Last week whilst visiting my family I was asked by my father to assist with a problem he was having with Microsoft Word. Armed with Word experience dating back to the Windows 3.x days I addressed his keyboard with confidence, knowing that his use of the product is straightforward (as is 90% of everyone’s word processor needs in my experience).
It turns out that he is using Office 2007. I found this interesting since he tends not to pursue “cutting edge” technology, but was curious to see what this new version had to offer so I dived right in. I am an Office 03/04 user and have not been enticed into making the move up (not that I could on my MacBook Pro) so this was a new experience for me.
My first impression is that Microsoft did an amazing job visually with the navigational metaphors and ontologically with the icons and object definitions. This version represents a giant leap forward in how users interact with Office. It is colorful, stylish and organized in what appears to be a very thoughtful manner.
There is only one problem: if you have ever used Word prior to this version none of it makes any sense.
I spent a tortuous 30 minutes groping my way through the pretty icons, carefully constructed menus and pseudo menus, flowery pop-ups, dialogs and Help material only to develop a dislike for a piece of software unlike anything I have every experienced before.
Part of my anger was a simple distillation of frustration for not being able to achieve a simple task (one that I could have managed in less than a minute using a previous version). However, a much larger component was the realization that Microsoft took a piece of software that served a purpose and mangled it to the point that it no longer does so…at least for those of us who have used a prior version.
Ignoring for a moment the cynical position that Microsoft doesn’t care about existing users because of a dearth of competition and the tremendous inertia of the world’s existing .doc document corpora, the only a rationalization that I could come up with for this behavior is that the design team got so caught up in being cool it stopped being good.
This is another of the great temptations in software development, one that is exacerbated for the need for software to evolve (read: require an upgrade to be purchased in the commercial world). Sometimes a thing is Good Enough and tinkering can only lead to it to be Less So.
Software is a tool. Tools provide a function. The value of a tool is directly proportional not only to the function it provides but in how it provides it. It is sometimes easy to lose this perspective.