1. Optimize for repeated use, not just first time use
First, according to Microsoft’s
Chris Pratley, Clippy suffered greatly from the “
optimization for first time use” problem. The first time you saw the cordial, “It looks like you’re writing a letter,” suggestion, you might have been pleasantly surprised by Clippy’s intelligence. But after the 1,000,000th time you probably found it hard to take Clippy’s incessant, repetitive options every time you wrote “Dear…” on your Word doc. It’s not surprising that many users chose to turn Clippy off after his novelty faded.
2. Imbue diversity in product design and development
Second, Clippy was created in a
male-dominated design process that lacked diversity. The original idea was to create a fun and non-intrusive helper for the Office interface, yet Clippy and his fellow digital helpers turned out to be especially
unpopular among women. In an interview with the
New Yorker, former Microsoft executive
Roz Ho recalled: “Most of the women thought the characters were too male and that they were
leering at them.”
3. Seek and listen to your real customers’ feedback
Crucially,
feedback from these focus groups were
not taken seriously in the product development phase. It seems that the male-dominated engineering team couldn’t understand why the female reviewers thought the characters were leering or male-looking. Ultimately, 10 out of 12 assistants that were shipped with Clippy were male characters. According to Sinofsky’s interview, even Bill Gates made fun of the assistant’s annoying nature when he first heard of the idea, suggesting he’d want to
kill “the clown”. Furthermore, Sinofsky also revealed that many reviewers in the focus groups were tech enthusiasts and did not include “regular folks” who represent a larger proportion of Office users.
4. Avoid being too attached to your creation
Along the journey to create an assistant that users could connect with, the creators of Clippy became
emotionally attached to their own product. Unwilling to accept feedback, “
they were willing to throw out the focus-group-provided data” because it defied their expectations.
James Fallows also softly hinted that
Clippy was a holdover from an unsuccessful
Microsoft Bob project, which
Melinda Gates led. It might not have been a decisive factor, but it may be why employees were hesitant to offer their sincere opinions about poor Clippy.
5. Be aware of the adjacent possible
Finally, in our estimation, the Clippy product was
outside the adjacent possible and way ahead of its time. According to Sinofsky, the Clippy project emanated from studies on social interaction and intent classification with Bayes theorem and NLP. But he also revealed another critical problem that doomed Clippy from the beginning: when Clippy was launched, contemporary computers had only 2MB of RAM, 20MB of harddrive space, and a VGA screen that could fit only two paragraphs of Microsoft Word. Melinda Gates also acknowledged that
Bob needed a more powerful computer. But, at that time, the gigabyte was not a given and GPUs were nonexistent. For any intelligent virtual assistant today, these engineering constraints are like digital starvation.