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.

So we fight with the software. A 6000-person US study found that on average users wasted more than five hours a week frittering time away on their computers: waiting for programs to run, or for help to arrive, or double checking print outs for accuracy and formatting ( http://tinyurl.com/7m6cl ). Rather than lobbying software developers for change, most of us simply decide to put up with and work around the difficulties and frustration inherent in much of today’s software.

Often the trouble comes from having megabytes of software features that we’ll never use stuffed into our computer, making the features we do want to use hard to find, slow, and prone to crashes. They even have a name for this - "creeping featuritis". Too often we get software that has "little to do with what users actually need and more to do with following the competition, providing feature checklists to IT departments or making guesses based on user surveys or customer wish lists" (Alan Cooper).

It’s refreshing to see Vodafone buck this trend and launch the Simply cellphone in New Zealand - a cellphone with fewer features.  The really great designs are the ones that eliminate needless choices. You know you’re doing your job as a designer when you figure out a way to take a complicated feature and make it simpler.

Now, if only Microsoft could release Word Simply.

- Trent