“Microsoft’s Office 97 contains 4,500 commands for features both useful and arcane.” in “Microsoft May Face Backlash Against ‘Bloatware’”—WSJ, 11/18/96
We did loads of user research to get to the bottom of this bloat sentiment. We even hosted a workshop at the annual ACM Computer Human Interface conference in 1998. While it was easy to find people who complained about 'too many features', nobody was willing to part with any. And when they got tucked away in expando-menus they wished they were there again. It's like the Joni Mitchell lyric from Big Yellow Taxi..."You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Leah Kaufman did the bulk of the research. We wrote a summary paper here: (sorry, ACM paywall) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/310307.310370
Yes yes!! I used to have a slide in my college deck referencing this (and a second one) since students loved to see an academic outlet for work on the team.
The general idea of “hiding stuff makes it simple or clean” drives me nuts…NOW. I remember full/short menus from the earliest days before I was at Microsoft and thought it was kind of dumb. I genuinely thought that doing what was basically an MRU of commands *plus* maintaining positional memory would work, especially as we learned how often people were using the file open MRU (which we made longer in the next release). Alas, it was a total failure. Now I just make fun of every app that tries to get simpler by just hiding stuff.
Thank you for the link to the paper. I will add a foot note to the post and feel bad for not writing about it especially because I used it for recruiting!
I remember Heikki saying "Install on Demand" or "Just in Time" (JIT) Install was really "just to late"; which goes along with the OAC's desire to "just installing everything".
We did loads of user research to get to the bottom of this bloat sentiment. We even hosted a workshop at the annual ACM Computer Human Interface conference in 1998. While it was easy to find people who complained about 'too many features', nobody was willing to part with any. And when they got tucked away in expando-menus they wished they were there again. It's like the Joni Mitchell lyric from Big Yellow Taxi..."You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Leah Kaufman did the bulk of the research. We wrote a summary paper here: (sorry, ACM paywall) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/310307.310370
Yes yes!! I used to have a slide in my college deck referencing this (and a second one) since students loved to see an academic outlet for work on the team.
The general idea of “hiding stuff makes it simple or clean” drives me nuts…NOW. I remember full/short menus from the earliest days before I was at Microsoft and thought it was kind of dumb. I genuinely thought that doing what was basically an MRU of commands *plus* maintaining positional memory would work, especially as we learned how often people were using the file open MRU (which we made longer in the next release). Alas, it was a total failure. Now I just make fun of every app that tries to get simpler by just hiding stuff.
Thank you for the link to the paper. I will add a foot note to the post and feel bad for not writing about it especially because I used it for recruiting!
I remember Heikki saying "Install on Demand" or "Just in Time" (JIT) Install was really "just to late"; which goes along with the OAC's desire to "just installing everything".
Thank you for the kind words 🙏 and support.