Microsoft Word

— Microsoft Word could use a billion dollars to refocus its design —

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, the host of Different Shapes. Today my topic is Microsoft Word.

If you’ve ever written any text using a computer over the last forty years, you’ve probably used Microsoft Word. I’m old enough to remember when Word actually had competition, a software called WordPerfect, in the ’80s and ’90s, and there were users and proponents of each. I’m trying to come up with a comparison that someone who’s not a Boomer or Gen Xer could relate to (VHS vs. Betamax doesn’t really cut it), so I’m going to ask ChatGPT if it can come up with an example for me for each of the subsequent generations.

OK, I just asked. Here’s what it came up with:

—    Millennials: Facebook vs. MySpace

—    Gen Z: Instagram vs. Snapchat

—    Generation Alpha: YouTube vs. TikTok

Does everyone understand now and do I see some nodding out there? As you can see, the later the generation, the more likely that there is no declared winner yet. It is not just really young people that use TikTok, for example, and it’s not just older people that use YouTube. ChatGPT supplied this sentence, which makes sense to me at least: “Word is like YouTube to Generation Alpha—not the coolest, not the fastest, but the thing you still end up using because the world is built around it.”

Microsoft Word has had, and still has, competitors, but it is generally dominant in work/office environments. I think we can declare that it has beat out WordPerfect, but its big competitor now is Google Docs. The thing that’s always puzzled me, and this is what I want to talk about today, is that Word is just so poorly designed, and often makes the simplest of actions so difficult to achieve, that I ask myself two questions:

1.     Why is it so dominant in some sectors if it is such a poor performer and often difficult to use?

2.     Why hasn’t Microsoft thrown some money at it in order to improve it?

One of the things that makes for good design is a kind of simplicity and logic that seem intuitive. You look at how the software is designed, from its biggest labels of tasks right down to its most specific feature, and it makes sense. My experience with Word—and, yes, I’ve been using it for about forty years—is that it’s not something I can use and operate now due to its user-friendly design, but because I’ve gotten used to its quirks and oddities.

You get an idea of the disorganization and poor design of Word right from the highest level of arrangement, that is, the ribbon of commands along the top of the page. The typical array looks like this:

File | Home | Insert | Draw | Design | Layout | References | Mailings | Review | View | Help

For me, the lack of effort or attention given to any logical order of inclusion is evident right from here. Think a minute about the main thing that this software is supposed to do—create textual documents that may also include images and other non-textual elements. You add various things to your document depending on what it is you are writing. For example, if you’re writing a letter to a friend, you likely won’t have much use for footnotes, but you might if you are writing an essay for a university course.

Just think of the arrangement again that the geniuses at Microsoft thought would be the optimum. There’s a tab called Home but for some reason it’s the second one on the ribbon. It sets out the main things you want to do in a document: choose a font and size of font, choose colours of the text, make bulletted lists, and so on. But that’s followed by a tab called Insert, which also includes things you might want to do in your document. Not only is “Insert” the only verb across the ribbon of nouns, but I truly can’t see any logic behind what is included in Insert and what is included in Home.

I won’t go through the individual tabs across the whole ribbon, but I get the same feeling of illogicalness at each of them. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that actions are randomly distributed into the tabs, but I also wouldn’t go so far as to say that there is any discernible sense to it all. What is Table of Contents doing under References? Why is Mailings so prominent? Does the thesaurus belong under Review? And on and on it goes. There’s a Help tab at the end, but by the time you’ve reached this as your choice, it likely means you just can’t figure the damn thing out. A Google search is likely in order, or a long question for ChatGPT.

There are also some aspects of Word, some details of how it operates, that for me are infamously annoying and should be simplified somehow. Should there be a whole procedure necessary on how to delete a line or horizontal rule? And why is the paging of different sections of the document so frustratingly complex? Why do I have to create sections? Why can’t Word take a simple command that I want simple lowercase roman numerals (i, ii, x, and so on) for my introductory section, and then I don’t want regular arabic numerals (1, 2, 7, and so on) to start until after that section. This should not be as complicated as it is.

I could go on, but I don’t want to risk getting too tedious about all this. My main point is that organization and design are things that attention should be given to. You could make an argument that they are the first things that attention should be given to. This is an important fact for all software and frankly for many other things in the world that are not software. Like a can opener, for example. It makes a difference how long the handle is, where the blade is, how you lock the tin in place so that it doesn’t fall away as you are taking the lid off.

Design is not an add-on. It’s the bones, the structure, that makes everything else seem simple and work simply.

And that’s all for today, episode 5 of the podcast. Thanks for listening and please join me again next Wednesday.