Yesterday evening a few colleagues and I went to a pub for some beer 
. We couldn’t completely keep our work out 
and for a few minutes had a discussion about the current Microsoft Office user interface. One colleague mentioned that he needed about an hour including reading the online help to find the function to paste something from the clipboard into Word as plain text, i.e. to get rid of the formatting. First I thought he was kidding me, but he was serious. If you start Word, the ribbon looks like this:
Yesterday evening a few colleagues and I went to a pub for some beer . We couldn’t completely keep our work out and for a few minutes had a discussion about the current Microsoft Office user interface. One colleague mentioned that he needed about an hour including reading the online help to find the function to paste something from the clipboard into Word as plain text, i.e. to get rid of the formatting. First I thought he was kidding me, but he was serious. If you start Word, the ribbon looks like this:
The paste button is prominently positioned at the top left. If you move the mouse over it, you see that it’s not one, but two buttons. If you keep the mouse a little bit, you’ll additionally get a tooltip:
Why is it difficult for some people to recognize that? Is it just that they are used two the old interface? Yes, there is no “Paste Special…” menu entry in an “Edit” menu anymore. But are the visual clues like the small black arrow below “Paste” or the button highlights too subtle?
I don’t know. Maybe he just had a bad day…
And I’m glad that my job does not require much user interface design
What’s your opinion? Please leave a comment.