Dylan Greene dot com

Normally it's not cool when Office crashes, but this time was different. When the "Do you want to send to Microsoft what happened so we can make our products better?" dialog came up, I clicked Yes. And then magic happened.

A new IE window opened...

"Hmm..." I thought, "That's never happened before."

And then I saw this:

"This is why you had the problem..." "...There is now a fix for it..." "...Click here to install the fix..."

This is near-nirvana for a usability freak like me.

That little "Submit your black box crash data to Microsoft?" dialog that most people curse at "I ain't helping Microsoft, they broke it, they fix it!" acted as my own personal IT servant, finding out exactly what went wrong and how to prevent the problem in the future. Awesome.

However, that wasn't the exact text. The exact text was more technical, talking about Knowledge Base article numbers, service packs, visiting Office Update, download times, etc. And I had to click through an Office Update web page or two, wait as it scanned for updates, and then install the fix. Not as intenerated as I would have liked.

Hopefully eventually Microsoft will tear away all that unnecessary techno-fluf for us mere humans and simplify it to a single dialog something like this:

"Sh*t, I crashed! No worries, I saved what you were working on, and I've already downloaded the free fix for this problem. How about I go ahead and install it now so we won't run into that problem again?"
Two buttons: [Fix it right now] [Fix it later, when nobody's using the computer.]

KISS in action. (Keep it simple, stupid.)