[HN Gopher] I created Clippy [video]
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I created Clippy [video]
Author : rhema
Score : 110 points
Date : 2023-06-09 14:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| h0ek wrote:
| Funny story.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Clippy as a virtual assistant power by AI would work.
| ftio wrote:
| Plagiarizing a comment of mine from another post:
|
| In general, cutesy UIs are fun only the very first time you use
| them. But they're a liability in the long term because once the
| novelty of the cuteness wears off, you risk really annoying your
| users, especially in high-stress scenarios.
|
| Expanding on that: Clippy is endearing now because it hasn't
| annoyed anyone for a decade+, but it was a real nuisance --
| difficult to disable and not nearly useful enough to justify its
| incessant interrupting.
|
| Avoid cutesy UIs.
| ycombinete wrote:
| Doubly so with cutesy "aw shucks" error messages.
| jchw wrote:
| Cutesy stuff is mostly just a culturally dependent thing, our
| appetite in the U.S. seems rather low whereas sensibilities in
| Japan and maybe East Asia in general are much higher. But
| really, in my opinion, if you're going to do something cute in
| a UI, the most important thing is to treat it like art rather
| than directly as means to accomplish some "business" end like
| appealing to a demographic or worse, for emotional
| manipulation. It's best if it's done to authentically make
| something pleasant and comfortable, rather than to check some
| weird boxes from the higher ups. Otherwise, it's going to feel
| immensely fake, and fire off the bullshit alarm of a large
| population of people.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| I don't think cuteness anything to do with it.
|
| It's when style interferes with the functionality, that people
| start to get annoyed. But that applies to any aspect really:
| Animations, Minimalism / Skeuomorphism, Simplicity /
| Complexity...
|
| Many apps successfully introduce cuteness through iconography
| and illustrations. Eg. Duolingo, Bear Notes, TunnelBear. Also
| look at Panic who have a (very mild) playful aesthetic in their
| power-user development tools: https://nova.app
| BossingAround wrote:
| In the same way, I really dislike using references to popular
| movies or characters in code samples or sample projects, esp.
| if it is the official docs for a framework or something
| similar.
|
| I see a ton of "battle of superheroes" kinds of apps that try
| to demonstrate cool stuff, like deploying distributed
| applications over multiple clouds/k8s distributions, using
| serverless, Istio, and who knows what. But I just can't get
| over the fact that such tutorials are _not_ made for me, as I
| 've not watched any superhero movie since I was ~10 years old.
| JusticeJuice wrote:
| Never put a pun in a UI
| yard2010 wrote:
| Let's not forget we're talking about the 90's Microsoft. Cute
| or not they were bad at UI/UX, so bad that no guideline would
| help them.
| hulitu wrote:
| You should see today's GUI. They are terrible.
| voytec wrote:
| Microsoft was already into drawn characters a few years earlier.
|
| Microsoft Comic Chat[1] was their take on how IRC should look
| like. It was quite popular for a short time and a bit annoying
| for users with other IRC clients. MS Comic Chat user sessions
| would send public messages upon joining channels: "# Appears as
| ANNA".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
| hamburglar wrote:
| Not sure where this falls on the timeline, but their well-
| trodden "wizard" UI pattern that uses a series of modal prompt
| dialogs to walk you through a process also used to be
| accompanied by a literal cartoon wizard.
| plastic3169 wrote:
| MS Comic Chat is long forgotten but it gave us Comic Sans which
| has amazing staying power.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Was clippy that bad or is it something we just love to hate or
| pile on, but much like Nickelback, who cares, it's easy to ignore
| / disable in clippy's case? I really don't remember as I was a
| teen when clippy came out. I liked the Merlin version fwiw.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Microsoft really missed an opportunity to bring back clippy when
| showing chat gpt integration in office/windows.
|
| It has deep nostalgia to a generation of computer users who are
| non-technical. People that were annoyed by it were either power
| users who wanted the machine to get out of their way, or learners
| who didn't find it helpful.
|
| I think in this case it would have worked much better and
| simultaneously validated earlier failed ideas. They would be
| viewed as ahead of their time, not like wrong futures.
|
| Imagine the Microsoft press conference moment where clippy pops
| up and ACTUALLY HELPS YOU. I'd probably cry a little.
| williamtrask wrote:
| Lol. Probably worried it would reproduce and become a paperclip
| maximiser.
| civilitty wrote:
| This would complete the time loop started when the LHC was
| first turned on and finally collapse our timeline back into the
| time vortex.
