I Hate Microsoft Word 2007

Having used Microsoft Word with its traditional interface for over a decade, I was not exactly pleased when Microsoft made a major revamp to its interface in Office 2007. The menu bar, which helped me accomplish so many tasks over the years, had been replaced by a foreign-looking tab bar. So too had the ever-familiar ‘File’ menu, and in its place now stand a fancy new button that resembles the ‘Start’ button on the taskbar of the Microsoft operating system.

Needless to say, I was utterly confused by the new interface. Initially, it was difficult to find and remember the positions of some buttons because I had become too used to navigating through a series of menus in the traditional interface. Over time, I had learnt to get used to the new interface and now know where to find most of the buttons (although I still have to Google whenever I want to find a button to perform an obscure task).

However, it did not feel to me like this interface was much better than the traditional one. It seemed like the only improvement it has over the traditional interface is to make the application look sleeker and more polished, and that Microsoft only decided to change it for aesthetic reasons. I thought that this must be the case, but I needed to validate my thoughts by looking for comments from other users that agreed with me.

Instead, I found an article that explains how the new interface improves usability: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/word-2007-lessons-on-usability/6164867

One of the more interesting points raised in the article is about why some of the buttons are differently sized. For example, the styles panel is a lot bigger and more prominent than some of the more commonly used buttons such as italics. It argues that this will encourage the user to choose a different style to format text, instead of using the italics button. The reason for this preference is that styles add a semantic value to the text, in addition to being able to change its look. It is equivalent to adding tags to the text, so that we can easily find and format a set of texts that belong to a certain tag.

It also points out that the new interface allows users to complete tasks in fewer clicks because it displays all the buttons in tabs instead of hiding them inside hierarchies of menus. I had thought that the layout of the buttons made them cluttered and too small, which made it hard to look for certain buttons. I realise now that I might have developed a bias against the new interface in my initial struggle of learning how to use it, which caused me to overlook its good points.

There are some more interesting improvements that the article talks about, which I will not discuss here. If you are curious to find out more, visit the link!

This shows how important affordance is to the success of a new interface. I felt that the change from the traditional interface to the current one had been too drastic, which caused me to become disoriented at first and to dislike it despite its apparent advantages. Perhaps Microsoft could have made smaller changes over a period of time to ease users in to the new interface.