At work, I’m tied to Lotus Notes–that plucky little groupware client that refuses to die. I dare say that a single day passes where I’m not surprised by its brusque nature, awkwardness, and overall “unapproachability.” Today, I share with you the following dialog box that I received while trying to comment on a meeting request.
About two words into my comment, I decided that I really didn’t have anything useful to say. So, I tried to cancel out. If you look at that dialog, you’ll realize that Lotus has committed me to sending a message whether I like it or not.
That is such BS. Someone was asleep at the switch.
Dude. Post this over at the LotusNotes UX blog.
Wow, I’m both pleased and surprised that such a blog exists. I could seriously spend days and days pointing out Notes’ bizarre behaviour. Top on my list? Users don’t write “emails” or “messages”, but “memos.” I consider myself a very adaptive person but this threw me for a bit.
Another interaction that baffles me is how you mark a memo as “read” in the memo list. Like Outlook, Notes offers a listing pane and a detail pane. Selecting a memo in the list will preview it in the detail. That’s where the two diverge though. In Outlook, the message is marked as “read” when you preview it. In Notes, this doesn’t happen. If you want to mark it as read, you press “insert.”
Now I’m not one to hold Outlook up as the pinnacle of good UEx, but seriously, choosing the insert key for the accelerator doesn’t make any sense. It’s not even in the same semantic neighborhood. I can only assume that that was the only key still available to map.
I could go on and on, but I’d begin to sound like a change-averse curmudgeon.
A few years ago I was at the Nielsen Norman Group “Usability Week” conference, and at the beginning of the session Jakob introduced the next speaker as “one of the initial UI designers on Lotus Notes”, as if this were something positive. I almost asked for my money back.
Not sure if you saw this Todd, but I posted something about the Notes web client recently: http://mikemadaio.com/more-lotus-notes-ui-disasters
*applauds*
Oomblog is a stream of thoughts, ostensibly focused on user experience.
