User experience is a core part of any piece of hardware and software that IT services will install, set up, maintain and repair.
Computers are meant to make our lives and our jobs easier, and many of the most popular hardware and software choices within an office will be based on how easy they are to use, how
familiar they are to people and how easily any complexities can be taught.
Because of this, software developers work hard to design interfaces and interactable components that are designed to be as natural to use as possible.
This is usually a very positive approach, but it has sometimes led to rather unfortunate design decisions, with the most infamous being the Office Assistant, more commonly known as Clippy.
Whilst the animated paperclip design still exists as part of Microsoft 365 and Teams as an emoji following a somewhat ironic social media campaign, the system it was the face of was infamously disliked despite trying to help.
Paved With Good Intentions
Clippy, officially known as Clippit until so many people used the former name that it stuck, was part of the Office Assistant user interface, most notably in Microsoft Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003.
However, the origins of the technological and design principles behind it come from an earlier and even more ambitious Microsoft Bob, an entire user interface designed to introduce computing to an entire generation of new users in 1995.
Bob was a rather infamous failure, partially due to its high system requirements but also because it went too far in the opposite direction. Instead of being unfathomably complex, Bob was too simplistic and came off as patronising to computer users.
If a business in 1995 decided to update to using computers with graphical user interfaces, seeing the cartoon house with cartoon rooms that represented all of the different applications a user could execute in the infamous Comic Sans font would probably cause them to look elsewhere.
However, whilst Bob was one of Microsoft’s biggest ever flops alongside the Zune, Windows Vista and Copilot, Microsoft believed there was value in giving novice users a helping hand if it seemed like they were struggling with the existing user interface.
Bob had a virtual assistant tool in the form of a cartoon dog named Rover, but the design was replaced with an animated paper clip named Clippit, working with Stanford psychologists to develop what became the Office Assistant, designed to make it easy to format a letter or create a pie chart.
Clippit was not the only Office Assistant, with a superhero dog, caricatures of William Shakespeare and Albert Einstein, a red ball, a globe and the Microsoft Office logo of the era were all available as options on the installation CD.
However, as Clippit was the default, it became the face of the Office Assistant, and by extension the target of the user’s wrath.
The idea was that certain actions taken by users would be detected by the Office Assistant, and it would chime in by asking if the user needed any help with loading a template or activating a setup wizard, as well as providing keyboard shortcuts and easy access to the help file rather than use the F1 key.
However, rather than being helpful, it was seen as deeply intrusive, annoying and even patronising, much in the same way Microsoft Bob had been badly received.
Part of the reason for this, according to Alan Cooper of Visual Basic fame, was that Microsoft was inspired by research that demonstrated that the same parts of the brain responsible for emotional reactions activate when using a computer and mouse.
Unfortunately, in what Mr Cooper called a “tragic misunderstanding”, Microsoft thought this meant that a human-like face would help create a sense of empathy when in reality people already had a tendency to anthropomorphise and treat computers as people.
It did not help that the Office Assistant had poor context recognition, often interrupting users with advice that had limited application.
Employees at Microsoft famously also hated Clippy, but it was also not a big enough part of Windows or Microsoft Office to be worth removing, although it would be turned off by default in Office XP.
The system was separated from Office and became Microsoft Agent, which attempted to apply the concept more broadly as an embodied agent used to help with searches, although this would also be unsuccessful.
It was fully removed for Microsoft Office 2007, and whilst the idea has been implemented in later tools such as Cortana and Copilot, the legacy of the Office Assistant is to show the importance of helping users in a way that is not patronising or frustrating.
