What Not to Do With a Paper Clip

Clippy haters of Harvard: there’s a reason for your rage. An actual academic paper has concluded that the default character for Microsoft’s Office Assistant is “almost a textbook case of what not to do in designing a user interface agent.”

In his senior thesis “Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior and Social Responses to User Interface Agents,” Luke Swartz, Stanford Class of 2003, interviewed Word users and ran an original experiment with different “agents” to find out if Clippy’s failure was “one of implementation or one of concept.” That is, is it inherently annoying to have a little creature proffering help in a computer program or is there potential for a truly useful Clippy 2.0?

His conclusion? Both.

Swartz found that agents should be created in a way that leaves users feeling “in control” of their computer program and should follow “human rules of etiquette.” Clippy does neither. Its main fault, Swartz writes in his paper, is the pro-active letter-writing feature, which annoys users like Bo Meng ’06, who says he “learned how to write letters in grade two.”

According to Swartz’s research, however, some users actually do find Clippy helpful and even “entertaining.”

Swartz doesn’t hold a particular dislike for the Office Assistant, unlike Evan Hepler-Smith ’06, whose passionate hatred for Clippy inspired him—“like any good revolutionary,” Hepler-Smith says—to start the facebook group “Fuck You, Paperclip from Word.” Swartz has tried all the characters and writes in an e-mail that he thinks that some of them have “pretty cool animations.”

But he also doesn’t find any of them “particularly helpful.” So unlike Becky James ’06, co-creater of the pro-Clippy facebook campaign, “A Group about the Cuteness and Niceness of the Paperclip from Word,” Swartz has his Office Assistant turned off.