Anyone ever used Lotus Notes? No need for hands in the air, I’ll pick you out from the gentle sobbing. I feel your pain. Notes has got to be one of the worst pieces of crap software I’ve ever seen in terms of design. It is woefully poor. Here are 4 of my favourite headscratchers:
- Alerts that aren’t – Sometimes you’ll set a reminder in notes, say for an important meeting at 4pm. A sensible program would tell you 5-10 minutes in advance, thus providing a “reminder” that you have something to do fairly soon. Not so with Notes. Instead it tells you half an hour after the event begins, by default. Genius; you’re so late that there is no longer any point in going. Thanks for streamlining my life like that, Notes.
- Save – The Save button often, but not always, means “Save and Exit”, kicking you out of the document after every save. This is despite the frequent inclusion of a separate Save and Exit button.
- Standardised Exiting – Instead of doing the same thing that every other Windows App has done since 95, the Lotus team seem to have thought they know better. If you’re writing something and try to exit without having saved it, a normal app will ask you if you want to save before exiting and provide 3 buttons: Yes, No and Cancel. Everyone who has used Windows knows what these do. Notes provides a slightly different solution: 4 radio buttons labelled “Save and Send”, “Send only”, “Save only” and “Discard Changes”, combined with “Ok”, “Cancel” and “Help” buttons. With this bizarre bit of UI, I can see why they included that last button.
- Mixed Metaphor – What UI form component am I describing: rectangular, white background and black text, a grey button-like square flush righ with a symbol in it that looks like it provides the main action? If you said a dropdown, you’d be absolutely right. Except in Notes. Here it describes a focussed tab. You will click that symbol at least a half dozen times without thinking about it, finding it exits that tab.
I should say that these all come from version 5. I have no idea if they’ve been fixed in newer versions, but that they happened at all is fairly shameful. There are another few obvious ones to come. Note that these are just the things that really bug me, not the day to day annoyances.
For more, see Design: Lotus Notes, Part 2.
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Alerts — sounds to me like you probably have a mis-match somewhere in timz-zone or daylight savings time configurations. Most likely you’re letting both the OS and the Notes software do the daylight time adjustment, which puts the Notes client an hour behind. (Why does Notes let you screw yourself this way? Because its been developed over a period of 20 years to run on multiple platforms, not all of which support daylight savings adjustment by the OS, and the setting that allows Notes to do it for you exists for backward compatability for people who had to set it up that way on some system in the past and have never changed it.)
Save — sounds like your complaint is with a badly designed custom application that someone has built for your company on top of Notes, not with Notes itself.
Exiting — The current version doesn’t have the “OK” and “Help” buttons you mention, though it does have close and help icons in the window frame (in keeping with standard UI conventions), but furthermore Notes is not a data editing program like “every other Windows app since 95″. It’s an email program and a client for custom applications that can be email-enabled. When you exit from something that is set up for emailing, it’s supposed to guard against lost productivity in case you exited by accident, and it doesn’t know whether you meant to hit the Save button or the Send button. A simple Yes/No/Cancel choice would be inappropriate because what exactly are you saying “Yes” to. Are you saying Yes to saving it as a draft? Are you saying Yes to sending it? Assuming either answer is going to be unacceptable 50% of the time, because mail will either be sent before its ready, or mail that users think was sent will not have been sent.
Mixed metaphor — no idea what feature you’re talking about here. Doesn’t sound like any part of Notes that I recall, even from R5. Could be another example of bad design in a custom application, or I could just be misunderstanding your description of the feature. In any case, it’s a complex program and historically the UI has had a lot of warts — no question about that. Version 7 is a lot better than 5, but since I don’t recognize that problem I can’t tell you whether it’s fixed.
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Richard, thanks for the reply. I accept your explaination for Save. I suspect you’re probably right on that front, but I respectfully disagree on the other three.
