Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
When an administrator over-rides a Lock Workstation, it logs the previous user out before it logs the administrator in. Meaning that it’s not possible for the administrator to look at the contents of the screen before it was locked.
And yes, our network is configured correctly.
Probably 90% of what we use Notes for is mail.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
Granted – on NT-based Windows. But while the computer is “locked”, it’s only the UI that’s cut off (in all Windows versions); the computer is still up and running with the user’s authority. F5 does more than lock the screen, it disables the credentials as well. Real security is something very different from what Windows does. Maybe Longhorn will change that, maybe not, but that’s yet to be seen.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
You say:“Notes is (mostly) an email client. Show me one other email client that doesn’t use F5 for refresh. I’ll wait. (Ok, ok, yes, web-based clients… but all applications do, and all web browsers do, and it might not be a “Microsoft standard” but it’s definately a “what users expect” standard.)”
Well funnily enough Outlook 2003 switched from F5 to F9 for refresh, so your argument here is flawed.
Subject: tabbed navigation
Firefox have those neats tabs for navigation and I heard that IE7 will have them also. Hmm, where did I see that idea first implemented?
And now F5 to F9 by Microsoft. Maybe all the UI designers are looking at Notes for inspiration? 
Hans Haraldsen
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
“The F5/F9 issue is a non-starter.”
This strikes me as off-topic, but I hate it when Notes-defenders misunderstand what the F5/F9 problem really is. It’s NOT that F5 should be refresh instead of F9. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the common browser refresh key (which is a common user key) performs nearly the exact opposite on a Notes client, by killing all session information and locking the client.
Again, the problem is not that F5 isn’t refresh. It’s that F5 does something so RADICALLY different and inconvenient that it’s incredibly user-displacing.
If F5 was, say, paragraph indent, no one would give a crap. If it made the font larger, no one would care. But it’s the single-key LOGOUT function, and that’s a major user displacement (that can occassionally trigger loss of work.)
The solution is boneheaded obvious, and it really disappoints me that IBM hasn’t implemented it. It’s called “user preferences” and there are a billion of them for things that no one gives a hinky about (“Enable ActiveX in Notes Browser” - yeah, that’s gotta be some kind of triple-suicide pact.) but not one that says “Make F5 perform Refresh” or “Assign Logout to Scroll Lock key.”
What would these changes really take to implement? How many people would it shut up?
No, those still complaining about F5/F9 ought to give IBM grief, and IBM deserves all the grief it gets. The problem and the solution have been point out here going back at least 7 years, and they’ve done ZERO about this issue.
Subject: *Ahh, Nathan, it is never really a good rant until you join in.
Subject: * Woulda been here sooner, but I’ve been under the weather
Subject: *Sorry to hear that. Hope you feel better.
Subject: HAHAHAHAHAH
It’s called “user preferences” and there are a billion of them for things that no one gives a hinky about (“Enable ActiveX in Notes Browser” - yeah, that’s gotta be some kind of triple-suicide pact.)
Wow, I haven’t laughed that hard reading this forum in YEARS!
And yes, I agree the F5 issue is completely hosed.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
Thank you. You’ve explained what I’ve been trying to a lot better than I could.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
You’re talking to a man who grew up with WordPerfect, where F3 was Help and F1 was Cancel.
Frankly, I don’t like the idea of key-shifting as a user pref. It makes user support at the helpdesk level nearly impossible. (That’s why the homepage policy, etc., were added – to give a consistent environment in order to reduce the cost of support.) So you’ve got to take an all-or-none approach, really – and then you’re screwing the people who thought they knew that F9 is a refresh. Training as-yet unproductive new users is much more cost-effective than trying to reprogram existing users.
That, also, was a rant.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
“It makes user support at the helpdesk level nearly impossible.”
Stan, let me introduce you… this is a Directory Policy. Directory Policy, this is Stan. 
Seriously, dude… make this stuff controllable via an user preference/INI setting, and it’s controllable for your entire organization. Done. No fuss. No Helpdesk problems.
Remember, it’s not like this is mandatory. It’s just for those administrators that keep running going “F5 for logout is non-standard!!”
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
I think you’ve misunderstood how the attachment>Edit function works.
That’s the POINT OF MY POST! EVERYONE MISUNDERSTANDS IT! The UI does NOT make it clear what will happen when you ‘edit’ a document, and it certainly doesn’t make it clear what the user has to do to make it work as you describe in your message.
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.
Oh, ok. I’ve been using Notes for 4 years now, and I’ve never known that sequence of events before. So you’re saying that:
The user selects “Edit Attachment.”
The user makes any edits they want in Excel (we’ll use Excel for an example) While editing the Excel document, the user cannot quit or close the email document in Notes.
The user saves their changes in Excel.
THEN the user has to also save their changes into the Notes document.
NOW the user can close Excel without any data being lost.
Do you really think that this is a workflow that most people understand? Most people, yes, even total computer neophytes, MULTITASK while using their computer. Imagine Bob getting interrupted while editing the Excel document: “hey Bob, do you still have that silly joke from last week?” Bob switches to Notes, deletes the email with the file attachment he no longer needs (after all, it’s open in Excel right now, right?) then finds the joke and they all have a good laugh. Now Bob goes back to Excel, finishes his changes, and hits Save, then Close. POOF! BOB HAS JUST LOST ALL HIS WORK because a co-worker asked to see a joke.
(BTW, I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say Notes keeps the edited temp files around, because the version 6.5.1 we run certainly doesn’t. The temp directories were the first place I looked, followed by a system-wide search for “*.xls”. This is ignoring the fact that to the naive user, the file is still “lost.” Normal people don’t search their HD and temp directories when a file disappears, nor should they have to.)
