Five Things Microsoft Bob Got Right – Fifteen Years Later
Fifteen years ago, Microsoft introduced one of their most perplexing products – Microsoft Bob. Today Bob is known mostly as a product failure, but in 1995 it was hailed as the future of PC user interface design. Released a few months before Windows 95 (which really was the future of PC user interface design), Bob was an audacious alternate interface built for Windows 3.1 that visualized programs on a computer as things found inside a home.
While Bob now looks like a bizarre alternate reality for UI design, in 1995 Microsoft designed Bob to help novice computer users better understand how to use their computer. Perhaps the best known elements from Bob were the ever-present cartoon character “guides.” Bob’s interface was primarily wizard driven, and the cartoon guides made the wizard process friendly and inviting. Check out this Youtube video to see a typical Bob session from a user point of view.
Bob flopped not long after it was launched for a number of reasons, including the fact that it was quickly overshadowed by Windows 95. But Microsoft persevered and kept around the idea of animated guides. We still celebrate Bob’s offspring: Clippy from Microsoft Office and Rover from Windows XP. Oh wait, I mean the opposite of celebrate…denigrate. Yeah, Bob’s memory is now pretty tarnished, but I think that’s short-sighted.
Today I come to truly celebrate Bob. Keep reading for five things Microsoft Bob got right.
1.) The user is always a human being.
From the very start, Bob was designed with a human relatable interface. Programs were located in rooms, and the user was expected to interact with software the same way they would interact with a book on the coffee table in their living room. Today that may sound slow and cumbersome, but at the time Bob was meant to make it easy for a vast market of novices to work with computers.
We so often lose sight of how important it is to acclimate new users, and even today people struggle with tasks as simple as finding the Facebook login. While Bob’s room metaphor didn’t work out, it’s still critical for developers to find innovative ways to connect novices – human beings – with new technology.
2.) The “computer as a room” metaphor lives on.
Did I just say the room metaphor didn’t work out? Well actually, it was brilliant and ahead of its time. Today we often talk about computer concepts using physical metaphors. My music lives in a library. My photos live in albums. My data lives in the cloud.
As technology has become more ubiquitous, the room metaphor has even reversed itself. I can read books on a computer that fits on my coffee table next to real books. Want to be even more confusing? I can access books on my computer in a virtual library that looks like a real library, all while keeping that computer on a coffee table next to real books that came from my actual library.
3.) Modal apps keep things simple.
Modal apps were another idea ahead of their time. Bob worked best when it did one thing at a time, thwarting new users from running several applications at once. For desktop and web applications, that idea now seems horrifying. But for mobile, modal is making a comeback. Mobile devices have less room for confusing windows and taskbars, and instead work best when they help a user focus on the task at hand. For example, the iPhone and the upcoming iPad both operate using modal applications.
4.) Different users want different experiences.
Today it seems obvious that one person might want their computing experience to be different from another person. For example, I spend a lot of time customizing the account settings on my laptop, tweaking the look of my Facebook and Twitter pages, and changing how my different applications act and behave. My settings are based on my preferences and are unique to me. They’re part of my various accounts, and those account details can be different from person to person.
Microsoft Bob solved this problem early – in the time of Windows 3.1 – long before anyone else was talking about multiple people sharing PCs, applications, and websites. With Bob, different members of a family could have different rooms, each customized to their tastes. A single central room could contain files and programs that were shared, while private rooms could contain files that were relevant to one person. This was incredibly forward thinking for the PC world, and we now take this concept for granted.
5.) Context-sensitive help is always helpful.
Context sensitive help can mean a lot of things, but here I mean anything the app does to help you best accomplish the one thing you are doing right now. Bob and Clippy were both poor implementations of this ideal, but the soul of the concept was sound. Today we expect apps to help us by only showing us controls and options that are useful to the task at hand.
A great example of this notion is the Office ribbon. The contents of the ribbon change as the user interacts with different parts of an Office application. Unlike context sensitive help in the past, the ribbon is not intrusive and instead focuses on showing you only the tools and features you need right now.
Closing Thoughts
Bob gets a bad rap. Yeah it failed, but wow did we ever learn a lot from that “failure”. In the past 15 years, companies like Microsoft and others have made computers simpler and easier than ever using concepts that were originally implemented in Bob. By improving on Bob’s best and worst features, computer usage has grown exponentially to the point that most people in developed countries either own or have access to a computer, the Internet, and a mobile phone.
Thanks Bob, we owe you a lot. Keep on smiling!
I think you give too much credit to Microsoft – e.g., “Microsoft Bob solved this problem early – in the time of Windows 3.1 – long before anyone else was talking about multiple people sharing PCs, applications, and websites.” Is it really so brilliant to suppose that different people would want a different environment when using the same hardware? You seem to discount, even forget, that people have been time-sharing computers for decades before MS Bob came along.
MS was employing monopolistic tactics during this time frame, that might have had as much to do with their success too, no?
I don’t discount time sharing at all. Unix systems had allowed multiple accounts for over two decades. What was innovative was to bring this to the PC world on a mass market scale. At this point, most PCs ran Windows 3.1 and those PCs did not support giving multiple users different experiences based on their preferences. In 1995, the vast majority of people did not use time-sharing computers or even know what one was.
As for monopoly tactics, I don’t think that’s relevant here. Besides, in 1995 there was still debate about whether the future of desktop operating systems would be “Chicago” (AKA Windows 95) or IBM’s OS/2.