"Clippy is living its best life"

September 10, 2022 9:02 AM

"The assistant’s once-grating command bubble and syntax is basically Mad Libs for passive aggressive memes, including those aimed at the sort of existential conundrums posed by tech today. 'It looks like you’re writing unsubstantiated nonsense,' a popular one begins. 'Would you like to turn on all-caps?'" Seattle Met discusses the Twisted Life of Clippy. [via]
posted by jessamyn (30 comments total)

Friendly drop-ins to talk through projects were common on campus. […] the people who made and managed computers—socially awkward dudes who thought they knew better than us

This leaves out an important part of MSFT drop-in etiquette — we had offices with doors, and if your door was closed it was assumed that you were not available for interruption just then. I even had a door of my own while I was still a temp, early on, and my manager respected it. I wonder if anyone tried giving the user a little door to open or close to Clippy.

What I really remember about the cartoon assistants is that one of them was lisping and feminine and submissive and ?writhed a little? and was strongly marked feminine and pissed off many of the women working there.
posted by clew at 10:01 AM on September 10, 2022 [6 favorites]

In a temple in the distant future, a giant statue of Clippy looms over an altar.

"It looks like you're trying to start a religion. Would you like a savior?"
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:26 AM on September 10, 2022 [17 favorites]

I would like the collective wisdom of a million years of software engineering to stop me sometimes. Just a little speech bubble that pops up and says 'hey, it looks like you're about to waste six hours of your life, try this instead'. I would sincerely love that version of Clippy. I would wear the t-shirt and baseball cap.

It wasn't a bad idea. It's like the Apple Newton. They took a swing at making a tablet PC in 1992. But it was 1992, so it sucked. It was 18 years until they put out the iPad when it all made sense. We've come a long way - I'm ready to give it another chance.
posted by adept256 at 10:28 AM on September 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Clippy was never able to answer my questions. But, those cute cat and dog animations helped me survive a lot of years of mostly horrible temp jobs.
posted by Glinn at 10:33 AM on September 10, 2022

Twitter decided I needed to see this today.
posted by jessamyn at 10:39 AM on September 10, 2022 [8 favorites]

What I really remember about the cartoon assistants is that one of them was lisping and feminine and submissive and ?writhed a little? and was strongly marked feminine and pissed off many of the women working there.
posted by clew at 10:01 AM on September 10

I believe that was Office Lady, shipped in all Japanese versions of Office 95 despite our protests.
posted by Arctostaphylos at 10:40 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I just learned Office Lady (aka Saeko Sensei) is a thing, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of information about the character on the English-language internet.
posted by box at 10:58 AM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

When Microsoft introduced Bob, my immediate reaction was Microsoft thinks its users are children. They named various utility programs, Wizards, things smarter than and more powerful than you. Apple meanwhile seemed to assume that its users were smart children who liked to explore and discover how to do stuff, because they were “intuitive.” Neither seemed to think its users were adults who just wanted to be told how it works, how to use it, and then just get to work. Hence the disappearance of manuals. Personally, I’m really tired of discovering all the hidden gestures in iOS when my fingers do something and the screen display goes into some weird mode and I don’t know how to get out of it. Or turn it off. Once upon a time, User Interface design was both a science and an art. Now under the guise of User Experience, I don’t know what the hell it is, other than a general pain in the ass.
posted by njohnson23 at 11:23 AM on September 10, 2022 [14 favorites]

You can watch all the Saeko Sensei animations here. I can't comment on the speech - there isn't any, but I don't see a problem with the animations, they're fine.
posted by adept256 at 11:23 AM on September 10, 2022

It's all fun and games until Microsoft merges with Universal Paperclips.
posted by notoriety public at 11:34 AM on September 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

