The Death of Clippy

AppScout interviews Office's Group Program Manager, Jensen Harris on the subject of Office 2007. Harris reveals that Clippy, the bane of all semi-sentient Office users everywhere, is officially dead. The decision apparently revolved not around the passionate hatred for the unfortunate sprite, but simply out of a desire for UI coherency.

Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.

[jellomizer]

I think the general annoyance of clippy was the fact it kept popping up whenever you did something. In many ways it was actually successful for Office. It showed people that they could use other features that people didn't know it had. Which really did put a nail in the coffin for tools such as word perfect. Now that people know how to do a lot of these advanced features and got use to them, they got frustrated when other word processors don't have or they don't know where the features they enjoy are. That being said because Microsoft successfully monopolized the Office software, they don't need advertise all there features all the time.

Oh, NOW...

[Anonymous Coward]

They talk about UI consistency!

Consistency or not, it was a huge failure of something in the development process.

I mean, the HATE heaped upon poor Clippy, from the most novice to the most advanced of users, is hard to comprehend. For something to be so wrong for such a wide range of users means it is truly bad. How on Earth did this get past the supposedly rigorous user-testing facility that Microsoft has? Nobody said at some point, "You know, that Clippy thing isn't really helpful. It just gets in the way and is annoying." Nobody? For years?

From the article, after talking about people who liked him: "There were also an equal number of people who looked at it as interference or an annoyance..." Equal? Equal?!! What kind of bizarro statistics is MS collecting from their user feedback system that it took them years to figure out the problem and at least turn it off by default?

Vorpal bladework

[tverbeek]

"And, has thou slain the Clippywock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

Good heavens, that's almost ... almost... enough reason to suggest upgrading to MSOffice 2007. Of course the fact that the rest of the UI is being needlessly changed is enough reason to suggest not upgrading. "You seem to be trying to figure out how to open a document, or where the hell the Tools menu disappeared to. Would you like to take a remedial word processing class to learn how we want you to do it now?"

While you're at it

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone put down that miserable dog in the XP search module?

Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.

[drsmithy]

I think the general annoyance of clippy [...]

Funnt thing is, most non-expert users I've interacted with actually _like_ clippy (well, they often change it to another avatar, like the silly little dog, but the point is they like the idea of a "helper").

The help system that sits behind "Clippy" is excellent. It does what its designed to do very well - the problem expert users have is that they're not interested in what it does.

Clippy's hints were often unrelated to the task.

[danimrich]

Some time ago, I was writing a lab book with Word. I had already typed more than a page when Clippy suddenly realized something and came up with the following dialogue (translated):

"Apparently you're trying to write a letter. Please choose one of the following options:
[ ] Use the letter assistant.
[ ] Write the letter without assistance."

Clippy gave me no other choice, I needed to select one of these options.
I'd have chosen the following if it were available:"[X] Stop bugging me, this isn't even a letter!"

Re:Clippy's hints were often unrelated to the task

[Fred_A]

This exactly sums up my experience with those little assistants.

While the idea in itself isn't bad, the execution just didn't work. The help offered was either completely off the mark (as above) or apparently targeted at people who had seen a computer for the first time just the week before (a bit like the Windows on-line help - this is how you format a floppy).

I haven't used MS office a lot since I don't use Windows but get exposed to it every now and then and could use a decent interactive assistant since I don't know my way around it very well. OTOH of course it's pretty much the same as any other such piece of software so I can always find what I'm looking for by poking around a bit. But a competent assistant would be a time saver.

It would however be very difficult to do properly.

I guess users are better off without the assistant than with screen space devoted to a useless one.