Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

BradC — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 17:22:23 GMT

As an instructor, when teaching Office 2000 or XP, one of the first things that I always did in nearly every class is to show them how to turn off adaptive menus and toolbars. (After a brief into on how the feature worked if they encountered it back at their office)

For classroom training, you MUST have consistency. This trumps any attempt at perceived usability advantage, which really only appears after using the application for a while (if it ever does).

For whatever this is worth, I always felt *guilty* about turning this feature off on my own PC, because I knew that I *should* be using the adaptive menus and toolbars.

This probably ends of being one of those features that people say "This feature would be great for you on YOUR computer, but I don't want it on MY computer."

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

anon — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 18:57:27 GMT

Well, there must be several other aspects of "perception of bloated" because adaptive menus are not the only thing I despise with the UI : 1) startup-time is big (and sure enough, the 32-bit picture you are adding in the UI are going to make it worse, unless you guys wrote a really really really smart pic loader) 2) vector shape UI goes all over the place, objects jump when they are selected,etc. : in comparison Office 97 is soooooooooooo great.

Did I say I love Office 97?

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

Dave — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:19:55 GMT

And for those of you wondering, here's how to turn off IntelliMenus:

Choose "customize" in the "tools" menu
Click the "options" tab
check "Always show full menus"

You also might want to turn off the annoying behavior of Office documents loading in the browser when viewed from a web site:
http://www.shahine.com/omar/PermaLink,guid,b6d6cdba-4b86-439a-a373-8a1cb8a58bca.aspx

(It's kind of sad when you think about the amount of effort that went into coding these features that people actually hate. Imagine what Office could be if more of the effort was towards useful and desireable features...)

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

tlmii — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 20:31:22 GMT

Dave - your last comment implies that the features you mention are not useful or desirable. Just because they are not to you, doesnt' mean they aren't to ANYBODY.

In fact, the Personalized menus are one of my favorite features of recent office version (along with smart tags). I use very little of Office - mostly just some quick spreadsheets or a simple document or two. So the menus stripping out things i never use is very useful to me. I doubt i'm alone.

I'm glad MS put effort into these features, and i'm sure others are as well - just as i am glad that they are continuing to put effort into new features (ribbon, minibar, etc).

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

David Harrison — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:13:10 GMT

Adobe Photoshop CS2 has a slightly different approach to personalizing menus - you can easily tick off any menu items you don't need, or you can choose from predefined sets based on your usage type. You can also choose to highlight certain menu items (e.g. just highlight the features you use frequently without removing the others). You can switch back and forth between different sets very quickly. In a way, this provides the advantages of personalized menus without the arbitrariness of having an algorithm decide which items to show.

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

Mr. Dee — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:33:30 GMT

Personalized Menus does have its Advantages and disadvantages. For me, it just was not intelligent enough and seemed to to hide the wrong things, it has improved over time though and I must give it credit for that. But I just like seeing all my menus anyway, but that won't be a issue in certain core apps in Office 12, it will just be there when you need it. I think the reason why Office got the bloat name was, the displays were still small and the resolutions were 800*600 Office was adding more features, and with personalized menus Office 2k, it was just apparent that Office seemed like it had a bit too much.

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

Andre — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:39:53 GMT

New Office 12 Blog is up about PDF, By Cyndy Wessling:
http://blogs.msdn.com/cyndy_wessling/default.aspx

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

Jason — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 03:45:27 GMT

Hi, great blog. The new UI looks like it will be a good improvement. One thing I might disagree on is the idea of bloat. For me, the features on the screen is not what I perceive as bloat. Those can always be turned off individually if I don't want them. For me, the long load time is my first negative perception. I hope that will somehow be improved in this new version. The second is slow responsiveness from the application. My brain tells me, if an application is slow, it is bloated. The final reason I view office applications as bloated is they kill my battery life. Just letting Word sit idol on my laptop, in the background, kills its battery life by about 30%. I hope the new version is not any worse than Office 2003, but I have my doubts. ;)

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

TC — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 07:41:37 GMT

Another problem with adaptive menus was that they applied to the whole Office suite. What if you wanted them in Word but not in Access? Or when working on doc #1, but not on doc #2?

I believe such things should have a seperate setting for each Office app (Word, Access etc.) - or even for each Office app /document/.

Take autocorrect as another example. I really do not appreciate MS Access performing automatic spelling correction on my end-user's product codes! Autocorrect might be useful in one Access database, but completely disruptive in another. Again, a single setting does not necessarly make sense across all Office apps & documents.

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

Frederik Slijkerman — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 09:48:08 GMT

I'm not sure why everyone is complaining about the load time. On my old P3 1GHz, Word starts within a second or so. And to the person complaining about 32-bit pictures, I just want to say that it's 2005, not 1995 anymore.

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

Chris_Pratley — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 15:29:11 GMT

Load times are highly variable and dependent on a few different factors. On a relatively clean machine Word2003 wil start in about a second on even a 500Mhz machine. If you have even one add-in installed (a common one is Adobe's Acrobat add-in, or a blogging add-in, or whatever), the add-in will force VBA to load as well, which can add several seconds to Word's start-up time. If you have low RAM, or you have loaded a lot of apps, some of that stuff has to be swapped out of RAM before Word can be loaded so that can double the start time since the swapping hits the hard disk on the way out as well as to load Word. One cool thing about Windows Vista is that it can learn what you tend to do and optimize the launch time for apps you start often. That will reduce boot time for Word and other apps if you use them at least once in awhile by predictively pre-loading critical parts of the app. There are also improvements in the memory management where typically if you are short on RAM, the oldest page of memory is swapped out to make room, but that page may be the first one needed when you switch back to an application which means you have to wait for the hard disk again just to switch apps.

re: Next Espisode

Death to Clippy — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 07:46:37 GMT

At the mere mention of the 'office assistant' you should expect torches, pitchforks & angry mobs waiting for your next instalment.

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

chrisker — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:00:20 GMT

I was the tester for both of the features you mentioned.

And yes, hindsight is 20/20. Oh, the many hours wasted on fidgeting with priorities of controls on rafted toolbars, and what the combined default command bar should look like at 800x600...

re: Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)

Gregory S. — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 12:08:48 GMT

I am so glad you guys figured out that adaptive menus suck. Indeed it is one of those ideas that sounds good because of Apple's (now 20 year old) UI guideline of "revealed power". However in practice it didn't work. The number one issue I have with it is that it essentially defeats the purpose of a menu as a interactive device. The essence of a menu is that you get to survey what is available; think of restaurant menus. You are never forced into any paticular choice but knowing all of your options is powerful even to the novice. Whenever I open a new app I always strobe through the menus and get a sense of what the program can do. In learning that program, I often poke at the menus with a notion of some task in mind that I presume the program can do. If it is hidden like adaptive menus, it only serves to obscure the power of the program and steepen the learning curve.

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