The Homer: what UX SHOULDN’T be

“I’m from the gov­ern­ment and I’m here to help you.”

That’s prob­a­bly the most recalled and least offen­sive of the big three lies clas­si­cally dis­cussed. I have a new one to add to the list. “The lat­est ver­sion of SlappHappy Software will bring about world peace.”

Replace the SlapHappy with what­ever piece of bloat­ware you are cur­rently strug­gling with. For me, it’s Microsoft’s Office 2011, specif­i­cally, Word.

I’ve been using Word since it first came out, for the Macintosh, in 1984. The appli­ca­tion fit on a sin­gle floppy disc. It was a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment on Apple’s own MacWrite appli­ca­tion. You could use more type­faces, and the para­graph for­mat­ting capa­bil­i­ties seemed rev­o­lu­tion­ary. WYSIWYG word pro­cess­ing was MODERN, so much more sophis­ti­cated than the embed­ded code style of text-processing appli­ca­tions I had access to prior to the Mac. ScriptVS on a dumb ter­mi­nal access­ing an IBM main­frame, anyone?

Word has been part of my toolkit for over 25 years. I have fought for it, defended it, and prob­a­bly trained hun­dreds of peo­ple to use it. Unfortunately, the sad news is that Word has become a franken­stein app, bloated and green, with parts stuck on wher­ever the mad sci­en­tist in charge has decided to bolt-on some cast-off func­tion that has no place being attached to a tool for wran­gling words. Writers do not need to use many of the things Microsoft has added to Word over the last 10 years. Even more, users can’t FIND the things that Microsoft has added to Word over the years, because it appears that no-one involved in the Word prod­uct devel­op­ment team knows any­thing at all about usability.

All of that is what gets in the way of the hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple with access to Word from pro­duc­ing doc­u­ments that actu­ally make use of the tools avail­able. Sure, there are issues regard­ing the aver­age user being unaware of the ben­e­fits that could be real­ized, but it doesn’t help that fea­tures and lessons are hid­den deep within the user inter­face of an application.

Humans are typ­i­cally resis­tant to learn­ing any­thing unless remain­ing igno­rant pre­vents them from doing some­thing. At the risk of giv­ing cred­i­bil­ity to a fas­cist war­mon­ger, unknow­able unknow­ables are pretty hard to quantify.

My only con­clu­sion can be that the goal of the peo­ple tend­ing these things is not to make the things more usable, bet­ter at what they are sup­posed to do. The goal is to make as much money as pos­si­ble from the manip­u­la­tion of a per­ceived need for the thing, rather than the thing itself.