I feel you, njohnson23. Back in the day I feel like Apple's human interface guidelines were more prioritized and now they take a back seat to what's most aesthetically pleasing. Reading The Design of Everyday Things really made me think that touch interfaces represent a huge challenge with regard to affordances. Searching through menus and clicking on available buttons is a good way to learn what's possible in pre-touch GUIs, but I don't know how you replicate anything similar with the near endless and invisible possibilities of gestures.
posted by Cogito at 12:25 PM on September 10, 2022 [6 favorites]

I don’t think it was Saeko-Sensei (the YouTubes are charming) but it might have been some particular "kittenish" text assigned to the cat.
posted by clew at 1:32 PM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Although, on consideration, who knows what text was assigned to the Office Lady? And I never worked on Office internationalization so I might have just missed that argument at the time. Right now I appreciate that her desk has a front. The bar is low.
posted by clew at 1:41 PM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

“Reading 'The Design of Everyday Things' really made...”

Door handles on public buildings (that span the entire door) versus car door handles!
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:46 PM on September 10, 2022

There's an erotic story called Conquered by Clippy?!?

I feel like Chuck Tingle missed one, somehow.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:08 PM on September 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

Eventually, Sarcastic Clippy will merge with Eldritch Garfield.
posted by acb at 4:56 PM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

It looks like you're trying to comment on this post by paraphrasing a William Carlos Williams poem. Would you like me to close the icebox so as not to spoil the plums?
posted by not_on_display at 5:24 PM on September 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Classic Clippy died with Gilbert Gottfried, alas, and can never be recreated.
posted by y2karl at 6:36 PM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I feel like Chuck Tingle missed one, somehow.

It looks like you're trying to be pounded in the butt...
posted by rhizome at 6:39 PM on September 10, 2022 [8 favorites]

“the worst thing about Clippy,” Reeves says, “was that he interrupted.”

Imagine that! People getting upset--

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER!

--upset about trying to do--

WATCH THIS VIDEO AD!

--trying to do something and then--

HALF OFF OF 12 ISSUES CLICK NOW!

--and then being interrupted, why would--

YOU HAVE THREE FREE ARTICLE VIEWS LEFT THIS MONTH! TALK TO OUR VIRTUAL AGENT NOW! CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT ABOUT OUR NEW FEATURES! WATCH THIS TUTORIAL!

....I think the thing about Clippy was, he put an easily-hateable name and face to being interrupted, instead of as in the current fashion of just facelessly breaking into whatever you're doing regardless that 80% of the fucking sites on the internet tend to do.
posted by JHarris at 5:37 AM on September 11, 2022 [14 favorites]

I feel you, njohnson23. Back in the day I feel like Apple's human interface guidelines were more prioritized and now they take a back seat to what's most aesthetically pleasing.

Or whatever a clueless artist or (even worse) programmer thinks looks cool. Or even just whatever the hell they want to do. Discord is a nightmare for me, buttons get dropped everywhere without rhyme or reason. Settings go under a small button with a gear icon on it by your name in the bottom-right corner of the window? Why the hell not! Who needs menu bars!

I have already grumped up this thread far too much, but I just want to note the number of times I accidentally open a page while scrolling through a list in the Discovery page of the mobile Google app averages at least three times per session, and it's far from the only app that I have this trouble with. Clippy is a model of thoughtfulness by comparison. Is it just age, or is UI really much worse now?
posted by JHarris at 5:52 AM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Or turn it off. Once upon a time, User Interface design was both a science and an art.

Yep. And to other things you comment on, it is really odd that Apple now makes you stumble around in their environment to figure things out, as they had literally written the book about best practices for HUMAN (as opposed to user!) interfaces.

I swear Apple has become contrarian to any guidelines in the name of "Think Different"

More to your point and also the point of the thread... I despised Clippy because it grabbed focus. I don't remember if it literally took the cursor out of your text field and forced you to close it out, or just grabbed your attention, pulling your focus from the work at hand.

But, for anyone who had written more than three Word documents, it was annoying as hell.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 6:11 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

If Clippy came out now, it would be permanent because the setting to turn it off would be "disable for 30 days" or "turn off for now."
posted by rhizome at 10:44 AM on September 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

alternate options would be "Remind me later" or "Got it!"

