the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 190
introduce them to Office’s powerful, potentially drudgery- saving fea-
tures. “It looks like you’re writing a letter,” for example, was intended to
guide them to new Word features that enabled users to format a document
without relying on complicated tab commands.
The problem, Pratley noted, was that Clippy not only offered the
suggestion for the first document in which a user typed “Dear” followed
by a string of words, but also every time it saw that combination in a
document thereafter. “Compounding things was that this tip did not have
a way for the user to turn it off, and it was a little too per sistent before giving
up,” he wrote. And many people, as it turned out, didn’t want Clippy’s
help at all. Steven Pemberton of the National Research Institute for Mathematics
and Computer Science in the Netherlands found that older users
liked help from intelligent agents, while younger, more savvy ones—accustomed
to solving problems on their own—found them annoying.
Clippy’s looks and manner were another miscalculation. In retrospect,
Pratley wrote in his Web log essay, the dog might have been a better
choice as a default—“he was cute, and animated to be subservient and
harmless, whereas Clippy was sassy and annoying.” Computer journalist
Peter Lewis likened him to Jar Jar Binks, a computer-generated character
in the Star Wars fi lms The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones,
whom legions of hard-core fans of the series found insufferable. Nisha
Dharna, a computer science student at Southern Illinois University, did a
study in which sixty test subjects learning tasks on a computer received
assistance from one of three animated intelligent agents—a genie, a spacecraft,
or a human being. The group receiving assistance from the spacecraft
showed the most anxiety, while the subjects getting help from the
human being were the least nervous and made the fewest errors. Dharna
inferred that Clippy might not have seemed so irritating if it had been
designed to look more like a person.
In a recent paper on human-computer relationships, Boston University
researcher Timothy W. Bickmore and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s Rosalind W. Picard noted that Clippy’s habits of barging