Microsoft, why must you task me so?

See this line?

I hate this line. I want to annihilate this line, but I can’t.

This line represents a bad user experience to me.

After listening to Janice Rohn from YellowPages.com talk to class the week before spring break, I started thinking about bad user experiences I’d had online. Honestly, I couldn’t think of many, outside of my feckless attempts to enter virtual worlds earlier in the semester. But in those cases the villains were out-of-date hardware or drivers, not inhospitable websites. Or at least not entirely inhospitable websites.

The line above didn’t come from any website or virtual world, though. It came from Microsoft Word 2007, the program in which I composed this and past posts.

I was taking notes in class on my laptop some weeks back, running Word 2007, when I wanted to divide one section of the notes from another. I held down the hyphen key until it made a dotted line halfway across the page. When I lifted my finger off the key and hit enter, the dotted line turned into a solid line extending from one margin to the other, just like the one above.

I wasn’t exactly shocked. Word is always acting like it’s smarter than I. Anyone who has used the program is familiar with its habit of turning successive single lines of type into bulleted items, whether you want them bulleted or not. I’ve talked with many PC users over the years who feel as I do, that Word should mind its own business.

I can usually outsmart the impertinent bulleting, but when I tried to move text from below my intrusive line to above it or to get rid of the line altogether, I couldn’t. I tried all combinations of backspace deleting, forward deleting, cutting-and-pasting copy, pasting it into a new file – no dice. I even tried changing the color of the line to white. It stayed black.

As a last resort I turned to the Help files. Or rather I would have turned to them, except Help was nowhere to be found.

In previous versions of Word, Help was a pull-down menu on the far right of a row of pull-downs that started with File and Edit. But in Word 2007 – in fact, in all the Office 2007 programs – there are no pull-downs, just bunches of buttons grouped under tabs. And there’s no tab for Help.

It was only after talking with a Microsoft Office expert in my office that I found out where Microsoft had hid the Help files in Word 2007. Hid is right. They’re accessed through a small circle with a question mark positioned at the far upper right of the screen, directly below the X that closes the file or exits the program. The question-mark circle is blue and it’s set against a background of lighter blue.

What were they thinking? This redesign could only have come from the same geniuses who replaced the “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” pull-downs in Internet Explorer with a star and the add-bookmark function with star and a + sign.

I think I know what’s going on here. When Microsoft, or any software maker, comes out with a new version of a program, they intentionally make it look different. The thinking seems to be, who would pay to upgrade to a new version of a program if it looked exactly like the old version?

I’ll tell you who would, I would.

I like new features, but I hate having to relearn how to navigate a program. Most industries understand this. On cars they don’t yank the turn-signal activator off the steering column and move it next to the heater controls just to differentiate this year’s Malibu from last year’s.

Websites understand the value of convention, putting things where people are used to finding them. They want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to get what they want. They know that if they frustrate users, users are likely to jump ship to a user-friendlier alternative.

Having built a virtual monopoly in office software for PCs, Microsoft doesn’t have to worry much about a competing word processor with more easily removed lines stealing its customers. We’re pretty much captive at this point.

So what's the lesson from all this? Nothing profound. User experience may always matter, but it matters a whole lot less in the absence of competition.