<This is a cut and paste, my comments are bracketed like this one>

1. From the Desk of David Pogue: Suggestions for Microsoft
==========================================================

This fall, the world will be treated to yet another version
of Microsoft Office, the software suite that towers over the
world like the Jolly Green Giant.

The truth is, Microsoft would still sell millions upon
millions of copies even if it did nothing more than change
the Microsoft Office icon. Two factors assure the new
Office's success: first, the world has settled on the Word,
Excel and PowerPoint file formats for the documents they
exchange every day. Second, Microsoft's new corporate-
purchase program practically forces companies to pay for
Office upgrades up to three years in advance, before they
even know what they'll be getting.

In any case, the last time I griped about Microsoft's abuse
of its power, a few defenders responded. One wrote: "I
worked on Office for nine years, and I can tell you that
there are several hundred very dedicated, very smart
software engineers who wake up every day thinking about how
to make great software and solve real customer problems."

Well, they may wake up thinking about making software great,
but one man's "great" is another's "bloated." To my mind,
great software speeds you up instead of slowing you down. It
reduces steps rather than increasing them. Those aren't
always Microsoft's priorities.

Here are a few examples of what I mean. May these pointers 
-- or at least the principles behind them -- waft their way
into the dreams of those very smart software engineers:

* In Word XP, when you choose New from the File menu, you
don't get a new document, as you'd expect. Instead, you open
a Task Pane at the opposite side of the screen, listing 15
commands. You must then click Blank Document, six commands
from the top. Suggestion: If I click New, I mean New right
now, not two steps later.

<All of Office has the yellow pages problem. You want to rent a car but is it under rentals - cars, or cars - rentals? The solution dujour is task based design, which is a great monniker that gives you the green light to make radical changes in your product. At its worst, the product lists the tasks that you might want to perform and the user selects it. At its best, the functional areas are clearly delineated and widgetized (as in, the toaster is for making toast, here is where the toaster is).>

* When you shut down Windows XP, the "Are you sure?" dialog
box lists only three of the four choices (Shut Down,
Restart, Standby). Inexplicably, the Hibernate button
doesn't appear until you press the Shift key. Millions of
people, as a result, don't even know that it's there.
Suggestion: Don't be shy. Put important features where
people can find them.

<Shut down is waay too complicated and this was a compromise to mitigate that. It is a weak compromise. The product should abstract the concept (how about "goodbye"), and have an intelligent default for laptops (hibernate of course), and do a shut down for all other systems. Control+goodbye would bring up the menu.>

* When you type an Internet address in Word, it turns into a
live, blue, underlined link, unasked. Power users know how
to undo it (promptly use the Undo command), but novices
routinely click the link in hopes of editing it -- and
launch their Web browsers by accident. Suggestion: The
factory setting for this feature should be Off, not On.

<This is not a question of having the link feature off or on. This is a question of how the web should be positioned in an authoring environment like word. This hyperactive linking came out of the desire to make the web at your fingertips, and make it impossible to avoid. Heart in the right place, but implementation not so good. Solution is to bring forward the concept of a "live document" as something different than a regular document, and can span across doc and html formats. If the doc/html you're creating is live, the link feature will be on. If you haven't saved as a live doc, that's ok, use the current mouseover messaging from the html authoring which has cntrl+link to follow link.>

* In Outlook XP, when you search for an e-mail message, a
"No results found" message appears while the search is under
way -- a misleading indicator, to put it mildly. Suggestion:
Don't tell us that no results have been found until the
search is complete.

<Everyone on the team knows about this one guaranteed. This is one of those features that ends up triaged and triaged until it's just too hard to put it in for the release. The real fix is: have a coherent concept of status that has consisent messaging to the user and is tested early in the release cycle. Have team leaders who view breaches of this design criteria for status as showstopper hi prio bugs>

* The Windows XP taskbar automatically consolidates window
buttons: If you have five Word files open, only one Word
button appears on the taskbar. It serves as a pop-up menu
that lists the open windows. That's great, but you're forced
to choose from this menu, once again requiring two clicks
where one used to suffice. Suggestion: Let us click the
taskbar button itself to bring the whole program forward.

<Well, not all programs work that way: this is an outgrowth of a MDI arrangement. Some people will always think in MDI and this reviewer is no exception. With that said, the categorization is clumsy and the solution is to fatten the taskbar so it takes up two lines, with an easy option to consolidate. Also, the consolidation should be smart and do groups based on referring windows, not based on window type. For example, I have one browser window with a bus schedule and notepad for notes about commuting. I also have a browser window open for mail. The first browser and notepad window should be consolidated together. Also, all automatic popups could go to the same grouping! But not of course by default: I say thicken the taskbar pane.>

* Finally, Outlook's anti-spam features are practically non-
existent. They're weaker than Mac OS X's Mail program,
weaker than America Online, even weaker than Microsoft's own
MSN software. Suggestion: Wake up and smell the junk mail.
<Yes, this is a major misstep.>
I can't wait to see what the new Office has in store. I'm
sure it will include buckets' worth of new architectures and
Object-Oriented Whatever. But if Microsoft is truly
interested in "solving real customer problems," here's
hoping that it will put a little thought into polishing up
the little things along the way.

-----

Forum: David Pogue's Columns

Do you think that Microsoft is improving its products or
just adding bloat? Post your thoughts on the feedback board.
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?50@@.f16bec4

comment []1:31:31 PM  trackback []