The
Microsoft Office Assistant started off as a basically good idea. It was integrated into
Office 97 to provide an easy
mechanism of finding
help when you need it. The
Office suite of
applications is a daunting bit of
user interface to
tackle, and the current system of help in
Office 95 really wasn't
stellar.
Microsoft never makes a move in the
market without testing it first in
usability. According to the
VP of
Office, in a
public speech I watched, the
Assistant tested very well and got positive
responses from the
populace as a
help-finding mechanism in the
lab. However, in the
retail channels, the
Assistant got
dismissed as an
annoyance that was too "
Big Brother" for most users. It was either too
dumb for the
advanced users, or not using enough
computer vernacular for the lower-end
user.
At another
public demonstration of up-and-coming
Office innovations, one
demo engineer showed off a
technology that was supposed to be for
Office XP (called Office 10 at the time). He opened up
Microsoft Word, and started typing a
letter:
Dear Sir,
It was of course at that point when the
Assistant popped up, and said "Hey, I see you're trying to write a letter, I've
auto-formatted this. Is that
OK?" In the dialog box, there were three choices: "
Yes,
No, and
No, Never Do That Again." I don't think I've ever seen a crowd cheer so much for a
mundane feature demo. Microsoft heard the
message, and they took action.
Windows 2000 improved
heavily on the
Assistant, making it less
intrusive, and dumbing-down the "
IntelliSense"; the
technology behind the
interruptions to the work. The
response was a lot better, and the
Assistant is considerably less intrusive about popping up
windows and where it draws the
WinHelp boxes, but is still a pain to many
users.
Office 2000 was the
last great hurrah for
Clippy, as he is now off by default in
Office XP.
The idea was initially
simple: the
Assistant would sit on your
screen, out of the way of your
workspace, and provide a common area for
dialogs and user
suggestions that the
program might give on how to better use itself. On the
surface, it sounds like a really great
feature for
anything to have. It is quietly
ingenious, because it gives your something to interact with as a
figurehead between you and the
Office interface. You get a sense that "
Clippy" wants to do something, and you interact with him to manage your
Word session. It seems removed, yet
attached in a way. Several other programs use the same
technology, copying
Microsoft's interface, such as
Adaptec's
Easy CD Pro.
On the underbelly, the
Assistant is a very important
UI tool.
Office works a little
differently if the
Assistant is up or not, since all minor
dialog boxes (messages like "You haven't save your work yet") go through the
Assistant's help balloons while it is up, and in a standard
Windows (or
Macintosh)
dialog box when they are not. The Assistant's dialog boxes also have a weird non-modality to them, as not to be
intrusive, but it doesn't have that native
Windows (or
Macintosh) feel.
The
Assistant is based largely on
technology out of
Microsoft Research's
UI division called
Microsoft Agent.
Agent is a
character animation and
response system that allows
programmable "agents" to respond to a
series of
events to allow an animated figure to guide your way through a task. This is a
Windows-only technology, even though there is an
Office Assistant available for the
Macintosh platform, on
Office 98 and above. On both platforms the
Assistant methods are available through
VBA calls (
animate,
move,
dialog boxes, turn on and off, etc).
The
Assistant does very well in
Japanese markets, but not with the same
Clippy that you and I have come to
know and love. You'll notice that on
Kanji SKUs of the
Office program, a
woman operator is
available, one that is not normally on the
English shipping version. This is because this
Assistant character tested
dramatically better than the cat (
Links) ,
ball (
Dot), puzzle piece, the
genius (
Einstein), or any of the other shipping assistants. That in itself is kind of an
insight into the
differences in culture between here and
Japan.
It was a good idea at the
time, and it proved to be helpful for a lot of
users, but the users who didn't like it were very
outspoken about it, and perhaps one day, we will
remember the
Office Assistant as a
UI bumble from
Microsoft, similar to
others before hand. However, it should be noted that
MS puts a lot of time into
User Assistance, and the
technology that underlies the
paperclip on your
desktop has been many years in the
making.