| Oddskar wrote:
| The real interesting part about Clippy is not the cartoony art,
| but the fact that it _actually_ would have been helpful if the
| project managers of office would not have gutted it:
| http://erichorvitz.com/lum.htm
| naikrovek wrote:
| am I the only one who remembers that his name was "Clippit"?
| ziml77 wrote:
| Nope, I remember when I was young flipping through options for
| different assistants seeing that his name was Clippit. Bothers
| me to this day that people call him Clippy and would look at
| you as if you had two heads if you called him Clippit.
| billfor wrote:
| Clippy wasn't as bad as the ribbon.
| codeulike wrote:
| When Office XP launched in about 2001 Microsoft had a comedy
| microsite all about Clippy being forced to retire (the angle
| being that XP was so easy to use he was no longer needed). It was
| entirely based around the idea that everyone was sick of clippy.
|
| They had a couple of flash animations (the contemporary
| equivalent of a viral video), recorded here for posterity. Clippy
| was voiced by Gilbert Gottfried
|
| Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_Pzuwy-JY
|
| Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82KZG3Zy8xU
|
| Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAsV6_AawVw
|
| Remains of microsite here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20031009044305/http://www.micros...
|
| There was also a downloadable blues-type song which was titled
| 'it looks like you're writing a letter', I can't find it anywhere
| now but it was pretty good
|
| edit: found the song! its at 1:01:35 in this video:
| https://youtu.be/8bhjNvSSuLM?t=3690
| perryprog wrote:
| Wow, I'd never seen those before. As far as ads go, those seem
| really stand-out--seriously creative, and even self-deprecating
| for the sake of promoting XP.
| jchw wrote:
| Clippy played by Gilbert Gottfried? That was not on my bingo
| sheet.
|
| Compared with the Windows 95 video guide with Jennifer Aniston
| and Matthew Perry, you can really feel the different era of
| both Microsoft and maybe even social climate between them.
|
| > flash animations (the contemporary equivalent of a viral
| video)
|
| Heh. It's kind of hard to boil down what flash animations
| really _were_ in essence anymore, isn 't it? Clearly it's
| obsolete _now_ , but something about limitations really does
| breed innovation.
| breadwinner wrote:
| So Clippy came from Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob itself was a
| response to General Magic's "social interface", known as Magic
| Cap [1].
|
| Another thing that came as a response to General Magic: Java.
| Java was a response to General Magic's Telescript [2].
|
| So Clippy and Java were both inspired by the same product!
|
| Watch the video [3] for an important piece of history!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic#Magic_Cap
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic#Telescript
|
| [3] https://youtu.be/7PpTVrWSMlY?t=63
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I always thought the idea was ambitious and interesting.
|
| The biggest problem, as he points out, was that it was a bit too
| simplistic. Anyone who was anywhere near to being a power user
| with work to get done was mostly going to be frustrated by it.
|
| It was cute - even delightful - to me at first, then quickly just
| got in the way. To my mind, two things which could make such an
| idea more successful would be 1) making it easier to deactivate,
| and 2) having a more robust 'advanced' mode which points you to
| actual documentation, articles and support forums and other than
| that leaves you alone. I don't think the tech for that second
| part was possible back then (especially parsing natural language
| inquiries), but it is now.
|
| The characters I ended up using most were the little dog and the
| bouncing ball. I didn't mind Clippy, but after seeing how others
| reacted to him I didn't want people to know that. The animations
| were great for all of them regardless, there was clearly a lot of
| talent deployed there. Unfortunately that has almost no
| connection to usefulness.
| acomjean wrote:
| >It was cute - even delightful
|
| I remember enjoying the animations for the different
| characters. I think you could click on the clips /dog/ globe
| and trigger an random animations. Maybe a slow day at work.
|
| I don't recall clippy being useful, but I wasn't a heavy word
| user.
| rompic wrote:
| As far as I remember it wasn't for word only. At least the
| dog (there also was a cat and I think a robot) were used as
| the windows file search companion as well.
|
| See https://youtu.be/lnOxTJwTmcc
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| It wasn't even just for MS applications. You could embed
| the Agents in your own application via ActiveX. There were
| some samples from MS of how to embed it in websites via
| VBScript. There was also an Agent Editor so you could
| create your own agents.
|
| There were also downloadable agents from MS. I think there
| were around a dozen or so different ones before they pulled
| the plug.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| I would not really consider the illustrator being its "creator".
| Sure the illustration is an important part but the real
| interesting questions would probably be answered by its product
| manager.
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