User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

HCL Domino Domino Forum
21

Subject: RE: Positive Feedback from a Rant.

Not sure how doing a File - Save As is a whol>lot easier for non-techy users, as the ones I

know don’t know how to find anything in a file

system, but I’ll assume you know your users

better than I do.

I have users that also don’t know how to navigate the file system, but that’s not really the point. If they call me about losing a document, and Notes forces them to save it somewhere, then I know that it’s somewhere and I can simply search for it by date. Or filename. Or whatever. Right now, I just have to shrug and say, “it’s gone.”

Have you noticed though that you have raised

various issues that people HAVE answered, such

as the F5 being switched in Outlook to F9

A couple things here:

  1. While better than Notes, Outlook is no paragon of application development. If you’re going to rip-off design decisions from another company, at least do everyone the courtesy of ripping off from Apple’s Mail.app.

  2. Outlook may not use F5 for refresh, but I’m willing to bet that a) it has a way to change which key it uses, and b) it’s a lot quicker to recover from accidentally hitting F5 than it is in Notes. (In Notes, if I hit F5 by accident, I have to type in my password again. What does it do in Outlook?)

I understand now that the Lotus Notes lockout is more secure than the Windows ones in some ways, so I see how it might be necessary to include it. That’s NO excuse for using a key that’s commonly used for something entirely different in every other application in existence.

Also, if you’re going to rag on me for ignoring points brought up, what about the points I brought up that this board is ignoring? Like the shameful Address Book interface? Or how about the fact that my mouse’s scrollwheel doesn’t work right?

22

Subject: MAIL.APP is it?

James,

You mention Apple’s mail.app as something to aspire to. True, it’s a nice looking little mail application, but after finding this post (sorry, I missed all these the first time around) I went and had a look at how mail.app handles attachment editing. The results of my test were interesting.

  • I create a new mail in mail.app and drag over an MS Word attachment to it.

  • I click (not double-click) on the attachment and it launches MS Word with the attachment’s contents showing. No dialogs to tell me what it’s doing - less to confuse the user, I guess!

  • I make some changes in MS Word then save the Word doc and close the application.

  • I go back to the open email in mail.app and close it. NOTE: there is NO prompt to save the email at this point. (Getting worried?)

  • I go the Drafts folder in mail.app and open the email again.

  • I click on the attachment to launch it in word. My changes are gone. It shows the original attachment, before I edited it.

I re-tested this scenario, but instead of just closing the email in mail.app at the end, I clicked the Save as Draft button and then closed it. Result: the changes I made to my MS Word doc have now been saved. However, mail.app gave me ABSOLUTELY NO WARNING that I would have to do this extra step to save my changes.

Notes DOES do this simple, but rather important little thing. The very act of editing an attachment in Notes is enough to tell Notes that you are making some changes to the hosting Notes document (email) as well. You cannot then simply close Notes document without a prompt to save.

One up to Notes, methinks.

From here on, things get very bizarre.

I tested what Mail.app does if you click on an attachment from a preview window in the Drafts folder. It launches the attachment in Word again, but this time when you save the changes they are saved in the (previewed) email immediately. Nice that it works that way, at least, I thought, but was confused that it works one way when the email is open and another way when the email is in preview mode. But it gets better.

I opened the email and clicked the attachment again and guess what? I get the original attachment again!!! I had to blink a few times here, but tested it over and over again with the same result: open from the opened email and I get one version of the attachment; open it from the preview pane (for the SAME email) and I get a different version of the attachment. Which one’s the right one? Which one is your recipient going to get when you send it? You be the judge!!

So, case closed, Ladies and Gents. Buy up a load of Macs, roll out mail.app and give your helpdesk the rest of their lives off!

Disclaimer

The version of mail.app that used to test is from 1.3.11 from 2003. Maybe these problems have been fixed in a later version, but do you know what? Nobody ever cuts Notes that kind of slack, so buggered if I’m going to do it today.

Cheers,

  • Mike
23

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Thank you for the consideration. To my eyes, the interface is the application. If the interface is bad and inconsistant, the application is bad. Admittedly, this is a very Mac-like point of view to take but… on the other hand… people are constantly praising Macintosh products for being easy-to-use and increasing productivity.

In short, the power the Notes client has is useless if you can’t figure out how to use it. That website I linked to earlier, the interface hall of shame, had a great example: You can have Notes render pages with the IE renderer, but for some strange reason the option to do it is in “Edit Location.” What does the HTML renderer have to do with my location?

And it’s IBM’s process that produces these situations that bothers me. Did anybody on the Notes team say, “hmm, it’s really goofy to have this option in ‘edit locations.’ We should change that to make more sense?”

I seriously think you guys should stop everything you’re working on and spend 3 months JUST on usability issues. Or, at the very least, address everything on that hall of shame before releasing version 7.

