CRITIQUE #2
TRACK CHANGES IN MSWORD

Track Changes is a feature of Word that allows you to see what changes have been made to a document.  The tools for track changes are found on the Reviewing tab at the top of the document.

Affordance:
- The feature is available in the Review tab of the word Document.(If the user is using the document for the first time, it will take him a while to understand where to find the featue)
-Selecting the Track Changes feature in the new version of Office causes the Track Changes icon to go orange(is highlighted) which is better than the word 2007 where there was no way to know in advance to the user is the Track changes are on.
-However this is not true for the Balloons feature. The use of Ballon option is also not very clear as the comments appear as a underline text and only a balloon appears to the right handside of the document which is opposite to the notion of most of the users who think that the comments should appear in the balloon itself.
Mappings:
- A few tabs/buttons/features are named differently in the help document such as tracking changes is referred as changes tracked at few places which might not be a good mapping.
Coloring:
- The coloring is good for this feature. The comments are underlined and the user can change the color of the text. However highlighting these comments could make the comments more catchy to the any other user of the same document.
User Control and freedom:
-The user cannot place the comments in between of a sentence. The comments are always placed at the end of the sentence
- One has to just click on the Track changes button to turn it on or off. For a not-so-frequent user of this feature, it may be difficult to understand how to turn on or off the track changes.

Recognition Rather than Recall:
Irrelevant features in the Track Changes makes user necessary to recall the tasks.
For example, the change tracking options has so many features that it has made it feature creep leaving the user overwhelmed by the display of options.