This is the kind of problem that could have been spotted EASILY with about an hour of observing users use your program. (And I mean users who haven’t been working on Notes their entire life and think like normal people, not Notes developers.)
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.
That’s better, but still not good enough. Does any other email client on Earth have a “procedure” to do something as simple as edit a file then re-attach the edited one to a new email? I managed to figure out how to do that in Outlook, Apple’s Mail.app, Eudora, Thunderbird all on my own without any explainatory dialog boxes.
That’s not fixing the problem, that’s just explaining Notes’ bone-headed operation to the user.
It’s a little hard to know what more Notes
could do to prevent loss of data.
What every OTHER email client on Earth does. Present a “Save As…” dialog BEFORE the user edits the document. Let the user save it safely, THEN they can edit it, and Notes can do its weird-ass “auto-attach-on-save” thing.
we really have no sure way to tell when the
user is done editing.
If you have the user “Save As” the file first, it won’t MATTER when they’re done editing… if something goes wrong, they can just look up that file and re-attach it to a new email.
Thanks for replying. It’s good to see that at least some of the developers of Notes actually care about usability, and a lot of the issues I bring up should be really low-hanging fruit. (Like the mouse scrollwheel problem… doesn’t even scrollbar in Notes use the same code behind the scenes? If they did, the scrollwheel would behave consistantly in every view.) Admittedly, fixing the bloat, and making the MacOS X version actually look like a Macintosh application might take a re-write of the code.
One last point: Here’s a link to a webpage called the UI Hall Of Shame. There’s an ENTIRE SECTION on Lotus Notes:
http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/lotus.htm
And only about half of the issues they mention are fixed. The truly sad part? That webpage was written about Notes 4.6. Between Notes 4.6 and Notes 6.5, you’re awkward Address Book window hasn’t changed one iota! That’s why it surprises me that anybody developer on Notes actually cares about UI.
(Usability problems abound! Upon hitting “Preview” for this post, this forum software decided to insert carriage returns between “back to” and “Excel, finishes” for no apparant reason… those carriage returns don’t exist in the text field I typed this message in. Lemme guess, this forum is implemented using Notes? It also put a carriage return between “re-write of” and “the code” in that third-to-last paragraph.)
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
Couple points here:
The extra carriage returns don’t appear on the final posted copy, just the “preview.” (Great, so it’s a preview that doesn’t show you what the final document will look like!) Additionally, I notice that while replying to a post, there seem to be no carriage returns at all!
I apologize for typos. If I were smarter, I’d type these replies in an actual word processor and just paste them into the browser. It should be:
Like the mouse scrollwheel problem… doesn’t every scrollbar in Notes use the same code behind the scenes?
That’s why it surprises me that any Notes developer actually cares about UI.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
Now you’re just trolling. Goodbye.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
Trying to make software better is “trolling” now?
I’m pointing out that “preview” on this forum doens’t work. I can’t fix it, so pointing out that it doesn’t work is all I got. If you don’t care, fine, don’t read it, but I’m sure as hell not trolling.
I’ll admit this: Lotus Notes DID really, really piss me off yesterday. And I got emotional and ranted against it. BUT, despite that, I think my criticisms are valid. (Maybe a little nitpicky, but I’m spoiled by being a Mac user at home.)
Remember, to the naive user, the interface is the computer… they don’t see the amount of RAM, or the API header files or anything like that. They have no appreciation for “protected memory” or “pre-emptive multitasking” unless those technologies help them get their work done.
That said, where I work we’re using Domino/Notes and that’s it. We don’t have the money or the manpower to switch products. So I see it as my duty to do whatever I can to make Notes work better for my users.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
Extra carriage returns, spaces and tabs work the same way in all web apps. You could get around the issue with HTML if HTML was allowed here – but this is not an all-web application. Notes users would have to wade through the markup to figure out what the actual text was.
Both points can be addressed by using Notes rather than the browser (you can check spelling in Notes).
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
Actually, I use phpbb on a daily basis and it doesn’t have any problem making the “preview” page look identical to the submitted entry. I find your claim that all web apps have similar problems to be rather dubious… I’ve used dozens of web apps that allow you to enter long text fields, everything from Gmail.com to Slashdot.org, and I’ve actually never encountered this particular quirk before.
You can check spelling in Notes, but since it uses its own dictionary and not the MacOS X system-wide dictionary it should be using, it won’t have any of the added terms I’ve added to the dictionary. (Given, it’s a nitpicky issue, but it is an issue.)
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
PHPBB is a single-client (that is, web browser) application, as are the other apps you mentioned, and stores the text in a different manner. That is, it is not stored as rich text to be read in alternate clients, so it uses HTML (or, rather, placeholder tags for HTML) in storage. This forum software is native Notes – if you use the Notes client, you can format the text, including indentation and so forth, and read same with perfect fidelity. But then it seems obvious that using this forum with Notes (as God intended) is not something you’re likely to do. (And if you think Slashdot is “usable”, you’ve got a lot of nerve complaining about Notes. Have you ever tried to follow the flow of a long thread?)
It is possible to create a web-only version of forum software to run on Domino, and that’s actually a fairly common application. One has to give up proper Notes compatibilty, however, or at least one had to before CoexEdit came along a couple of weeks ago.
I do agree with you, though, about the Mac dictionary. It would be kewl if all OSs addressed the spelling dictionary in the same manner.
Subject: RE: User Interface Disasters in Lotus Notes
Slashdot might be a usability nightmare also, but at least post previewing works-- which is exactly what my point was. You’re way off on a tangent… it doesn’t matter whether this forum is made with Notes or phpbb or whatever, the important part is that when accessing it with a web browser, Preview doesn’t work correctly. That is a bug, and it should be fixed whether or not “god intended” me to use Notes.