And please, please, please when you seek interface feedback, do not use Notes developers, or expert users, or anybody who works for IBM. Go outside, find nurses, schoolteachers, people who don’t use computers for a living, and ask what they think.

24

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Well, this (the choice of browser) is one of those things that might not seem immediately obvious, but having the setting be location-dependant is right.

The Notes client is designed so that several settings can be grouped together into a location preference; a user merely needs to change locations to change a lot of settings all at once. Keeping the browser setting in a location allows the user to change browsers based on a whole context of work. While that might not seem important from a follow-the-joke-link-from-the-mail point of view, it can have a tremendous effect when using one of the too many web applications that are designed to work on a single corporate standard browser. To someone who is mobile, that may mean Internet Explorer in one location, the IE control in Notes in another, a proper browser for ordinary use, and then there’s that one client org that has everything coded for Netscape 4. Obviously, things like server addresses, proxy, replication and pass-thru settings, and often even the Notes ID need to change at the same time.

25

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Ok, let’s say you’re right about why the option is there. If that’s true, why isn’t “check for new mail every X minutes” also in the location? After all, if you’re on a laptop not on the Internet, you don’t need to check mail at all… so that setting should be in the ‘location’ also, right?

Look, you may be right about why that is there, but your reasoning ALSO applies to almost every preference IN the application. What’s so different about “check mail every X minutes” and “which web browser?” that one is in the Preferences dialog and the other is in the location file?

26

Subject: *This seems like a good point. I would never know where to find either if I didn’t already know

27

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

It may not be immediately obvious, but even this kinda makes sense. The notification frequency preference is not something that’s likely to change (if you don’t want to be bothered by email more than once an hour at most after logging in, it’s because that’s your working style) – but where the checking is done makes a difference. In a disconnected (or dial-on-demand) location, you would normally be working in a local mail replica. The replication settings for the location would actually determine how often the server-based mail database (when accessible) is checked, and the new mail notification facility merely checks the local replica for changes.

28

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

… and the user’s browser preference is something that’s likely to be changed often?

Seriously, I don’t get your line of thinking here at all. It seems to me that both preferences are the same ‘type’ of preference… both are per-user (or per-machine at least) and not per-location, both are settings that aren’t likely to be changed often. But one is in one spot, and another is in another spot.

29

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

It’s not that it’s likely to be changed often, so much as something that’s likely to be location-specific.

There is a difference between “the browser I prefer to use” and “the browser that works in the environment I’m currently working in”. Please take into account that not everybody spends their time working in a single environment, even if they stay within the confines of a single corporation. Mergers and acquisitions mean heterogenous environments that may take a while to come into sync, and it isn’t necessarily the case that a web application written to work in, say, NS4, will ever be upgraded. A large number of people also have the pleasure of working in both their own corporate environment AND a client environment, which often requires a different Notes ID, a different mail database, a different browser, and so on. Should they be required to individually adjust all of these settings?

30

Subject: *Well put

31

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Personally, Stan, I think you’re over-defending here. The fact remains that much of the preference/location control stuff IS obtuse. And that’s why it gets a bit of an overhaul in every release. Look at how much security preferences have changed between 5 and 6.

I wouldn’t say this justifies the initial poster’s raving. But just because he’s picking fights doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a point.

I will say that if I see that damn “Notes UI Sucks” webpage again, I’m going to have to chase some people down with a cheese grater. Have you looked at the interface ON THAT PAGE!? That guy has ZERO room to talk.

32

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Watch it, Nathan – that cheese grater talk has gotten you in trouble before. Perhaps a nutmeg rasp would be more in order? (And take longer and be ultimately more painful.)

Fact of the matter is that I’m currently in one of those heterogenous internal plus client environment situations right now, and I have come to LOVE the Location, to become One with the lower-right-hand corner of the client. If these prefs were anywhere else, I’d spend most of my day tweaking settings. The Location document is the right place for it – but I’ll admit that it might be easier to figure out. But there is SO MUCH in Notes to figure out – anyone who throws a new user into a Notes environment without some training or reference would also be a suitable target for food-shredding implements.

33

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

“Watch it, Nathan – that cheese grater talk has gotten you in trouble before.”

The web has a long memory, doesn’t it? :wink:

“Perhaps a nutmeg rasp would be more in order? (And take longer and be ultimately more painful.)”

I’m hunting for a way to abuse someone with a garlic press. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader’s imagination.

“The Location document is the right place for it – but I’ll admit that it might be easier to figure out.”

Well, it’s not so much that the Location document is where it needs to be, as there just needs to be a reasonably easy way to say “switch instantly from this set of preferences to that set.” I’m sure between the two of us we could come up with a dozen UI models for how to achieve that. But consistency is the hallmark of a good interface, and when it comes to preferences, Notes lacks that today (which is what James is trying to say under his rather inflammatory language.)

