Word and Outlook becoming too complicated for 80% of its users.

[Guest]

I have considered myself a fairly advanced user of various wordprocessing
Generally, if someone in th office wants to know how to do something, they
come ask me. I work in a law office and the level of competency
expected/required is probably pretty high compared to most offices. Yet I
find that most users are working with our programs at a very rudimentary
level. As for myself, I have seen my productivity steadily decrease because
even very simple tasks require more and more steps. Styles drive me crazy.
I used to use a couple of macros to do all this and didn't have to spend my
time undoing what Word tries to anticipate I want to do. I do turn off most
of the automatic features . I do set up hot keys and macros and this helps.
But both Office and Outlook are less and less user friendly. All the new
features require too much time and training to put to them to use. My bet is
that it won't be too long before someone is going to come out with an "Office
Light" to do away with Office's overly complicated menus and choices. In
other words, "office suites" will be tailored to specific industries instead
of trying to do all things for all people . . . . . . Simplify simplify

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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...78e76b&dg=microsoft.public.word.docmanagement

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You and your users are going to love the new UI (in Office 12) as much as we
power users hate it.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

I have considered myself a fairly advanced user of various wordprocessing
Generally, if someone in th office wants to know how to do something, they
come ask me. I work in a law office and the level of competency
expected/required is probably pretty high compared to most offices. Yet I
find that most users are working with our programs at a very rudimentary
level. As for myself, I have seen my productivity steadily decrease because
even very simple tasks require more and more steps. Styles drive me crazy.
I used to use a couple of macros to do all this and didn't have to spend my
time undoing what Word tries to anticipate I want to do. I do turn off most
of the automatic features . I do set up hot keys and macros and this helps.
But both Office and Outlook are less and less user friendly. All the new
features require too much time and training to put to them to use. My bet is
that it won't be too long before someone is going to come out with an "Office
Light" to do away with Office's overly complicated menus and choices. In
other words, "office suites" will be tailored to specific industries instead
of trying to do all things for all people . . . . . . Simplify simplify

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...78e76b&dg=microsoft.public.word.docmanagement

 

[Jonathan]

You and your users are going to love the new UI (in Office 12) as much as
we power users hate it.

I don't wish to be negative, but isn't that statement exactly the same as
that made by MS every single time a new major release of Word (or Office)
comes out? New "features", new "enhancements" to existing features... and
with Office 12 a whole new UI! Oh great (that's assuming we can pay for the
"upgrade" before we're forced to).

Consider this: Word is what, 25 years old? How far has the world of "word
processing" moved on in that time? Did requirements for templates, footers,
tables of contents, etc. not exist before Word arrived? How long does a
desktop software UI need to settle down? How long does it take for basic
(not even advanced) requirements like a table of contents to be de-bugged
to the extent that it works as expected every time? How long to design a
decent interface for cross-referencing? How long before auto-numbering
might be thought of as even generally stable? The list seems endless. Over
two decades, and still you talk about the new UI as if that's a good thing
for users!

I wouldn't complain so much if I had a choice of word processor, but I
don't. I'd like to use Open Office, but I can't (yet). So until then I feel
justified is venting my frustration and anger at Microsoft (and not at you
Suzanne, for I know you are blameless and in fact actually very lovely) for
the travesty that is Microsoft Word.

Jonathan

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The ease of creating headers, footers, TOCs, footnotes, indexes, etc., has
actually improved tremendously since Word 2.0 (where I started), even though
the field codes that underlie these features have remained the same. Even
when it was necessary to insert XE and TC and other fields manually, it was
still an incredible improvement over the effort required to do all these
things manually (using a typewriter), which I did for more than 20 years
before I started with Word 2.0.

You may complain about auto numbering (as we all do), but it would change
your viewpoint a little if you sat down in a room with Microsoft developers
(as we Word MVPs did last year) and discussed how we expected numbering to
behave. When the developers start asking, "Well, but what would you want the
numbers to do in this case? What about this?" then you begin to get an idea
of what a complex issue it is. We left feeling that MS really is listening
and dedicated to getting this right but also enlightened about the
complexity of the problem.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Jonathan]

The ease of creating headers, footers, TOCs, footnotes, indexes, etc., has
actually improved tremendously since Word 2.0 (where I started), even
though the field codes that underlie these features have remained the
same. Even when it was necessary to insert XE and TC and other fields
manually, it was still an incredible improvement over the effort required
to do all these things manually (using a typewriter), which I did for more
than 20 years before I started with Word 2.0.

So why then is this ease of use deemed now not to be easy? Why the radical
change to the UI in the new version of Word? My point is that an amount of
experimentation and learning on MS's behalf about what users need and want
is acceptable, but what is not is to spend two decades and STILL not know
how best to do it.

You may complain about auto numbering (as we all do), but it would change
your viewpoint a little if you sat down in a room with Microsoft
developers (as we Word MVPs did last year) and discussed how we expected
numbering to behave. When the developers start asking, "Well, but what
would you want the numbers to do in this case? What about this?" then you
begin to get an idea of what a complex issue it is. We left feeling that
MS really is listening and dedicated to getting this right but also
enlightened about the complexity of the problem.

I use Word mainly to design (and document the design of) complex software
systems, and I certainly feel for those developers. I'm sure auto-numbering
has all manner of hidden edge-cases and thorny problems in its execution
that must drive them nuts. But it's clear to most people what
auto-numbering should do in 80% of cases. That it does not do this is a
signal failure on the designers' part.

