Code, Software and Serious Games

This is a famous screen of Word at it's worst, it was always in the back of my mind when reading about the mountain of features in Fuller's Microsoft Word article.

When Office 2007 premiered, the UI was redesigned. The tabbing and context sensitive menus where meant to eliminate the search for features by presenting those features which the user would more certainly need based on the tasks that the user was performing. The reorganizing of icons into more work-driving tabs, also meant to elevate thinking and instead allow the user's instinct to guide them to the proper tab. It was surprising and worthy of a note, that many first time users felt that they needed to learn a whole new system, which was designed to eliminate the concept of a system. Either the Usability experts missed their mark, or (what is quite probable) the old system was so ingrained into the users' habits that it took some effort adjusting to a more intuitive interface.

What particularly rings a bell is quote from Heim in Fuller's It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter: "As the user learns the new system, the language installs the user in the system." I believe it is quite relevant to acknowledge the reserve: the system installs itself in the user. The user conforms to a model defined and designed by (in this case) the usability experts at Microsoft. In the reading from last week, Fuller mentioned Alan Cooper's HCI approach, which is driven by a "stereotypical user": "they are imagined as full 'characters', users of the system which is reworked...in order to meet an aggregate of their needs." It is necessary to acknowledge that Microsoft's approach is just this, these 'characters' are referred to as archetypes and are often referred in design documents and drive the feature scenarios. Fuller acknowledges this as a flaw and even mentions the disappeared of the user from system's HCI design. In an alternative view, we can even take Fuller's argument and use it to counter the first quote, the users are not installed into the system, their archetypes are packages within and it is only the reverse, the incorporation of themselves into the model, that holds true.

What is also interesting to note, is that the main bar which was described by Fuller as showcasing most essential features (in contrast to text animation which is hidden deep within the font formatting menu), is often echoed in word professing software, such as this blog, gmail, etc. It makes me think of last week's Fuller reading that touched upon Open Source software and its fatal attention and conformance to propriety software's standards. Is makes me think whether this standardization of the main bar is because this is the most efficient way to provide access to the what is considered the essential word processing features? Of has this standard installed itself so much into ourselves that we have made it so without question?