I mean, really, Stan, in any other environment, would you expect to go to your contact list to figure out where to change your default browser? It’s no secret this stuff needs presentation work.

“But there is SO MUCH in Notes to figure out – anyone who throws a new user into a Notes environment without some training or reference would also be a suitable target for food-shredding implements.”

Ah, well, it’s hard to argue with that. But it would be nice if you could cut out 30 minutes of user class time because you could just cut out a feature, wouldn’t it?

After all, it’s the REDUCTION of user-options that has made the GUI the presentation model of choice worldwide. The CLI left an infinite number of mistakes a user could make, while the GUI constrained them. And HTML-as-UI constrained those even further, thus helping increase intuitability of browser applications. Notes could take a giant leap forward by allowing customer administrators and user the choice of what depth of complexity they’d prefer to face.

34

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Note that I never said that location files aren’t useful… I use a similar device on my OS X laptop every day when I go back and forth between work and home.

What I’m saying is that I don’t get why some options that seem to me they belong in the location (like email checking interval) aren’t.

35

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Just because his webpage design might not be great doesn’t mean HE doesn’t have a valid point. To counter with the obvious reply…

The fact remains that most of the issues brought up on that page haven’t been addressed yet. I’m sure there’s all kinds of new database replication features or something for you hard-core users and developers to salivate over, but there hasn’t been much done at all to make things easier for the user.

36

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Look, if you’re going to point to someone else’s complaints, at least look at something that’s up to date.

http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/index.html

37

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

Hah, thanks for the link.

38

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

I’m starting to see that this entire debate is pointless. The only person who can actually help me address these issues replied once, promised a second reply, and never got back to me. Everyone else here is a Lotus Notes-addicted developer or sysadmin who has NO idea how the normal computer user thinks and won’t admit, even under torture, that Notes is anything less than absolutely perfect. It’s like going on a website like MacAddict.com and telling the people there that you think iTunes is a bad idea.

In any case, in my survey of random users I work with, and people on other boards I’ve posted this to, I’ve yet to find somebody who enjoys working with Notes. The closest I’ve gotten is “it didn’t bother me that much.” I think this is a problem, even if the people on this forum don’t, and even if IBM doesn’t.

I don’t know what the next move for me is. Is there another way to submit product feedback that won’t incur the wrath of Notes-addicted people? Does the dev team even give a crap about the interface to their own product? I don’t know. It’s futile, it’s hopeless, and I’ll be stuck administering a product that constantly creates problems, makes existing problems larger, and IS a problem in itself. At least until I can convince the administration to switch… that’s lost business, IBM, because your interface sucks.

BTW, one of the interesting comments I got was from a fellow soul who tried to address interface quality in Notes before… his comments? … I’m going to quote a lot of it below:

Actually the replies to [James]'s rants from the Lotus development team are in keeping with their hilariously perverse UI design.

Quote:

The normal sequence of events is that the user first saves the file they're working on outside of Notes, and then saves the Notes document that has the attached file. This saves the updated file attachment into the document, and then deletes it.



Quote:

I'm sure you will be happy to know that in Notes 7, there is also a dialog that comes up when the user tries to exit the Notes document after using the attachment edit function. This dialog, which contains a checkbox that the user can use to ask not to see the message again, explains the procedure for attachment editing so that the user knows that they must exit the editing application first.

So, 1. It isn’t a problem, honest. 2. We’ve brilliantly fixed it with a dialog box that explains the bizarro procedure by which you can avoid the non-problem. (The first time I saw one of these “now, copy this down” dialog boxes – in 1998 – in Notes I began a somewhat self-destructive campaign to purge Lotus Notes from the corporation I was working at suggesting that say a web-based bulletin board might work better.)

There are some products that are simply so bad that in order to still be using it you must create your own reality distortion field and live in it. When all your users are living in an RDF you’re completely screwed because fixing your product will alienate your clinically insane user base.

39

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

God, now I’m embarrassed that I agreed with anything the man had to say.

Do you really think you’re going to get any action by accusing everyone you’re dealing with here of being slavish worshippers of the product? Hell, the only user consistently arguing against your points is Stan.

I think if you want to talk about alienating people, you might want to consider the outcome of remarks like “your clinically insane user base” or “your interface sucks.”

40

Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes

I didn’t make the “your clinically insane user base” remark, I only quoted somebody else. And I think the interface does suck, I don’t apologize for that. It’s not “here’s a minor quibble about how scrollwheels work,” it’s “holy crap my users keep losing their work because nobody understands how ‘edit’ works with attachments.”

And I don’t think I’m going to get any action either way. Like I said, only one developer posted a reply and he seems to be gone now anyway. The only way to fix these problems have, as step 1: “become lead of Lotus Notes project.” I’m giving up.