[IxDA Discuss] "The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office"

[Katie Albers]

<snip>
>I for one think that the "Less is More" mentality makes a lot of sense,
>because the interfaces get so complicated that even veteran users get
>lost going for features that would be somewhere around 26-50 on the
>'most used' list.
>
>-- Marty

Well, since I often get official communications from Microsoft in 
which the paragraphs are separated by double returns...and forms 
which don't use Word's built-in form technology...I suspect the 
feature-set long since passed the useful set.

Part of this can be laid at the doorstep of mere feature creep; but 
part if it is also a failure to define a product (both these issues 
are endemic, they're just easiest to find in MS Word). What started 
life as a word-processor has quickly gone through the stage of 
formatting tool and is striving to be a full-fledged 
document/publishing tool (which it actually does rather poorly). 
Thus, features that are necessary to one level of tool are 
incorporated into all of them and the increased levels of complexity 
often lead to failure of the tools. Issues like the occasional 
randomization of numbering, the persistence of changes in tracked 
documents and so forth result from this complexity.

All of this by way of saying: One of the critical pieces of good 
interaction design is deciding what set of interactions your 
application is going to support. Who has that responsibility will 
often not be an IxD, but it is still the job of the IxD to call 
attention to the problem.

Katie
-- 

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Katie Albers
katie at firstthought.com