This goes to the heart of what is wrong with Microsoft, and has always been
wrong with Microsoft's products: they are designed by developers. Good
design solves the main problems first, and solves them well, but the 80/20
rule is not something that comes easy to those who are responsible for
catching every exception, accommodating every quirk and messaging every
tiny error condition.

When those developers asked you what you wanted to happen in a specific case
with auto-numbering, you should have said that you don't know and you don't
care. That's up to their designers to decide. If the designers find they
need to talk to users and experiment with some prototypes or models of
these conditions then so be it, but again, it should not cloud the main
purpose of delivering a well-designed application for 80% of the user base.
To do that, somebody in the organisation has to take responsibility for the
design. A bunch of befuddled developers struggling with tiny edge-cases is
not the place to look for those individuals.

The awful thing about all this is that we are powerless to do anything about
it. You may say that "MS really is listening and dedicated to getting this
right" - and I'm sure the individuals you met probably are. But would it
affect Microsoft one iota if they were NOT listening? Would any of their
shareholders give a damn if we marched on the streets shouting about how
bad the document map is, or why we want to burn Clippy alive? No. We would
still go on buying their products, however bad, because at the end of the
day we have no real choice.

Maybe one day we will, and if we do, I am convinced that history will look
back on us and pity us for the powerless dupes we are.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

When those developers asked you what you wanted to happen in a specific
case

with auto-numbering, you should have said that you don't know and you don't
care. That's up to their designers to decide. If the designers find they
need to talk to users and experiment with some prototypes or models of
these conditions then so be it, but again, it should not cloud the main
purpose of delivering a well-designed application for 80% of the user

base.

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning here. We may not know, but we do
care very much. These developers were discussing this subject with us in
response to our requests for "improved" numbering, and they set us the task
of proposing a design for how outline numbering should work. We were trying
to come up with a design that would be logical and would usually give the
results that users expect, based on what we have learned from the types of
questions posted here. Isn't that what you want?
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Jonathan]

base.

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning here. We may not know, but we do
care very much. These developers were discussing this subject with us in
response to our requests for "improved" numbering, and they set us the
task of proposing a design for how outline numbering should work. We were
trying to come up with a design that would be logical and would usually
give the results that users expect, based on what we have learned from the
types of questions posted here. Isn't that what you want?

I'm making the (perhaps unsafe) assumption that they were quizzing you about
the behaviour of outline numbering in specific circumstances, and that
those circumstances were rare ones. I say that because it's pretty clear
what outline numbering should do in the most common cases of use. It's only
when things get complicated, or unusual, that there may be several possible
behaviours to design for.

What we don't want is for designers of an application like Word to ask us
about what should happen in rare cases of use. Part of their job in
designing the system is to think about an optimal way of implementing these
that does not over-complicate the *main* cases of use. If you're saying
that those rare (20% or less) cases are so complex as to be unresolvable in
this way then I agree users might need to be involved. However, that should
be as a small number of prototypes identified by the designers'
identification of the best choices - not a complete abdication of
responsibility.

I suppose my gripe here is that Microsoft don't seem to have designers of
applications. Where they listen to users like us, it seems more as a
sounding board for whether their development teams should carry on
"improving" something or ditch it. Consider Clippy's trajectory: flung in
as one of the reasons to upgrade to Office 97 (or whatever). Users hated
it, so MS "listened" to that, and killed it off in Office 2000 (I think).
If a system is so hard to use that it needs another system to explain it
then that is surely a sign that things has crossed some kind of Rubicon.
But this "fling it at the users and see what sticks" strategy only serves
the marketing department's need to sell upgrades. It is nothing about
listening to users.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

No, these were not rare cases at all, just complications we hadn't taken
into account in our design. It gave us a taste of how difficult it is to
design numbering for a wide variety of uses. And it was not so much a matter
of what the numbering should do but how the text that was not numbered
should behave: how Word should know how to format unnumbered text and so on.
I'm probably putting this badly; Cindy Meister, who was the lead in creating
the "MVP design," could probably give you better details. One of the most
taxing problems for numbering is that one of the largest communities of
users is legal offices, and they often want to use numbering in ways that
are entirely different from the rest of the world.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Jonathan]

No, these were not rare cases at all, just complications we hadn't taken

into account in our design. It gave us a taste of how difficult it is to
design numbering for a wide variety of uses.

This still begs the question *why* it should be designed to cater for a wide
variety of users if (as is the case) the *majority* are negatively impacted
in doing so.

Be that as it may, if we step back from the detail here and return to my
main point, which is that engaging users on things like auto-numbering;
re-vamping the whole Office UI; introducing then withdrawing things like
Clippy and the binder, etc. would be explicable in the context of a *new*
application. But Word is 25 years old!

I would put it to you that fundamentally, once WordPerfect and AmiPro were
vanquished, Microsoft could not give a damn about users other than to feed
them "upgrades" of at best dubious design. If they did, this newsgroup
would not be getting 30 posts a day at a time when Usenet use is at an
all-time low. Instead, Microsoft leave it to MVPs and dedication of people
like you to do the best they can.

I'm sorry, Suzanne, I know this thread is futile - I'm just venting. Please
don't let me take up any more of your time.

Jonathan