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Sometimes what customers want is not always what customers get. Take Scout for example, a little piece of Microsoft Research ingenuity that really helps users with the new Office 2007 Fluent interface. As religious as I am about the Ribbon and contextual interface, I suffer just as much knowing a feature exists somewhere in the application that I just cant find in the Ribbon. I mean how do I know what context its in? And Im almost certain Im not the only one suffering.
Developed and distributed internally at Microsoft as a proof-of-concept, Scout solves the problem by offering a simple and straight-forwarding search solution. You basically type the command you are thinking of, and youll be presented a list of matching command buttons. And unlike commands in the Ribbon which are only a select few picked by someone else who thought might be relevant, this search goes deep into the application to find anything and everything.
Even though it was highly favored by Microsoft employees, Scout was never released to the public. Chris Capossela, corporate VP for Microsofts business division argued Scout was superfluous and potentially confusing. No. The only thing superfluous are the features I cant find.
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