When is it too much?
I think the following quote from Julie Larson-Green, who is the group program manager for the Office User Experience at Microsoft, answers the title’s question rather nicely. The quote is from Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office 12 Core Applications”:
Word 1.0 only had about 100 commands, and you could go through the menus and see everything you could do. But Word 2003 has over 1,500 commands, many of which are harder to find.
Clearly, 1500 commands is too many. How many people do you know (feel free to include yourself in this number) insert space between paragraphs in Microsoft Word by hitting the ‘Enter’ key a few times? I think Microsoft may have misjudged the problem by trying to make it easier to find the 1 command in 1,500 that you were looking for. The problem, as it seems to me, isn’t the fact that it is hard to find the 1 in 1,500
I may be biased coming from a web based world, but I would have done a better job at seperating the content of the document from it’s visual representation. I would have incorporated the web’s idea of XHTML and CSS to traditional paper document creation. And I would have spent considerable effort making the GUI more adaptive and selective by utilizing contextual menus and other visual clues. For instance, placing the mouse pointer between two paragraphs should pop-up a graphic in the ruler that allows you to change the distance between the paragraphs in increments of the specified font-size, with an option to alter all paragraphs to match.