Alerts – I’m not convinced that the time is off, but in any case applications should be relying on the OS and not reinventing the wheel. Moreover, support for legacy systems is not a valid excuse in my book. If the system is borked for current systems because of changes, then support the current systems properly as well. That’s what I’m using, that’s what I expect to work.
Exit – Your argument here is flimsy at best. Email programs are data editing programs, you’re very obviously editing data. All programs should guard against careless loss of productivity, as you put it, regardless of the type of data. Email is nothing special. You can, of course, phrase the question in a 3 button context like most mail clients do. Thunderbird, for example, uses something like “Message not yet sent. Do you want to save it as a draft?” with “Yes”, “No” and “Cancel”. Not hard. Anything more complex is bad.
Mixed Metaphor – What I was saying is that the tabs in Notes v5 look exactly like dropdown boxes (they have an X rather than a triangle in the grey selector box but you WILL overlook this fact at least once). UI components should look like a reasonable standard, but not the standard for something else.
I actually have 4 more complaints about Notes already jotted down, and I’d certainly be interested in hearing your thoughts on those.
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I’d be happy to hear your additional four complaints. I freely admit that although Notes UI has improved a lot over the years, there are still a lot of things that can be improved. I’ll link this thread from my own blog, and chances are it will get the attention of a few other folks, including some IBM people — and they do listen closely to intelligent feedback about the UI.
Regarding the tabs, yes.. in R5 they do look a bit like drop-downs. I can’t say that I ever confused them or ever heard anyone else complain about the possibility of confusion before, but you’ve got a point. In Notes 7, I can tell you that they don’t look like drop-downs at all. Get your company to upgrade, and have them tell IBM that Richard Schwartz convinced them :-)
BTW: do you know that tabs have been the key navigation metaphor in Notes for more than 15 years? A little credit where it’s due, perhaps, for being an innovator in what has proven to be a very popular user interface technique, even if their implementation hasn’t always been as clean as it should be.
Regarding the exit dialog, I find the Thunderbird way a lot less helpful, but that’s possibly because of the fact that I’ve been doing it the Notes way for 12 years. I’m used to it, and it’s also a personal choice, I guess. I’m a keyboard guy much more than I’m a mouse guy, and I find it easier to press Esc + Space to send, rather than taking my hands off the keyboard to click on a send button. I hardly ever save as draft, so I want that Send option in the exit dialog and I want it to be the default. This saves me a second or two with every email I send, and it adds up.
As to the alarms, if you want to check my theory and fix your problem (if I’m right), you need to go into your current “location settings”. Easiest way to do that is by looking at the bottom of the window and clicking on the little panel that’s 2nd from the right. A pop-up menu will appear, and you can select “Edit Current”. A form will appear, and you can click on the Advanced tab. On the “Basics” sub-tab, check the radio button setting for “Use OS’s time zone settings”. If it’s “No”, change it to “Yes”. (And, by the way, Yes is the default. I agree with your argument that support for current systems is more important than compatability with old systems, but they can’t just drop support for the old way. Notes does support the newer systems out of the box, but that setting still has to be available and some people do change it without reading the help text that indicates pretty clearly that “Yes” is the correct setting for just about everyone using R5 or above.)
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Richard: I did not know that Notes helped start tabs. Kudos for that, although, as you suggest, the idea has come a LONG way.
The Thunderbird approach seems more sane to me too. I’m also a keyboard kinda guy. If left to my own devices, I’d probably use Pine or something equally archaic to most people but a lot faster for those who know how to get the most out of it.
I wanted to get the second part of this out over the weekend, but have been otherwise busy. Keep an eye out Tuesday-Wednesday.
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Will do.
-rhs
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The “Send & Save” option is terrible. Not only is it unlike every other save-before-close dialog in the world, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to close a draft, hit space reflexively, and watched as Notes sends my half-finished draft to all recipients.
Because of this, I’ve started composing e-mails with the recipient addresses in the body, and only pasting them into the header when I’m finished and ready to send. It’s a productivity hit, but better than having this cursed app make me look like a fool.
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