[IxDA Discuss] Improving Word's outlining feature

[Peter Bagnall]

Damn, I was hoping you weren't going to ask that!!

I should say before I get into this, I've not talked to any potential  
users about this, so this is purely off the top of my head, so if  
anyone has looked into this rigourously then they probably have a  
better view on it than I do. This is half baked in other words ;-)

First off, the outlining feature, at least the thing I'm talking  
about is the view which lets you work on a documents structure - by  
hiding content and just looking at headings. This is rather similar  
to "folding" in many text editors.

There are several problems with it. It's conceptually quite difficult  
for many people. It relies on an understanding of a document as a  
nested structure, of one large document made up of subsections, which  
in turn are made up of smaller subsections and so on. A hierarchy in  
other words, and we know how well they're understood! It also, so  
some extent relies on an understanding of semantic markup, that is  
word needs to understand that this part of the doc is a subheading,  
whereas this part is body text that "belongs" to that subheading, and  
so on.

I've noticed many users just don't understand this concept. Lots of  
people don't do headings by using the "style" feature, which gives  
Word some semantic information, they just change the font, make it  
bigger, bold etc so that it looks right. Of course this completely  
trashes the outline since it provides no semantic information at all.  
In fact I've just received a document from a colleague which has no  
semantic information at all. I filter it just to show headings and  
the whole document just vanished! Show body text - oh, there it is!  
The headings have just been bolded.

So one thing I might do to help the outlining feature is be much more  
forceful in guiding people away from randomly changing the fonts in  
their doc and guide them towards using the styles instead. Surely  
this is what a word processor should be doing?! Word suffers greatly  
from doing too much document layout. You shouldn't be worrying about  
document layout while you're writing - that's a production step for  
later which perhaps ought to have a dedicated tool (or sub-tool). Of  
course this is a pretty fundamental change to Word's model, which is  
why I say Word does a bad job of outlining because it presents itself  
most of the time as a layout tool.

Just to make matters worse, the icons on the toolbar for the outline  
mode are pretty opaque.

I don't intend to redesign it just at the minute though, it's not a  
trivial job, and if I attempted to do so in an email I wouldn't do it  
justice (and I'd make a fool of myself to boot!). But I think I've  
indicated the direction I'd head in.

Cheers
--Pete



On 22 Jul 2006, at 23:22, jackbellis wrote:

> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted  
> material.]
>
> Peter,
> What would you do to improve Word's outlining feature?
> (First, I'll be interested to find out if everyone means the same  
> thing when
> they refer to Word's "outlining feature.")
> Thanks, Jack
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Bagnall" <pete at surfaceeffect.com>
> Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] motivating new learning
>
>>> I'll give a practical example: an experienced colleague, whose  
>>> work I
>>> often edit, can't properly outline in Microsoft Word.
>>
>> So the problem is not about learning new stuff, he's already using  
>> the
>> outlining feature. It's that he's not understanding how the feature
>> works. That suggests very heavily to me that that feature is badly
>> designed. Having used it myself, it could use some improvement.
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Peter Bagnall - http://people.surfaceeffect.com/pete/