Users do not like to feel trapped by their computer. This aspect makes user control one of the most important interaction design guidelines and Microsoft learned this lesson the hard way with their Office Assistant debacle.
In the 90s, Microsoft decided to improve human computer interaction using sophisticated mathematical methods. The company's objective was to provide valuable assistance and feedback to users when necessary. This desire was materialized for the first time in Microsoft Office 97 by introducing an animated character that would guide users while they use Word and Excel. The default version of this interactive character was a talking paperclip named Clippy.
Unfortunately, Clippy worked so poorly - by trying to help when no help was needed - that it was not long before users started complaining about its behavior. For example, if you typed "Dear X" in Word, Clippy would pop up out of nowhere and say "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?".
Many users felt Clippy was a very annoying nuisance which hampered their experience of the office tool by continuously disrupting their workflow. This point of view was so widely spread that it was the subject in 2003 of a Stanford student thesis entitled Why people hate the paperclip: labels, appearance, behavior and social responses to user interface agents. A major fault that the tool had was that that it could not reason about user competence. An experienced user, who would find the tool useless, could not be differentiated from a novice user for whom the tool could be necessary. According to the blog Robotics Zeitgeist, this user differentiation feature existed but was excluded of the product release because of a lack of disk space.
Eventually Microsoft understood that their little animated character has been despised globally that they themselves started to tease him. Microsoft turned off Clippy by default with the release of Office XP on 2001 and the Office Assistant was completely removed in Office 2007.
In 2010, Time magazine declared Clippy one of the 50 worst inventions of all time. More recently, Clippy made the buzz by opening a Twitter account where he called out Satya Nadella, the recently promoted CEO of Microsoft Corporation :
You do know what tomorrow's Microsoft event is about right? @satyanadella is bringing me back, baby!
— Clippy (@ClippyTheClip) 27 Mars 2014
@ClippyTheClip nice try buddy :)
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) 27 Mars 2014
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