11–20 of 35 posts
Plagiarizing a comment of mine from another post: In general, cutesy UIs are fun only the very first time you use them. But they’re a liability in the long term because once the novelty of the cuteness wears off, you risk really annoying your users, especially in high-stress scenarios. Expanding on that: Clippy is endearing now because it hasn't annoyed anyone for a decade+, but it was a real nuisance — difficult to…
Microsoft Comic Chat[1] was their take on how IRC should look like. It was quite popular for a short time and a bit annoying for users with other IRC clients. MS Comic Chat user sessions would send public messages upon joining channels: "# Appears as ANNA".
I always thought the idea was ambitious and interesting. The biggest problem, as he points out, was that it was a bit too simplistic. Anyone who was anywhere near to being a power user with work to get done was mostly going to be frustrated by it. It was cute - even delightful - to me at first, then quickly just got in the way. To my mind, two things which could make such an idea more successful would be 1) making it…
>It was cute - even delightful I remember enjoying the animations for the different characters. I think you could click on the clips /dog/ globe and trigger an random animations. Maybe a slow day at work. I don’t recall clippy being useful, but I wasn’t a heavy word user.
When Office XP launched in about 2001 Microsoft had a comedy microsite all about Clippy being forced to retire (the angle being that XP was so easy to use he was no longer needed). It was entirely based around the idea that everyone was sick of clippy. They had a couple of flash animations (the contemporary equivalent of a viral video), recorded here for posterity. Clippy was voiced by Gilbert Gottfried Part 1: https…
Compared with the Windows 95 video guide with Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry, you can really feel the different era of both Microsoft and maybe even social climate between them.
> flash animations (the contemporary equivalent of a viral video)
Heh. It's kind of hard to boil down what flash animations really were in essence anymore, isn't it? Clearly it's obsolete now, but something about limitations really does breed innovation.
Plagiarizing a comment of mine from another post: In general, cutesy UIs are fun only the very first time you use them. But they’re a liability in the long term because once the novelty of the cuteness wears off, you risk really annoying your users, especially in high-stress scenarios. Expanding on that: Clippy is endearing now because it hasn't annoyed anyone for a decade+, but it was a real nuisance — difficult to…
When Office XP launched in about 2001 Microsoft had a comedy microsite all about Clippy being forced to retire (the angle being that XP was so easy to use he was no longer needed). It was entirely based around the idea that everyone was sick of clippy. They had a couple of flash animations (the contemporary equivalent of a viral video), recorded here for posterity. Clippy was voiced by Gilbert Gottfried Part 1: https…
Plagiarizing a comment of mine from another post: In general, cutesy UIs are fun only the very first time you use them. But they’re a liability in the long term because once the novelty of the cuteness wears off, you risk really annoying your users, especially in high-stress scenarios. Expanding on that: Clippy is endearing now because it hasn't annoyed anyone for a decade+, but it was a real nuisance — difficult to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It was cute - even delightful I remember enjoying the animations for the different characters. I think you could click on the clips /dog/ globe and trigger an random animations. Maybe a slow day at work. I don’t recall clippy being useful, but I wasn’t a heavy word user.
As far as I remember it wasn't for word only. At least the dog (there also was a cat and I think a robot) were used as the windows file search companion as well. See https://youtu.be/lnOxTJwTmcc
There were also downloadable agents from MS. I think there were around a dozen or so different ones before they pulled the plug.