
• They’d find 80% of the ordinary user community who can write a document and are happy with that. This breaks down into the 16% who can use the spell checker and know what the grammar checker is doing, and the 64% who can’t use the spell checker and turn the grammar checker off.
• They’d find the weird 10% of people who misuse Word egregiously. These are people who make giant spreadsheet-like tables because they can’t figure out Excel, or who make hyper-complex interlinked documents because they can’t figure out FrontPage. These are the people writing VBA scripts and attaching them to documents to automate something that has little or nothing to do with Word.

If users would complain about how Office is structured, perhaps we could get many simple applications that really work instead of a few bloated, complex applications that we can barely use.

When they went to the hidden and optional menu items, I was already baffled by the complexity of the product. When they put functions that only appear when you right click the right UI element, I hated it. Now, they’ve had to do away with their menu structure altogether because they won’t fix the root cause (bloat) and instead elect to add to it.

Here’s the bottom-line.

If the menu structure isn’t obvious, you’re working with the wrong metaphors.

Check out resources like Trolltech’s Books about GUI Design [link ].

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines [link ] are pretty clear.

“Take advantage of people’s knowledge of the world by using metaphors to convey concepts and features of your application. Metaphors are the building blocks in the user’s mental model of a task. Use metaphors that represent concrete, familiar ideas, and make the metaphors obvious, so that users can apply a set of expectations to the computer environment.”