The Frustrations of Modern Software

As a consultancy company, our findings and recommendations from usability testing typically end up as a report. Microsoft Word is an important tool in producing these reports, but I still fight with it. It crashes on me. Tables are routinely corrupted. Headings sometimes seem to choose a random numbering scheme (it’s certainly not Base 10). It selects unexpected directories when I ask it to save a document. It thinks I’m an American.

Taking a step back for a second, let’s think about this. What is a word processor? As Michael Dertouzos said it “does what a pencil used to do, only somewhat differently, and comes with a 600-page manual”. Sure it can do a lot of fancy formatting but at the end of the day the user’s goal is the same, communicating the content. Read more »