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.