And Teams would pop up regardless.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 11:27 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Once upon a time, User Interface design was both a science and an art. Now under the guise of User Experience, I don’t know what the hell it is, other than a general pain in the ass.

I'm a front-end developer, and in the last couple of years, interface design, which used to be part of my job, has been handed over 100% to our newly formed UX team. I am literally no longer allowed to make changes to improve usability. I'm barely even allowed to propose them.

Our UX team is well up on modern design trends. Apparently this means things like: minimising on-screen verbiage (icons alone, for a cleaner interface); hiding functionality behind hover (hover on a bit of content and controls appear); styling links to match the text they're embedded in because making them stand out is ugly; using lighter font weights to reduce contrast without actually *technically* reducing contrast; making things flex or highlight when you mouse over them even if your mouse is not on the clickable element; extensive use of popups and modals, because minimising clicks is no longer seen as desirable.

I can see that the interface is cleaner. I can also see that it's a much bigger pain to use, and even to look at (low contrast is hard on the eyes), and that it's harder to make accessible.

I loved taking a page and refining the interface design to make the workflows smoother and easier to follow, the explanations clearer, the layout easier to understand. I don't get to do that any more, and as far as I can tell, the changes at my company are representative of changes in the wider industry, so the thing that's been my favourite part of the job for twenty years is no longer a thing I'm even qualified to do.

And of course I'm also affected as a user by those same modern design trends that it pains me to implement. Great swathes of the web have become inaccessible to my neurodivergent brain. I'm so tired of having to bring up the dev tools to turn off an animation or fix a font so I can read it.

I trust you can all hear the silent scream of anguish that underlies this entire comment.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 4:32 AM on September 12, 2022 [11 favorites]

…using lighter font weights to reduce contrast without actually *technically* reducing contrast…
...it's a much bigger pain to use, and even to look at (low contrast is hard on the eyes)…

Amen — not everyone’s eyes are 18 years old. What’s the point of making onscreen text thinner and/or lower contrast, especially for reading on phones or tablets? Briefly stylish designs are no reason to make information difficult to even see, let alone comprehend. However, a trendy makeover does give an excuse to proclaim “New fresh look, same great taste.”
posted by cenoxo at 5:11 AM on September 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Clippy was cute for about five seconds. OTOH, give me a small (Leia-sized), 3D pop-up holographic guide — like the one in The Time Machine (2002) — that hovers a few inches above my screen. Make it change characters to match the subject: Picasso for art, Shakespeare for literature, Einstein for math, Beethoven for music, Sagan for science, etc., and I might be interested.
posted by cenoxo at 6:15 AM on September 12, 2022

While Babylon 5 was in the middle of its run, someone at msft suggested reworking Clippy to speak more like Ambassador Kosh, which I thought was a wonderful idea.
posted by rmd1023 at 11:24 AM on September 12, 2022

I have had two more memories about this era bubble up:

The first head of the whole Windows UI design was a woman with a degree in rhetoric from a classics department. No one I talked to knew how she got from one to the other, but there were plenty of stranger careers before everyone expected software to be money. I’m not looking this up because I long for it to be true.

I spent a week, as a fairly new employee, with a developer furious at me because he’d gotten the highlighting on a button wrong and absolutely would not see that there was a consistent pattern of which two sides of the rectangle got a light stripe in the unchecked state, and also refused to understand the imaginary light source that made the "3D" effect. I know the bug got fixed, I think someone took it away from him, I still wonder sometimes if I could have explained it better. (1) Buttons were still handwritten to that degree!?! (2) If "skeuomorphic " was a word already, I didn’t know anyone who knew it.
posted by clew at 12:31 PM on September 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Clippy was around when I was in high school and I remember having great fun in grade 9 in turning all the computers to use the Wizard assistant instead of the paperclip of Einstein (the wizard was just Einstein wearing wizard robes though)
posted by Canageek at 5:50 PM on September 15, 2022