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Not to mention what is possibly the most asinine change I've ever seen in any UI revision of any software: Making the right click menu show you half the availab

• sho_hn 4y ago
  This is not the first time Microsoft has done it, either. In one of the MS Office generations, perhaps Office 2000, they introduced "Personalized Menus" as a major innovation in attempt to make the software less overwhelming. The idea was that the menubar menus would only show the most-used menu items by default, and hide the rest behind a "More items" at the bottom. It would then learn usage patterns and adjust the menu contents over time. The result: Menu options disappearing seemingly randomly. Stuff you used rarely but relied on sometimes would suddenly not be where you found it last time. The Ribbon later was kind of a "it's not working, back to the drawing board" reaction to that. It's an interesting lesson in how "pseudo-intelligent" software can come at the cost of predictability. I once had to design tab nickname completion in a chat app, and remembering the MS Office anecdote I made it so that prefix<tab> would complete to the most recently active user matching the prefix, but that subsequent <tab> presses would go through the rest alphabetically instead, which also made a lot more sense to the testers.