Joel, of Joel on Software, has a satisfying, spleeny rant about how difficult it is just opening the box of MS Office Pro 2007 (and Vista, which uses the same package design). He vents:
“It’s a hard plastic case, sealed in two different places by plastic stickies. It represents a complete failure of industrial design; an utter F in the school of Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things. To be technical about it, it has no true affordances and actually has some false affordances: visual clues as to how to open it that turn out to be wrong.”
And…
“Wasting five minutes trying to get the goddamned box open is just the first of many ways that Office 2007 and Vista’s gratuitous redesign of things that worked perfectly well shows utter disregard for all the time you spent learning the previous versions.”
Read the rest here.
