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.

Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.

[HappySqurriel]

Personally, I think clippy represents what is wrong with office more than anything else. For most users Office is far too complicated, and has far too much functionality, so it "needed" a way to inform average users how to use some of the features.

Personally, I see three classes of Office users and there seems to be a reasonable argument that there should be three seperate classes of Word/Office for these people; the classes are students/home use who want something which they can write a paper or resume on, office workers who want a little more control over their presentation, and professionals who want complete control over their presentation.

Enjoy the respite

[smchris]

I have no doubt there will be many badly flawed milestones to come along the path to a coherent AI assistant. It is something too cool not to aspire to even if the results are going to be awful for years to come.

So far the most memorable I've seen was a shareware "Southern" parody of Microsoft Bob that involved an outhouse and, if I remember correctly, a possum.

Interesting yet not surprising...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The decision apparently revolved not around the passionate hatred for the unfortunate sprite, but simply out of a desire for UI coherency"

Translation:

We got rid of it for our own internal reasons, and not out of any desire to give users what they want - in adherence to our standard business practices.

This must be a sign that Bill is really not as

[Growlor]

influential or at least not as feared by MS leadership. The REAL reason clippy was inflicted on us was because he was (as another slashdot poster mentioned) the "last piece of MS Bob technology." The project manager for MS Bob is now better known as Mrs Bill Gates.

Re:There's a couple more "features" they could los

[Xanius]

Thank you preview for screwing up and showing me the line breaks but not actually posting it that way...

Well the new UI fits better with vista and for the lower end users of word, you know the ones that could never afford to buy it anyway, everything they need is right there in the shortcuts. My problem with word is that it has too many damned retarded features that will make me strangle a man with his own tie if I ever see him using them in a business report.

My schools business college requires I take a fundamentals of the PC class, which is actually a class dedicated to microsoft products. Word,Power point, and excel, I figure I can pass this no problem so I go to take the test and it wants me to tell it how to put a specific type of word art in the paper or how to add embellishment to the letters. Why in gods name would I ever use word art in a business report? Do I work for fucking kindergarteners?

I know where the word art is, it's hard to miss. But I don't know the names of them and I don't ever want to know the names of them.

He will be missed

[wootest]

I never understood the unabashed Clippy hatred. It was certainly a more friendly window to the whole help interface since it's much easier for a novice to ask a question than rummage through indices. It was one checkbox to turn the little bugger off, and you could choose something that you thought was less annoying if that was the problem. (I've almost always used the dog.) Not to mention that he's being going away more and more the past few versions: "It looks like you are writing a letter" is becoming about as relevant as the 95-thru-Me era BSOD.

I agree with the new notions that the Office user interface team has chosen to adopt, like only being able to access a feature from one place. Jensen Harris is a smart guy and I've been enjoying reading his weblog and the trials and tribulations of the Ribbon and the new UI as a whole.

Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.

[riscthis]

Personally, I think clippy represents what is wrong with office more than anything else. For most users Office is far too complicated, and has far too much functionality, so it "needed" a way to inform average users how to use some of the features.

Hence when Microsoft massively overhauled the Office 2007 UI, with the idea that people can easily find this functionality, Clippy became obsolete and was removed. I *think* Clippy may actually have been switched off by default in new installs of Office 2003 (or possibly XP.)

Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.

[digitig]

Unfortunately, they overhauled the UI in a way that IMHO completely fsailed to help people find the functionality. The previous UI, with menus and toolbars, for me was a model of a tidy workshop, with most tools tidied away in logical places (the menus), and just the tools one uses a lot or are using just at the moment left out (on the toolbars).

The Office 2007 model, on the other hand, for me is a model of tipping out the contents of every draw and box in the workshop into a heap in the middle of the workshop floor (the ribbon) and having to search through it every time you want something. There doesn't seem to be any useful way of configuring it to particular styles of use, so whenever I wanted anything from the ribbon I was confronted with a huge block of the screen on my laptop taken up with options that I had set up once and for all in the template.

I could go into a lot of other things that I think are wrong with the Office 2007 UI (I tried the beta for two months, and I reckon by the end of that time it was still dropping my productivity by 20%-30%) but that's the main one that I think is related to the death of Clippy. Unfortulately, I think Clippy is needed more than ever, but needs to be equipped with a laser pointer to indicate the bit of the ribbon we should be looking at :-(

Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.

[digitig]

Now, with O2K7, Microsoft has taken a quantum leap forward in interface design and made easy enough that the quintessential grandmother can use it to its full potential. I balked at the ribbon myself until I actually used it. Honestly, they got their "wow" out of me after just a couple of minutes using it.

That's not the word I used after a couple of minutes, and even after a couple of months it was seriously impairing my productivity. Yes, sure everybody who looked at it said "wow", but it was a different matter in practice. There's so much wrong with it, even in terms of established and reliable UI design principles, that it's a huge step backwards (I wish the designers had read "About Face", a Microsoft Press book on UI design -- there's a lot wrong with it, but it's right enough to show the O2K7 interface up for the usability disaster that it is). And the biggest issue is that the ribbon can't be configured, so stuff I know I won't use more than once a year (the stuff I build into templates) still has to clutter my desktop and distract me from whatever it is that I do need.

Obligatory Clippy quote

[ady1]

It seems like you are remaking the UI. Would you like help with making it more disneylandish?

On a serious note, I honestly don't get it. The new interface is pretty cartoonish (though simple to use for a first time user). If clippy isn't coherent with this UI than I don't know what is.

Also the big overhaul isn't about coherency in the first place since to change the color of outlook interface, you have to open MS word and customize it's options.

Clippy falls on hard times

[Anonymous Coward]

XP Media Center includes a desktop dancer program.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/deskt op/dancers.mspx [microsoft.com]

One of the characters is wearing a ghost outfit. Occasionally the white sheet slips, revealing the thin curve of steel underneath.

right

[mapkinase]

The decision apparently revolved not around the passionate hatred for the unfortunate sprite, but simply out of a desire for UI coherency.

... which are (hatread and UI coherency) absolutely unrelated.

Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.

[Workaphobia]

> "I think the general annoyance of clippy was the fact it kept popping up whenever you did something."

It's more than just that. For instance, the chief annoyance I have with the dog in XP searches is that it takes a context menu and a few seconds to go away, rather than just disappearing as quickly as an open window.

Clippy represented everything terrible with Microsoft's UI design - the overbearing "Use your computer in just the ways we enumerate" mentality, combined with "Look at me! Look at me! See what I can do?!". I find it very consistent that the same company to produce such an abomination also decided to add integrated popup spam as an operating system feature: "Help make office better" in the middle of your powerpoint presentation. And god help you if you miss when you click the X, as there's no titlebar to protect you from accidently responding to the popup. Nor can you press a precise key combination to eliminate the offending content.