You think my last post on the design of Lotus Notes was all there was wrong with it? You’ve never even seen it have you? Remember we’re looking at v5 so these bugs gaping holes in design may have been fixed later. Four more:
- Back and Forward – I have no idea what kind of rationale is behind the back and forward navigational buttons in Notes, but it does not conform to our Earth logic. Instead of having a back button that sensibly means go back within the current context (i.e. the current tab), it goes back through different tabs. This is particularly infuriating in browser mode, where there is not necessarily any other easy way of going back a page. It’s also easy for it to just get stuck and throw away the history, stranding you where you are. Good move. The forward button? Well, it doesn’t work so much. It goes forwards when it wants to, but not always.
- Attach – The Attach icon only works if a new email message body is in focus. If you’re in any of the header fields, you can’t attach things. This might be remotely excusable if being out of the correct context disabled the attach icon but it doesn’t. Instead, clicking it produces an error. Oh yes, and a minor point: it uses the wrong verb for attachments. You do not “create” an attachment, you “add” it or “attach” it.
- Scroll Bar Sizing – Notes gets it’s scroll bar usage hugely wrong. Think of the scroll bar, from top to bottom, as representing the length of the associated document. The scroll block (the bit you can grab to drag up and down) should be proportional on the bar to the size of a single page of the document in the view port. So, if a document takes up 2 pages (i.e. it’s twice the size of the view port) then the scroll block should be half the size of the scroll bar. This sets up all sorts of great visual cues and feedback. Notes ignores that. It sets it to the minimum size allowed. As a side effect of this, it also doesn’t implement smooth scrolling; it’s perfectly possible to drag the scroll block down a bit and have it snap straight back to where it was previously. Oh yeah, and scroll wheels don’t work either. Kudos to the Lotus team for ignoring a really simple and highly effective bit of standard design.
- Crash – If the program crashes (which it will), you must do an OS restart if you want to open Notes again. So, it messes up and you have to restart everything. That’s failing gracefully for you. This will happen when you’re running several server processes and waiting for an email to help sort an important issue.
That’ll do for now.
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Agree. Agree. Agree.
On the last, Notes 6 and 7 are much more stable, much more likely to restart without reboot. There are a variety of little utility programs out there for “cleaning up” after a Notes crash. Google on KillNotes and the first two entries you find will be a couple of different tools, both posted to the sandbox on the IBM site for Notes. Even without running one of these utilties, most crashes in 6 and 7 are recoverable simply by going to task manager (I’m assuming Windows here) and finding all tasks whose names begin with the letter “n” and killing them. Well, not all the tasks that start with “n”, especially if you’re running Norton anything. Can’t recall all the task names offhand, but nlnotes, nreplica, nweb, nhttp nxpcdmn, nhldaemn are probably the commonly seen ones.
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Have they changed the scroll bar sizing in newer versions? That annoys me no end.
There are another 6-7 things I’ve noted down in the last few days, but some are fairly minor so not sure if there will be a part 3… yet.
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I’m so used to the scroll-bar positioning being off the mark that I doubt I’d notice if it’s improved. I mostly don’t pay attention to it. That said, I just did a very cursory test with the Notes 7 client in a long document, and it worked properly. But I didn’t try it in a document with expandable/collabsible sectiosn, or in a view with an expandable/collapsible hierarchy — which is where I think I’ve most often noticed issues, so I can’t say whether or not it’s got a clean bill of health there at the moment.
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Gary, new here via Richard’s blog. Aside from what he says, a couple of items:
Attach – In Notes 6+, the paperclip icon on the toolbar does simply gray out if you are in the wrong context (which is the problem you see) that is, your cursor isn’t in a Rich Text Field. As to the verb, you’re really being petty with that one as I find it completely acceptable to Create an attachment.
Concur that the scroll bar behavior is goofy; but scroll wheels work fine in Notes 6+.
Back/Forward – Never use them because it never occured to me that working in Notes has any sort of linear motif like the history of followed links in a browser. Also, I’d never use Notes as a web browser – Firefox rules!.
Many UI ‘issues’ in Notes stem from its multi-platform history as well as legacy from Lotus’ meticulous attention to backward compatibility, something that’s never really concerned certain other software makers. And honestly now, Notes 7 is the current version and Notes 6 shipped over three years ago. R5 first shipped in 1999. Are you still using Office 97? Win98?
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Jerry: Welcome!
I use R5 because that’s what my company has installed and, due to the massive effort it would take to change (they’re a bloody big company), I don’t see that changing any time soon. So I write about what I know. I also don’t buy the “a new version fixes it” excuse; these were not new or poorly understood problems. UI conventions were firmly in place for all of these and that Lotus chose to ignore them for whatever reason is poor design. That’s what I’m highlighting.
Back and forward: I’m all for Firefox. Sadly, I’m forced to use the embedded IE engine Notes has for several things, so that the back and forward buttons just don’t work is a pain.
As for being “petty”, yes, I am (that’s why it was tacked onto the end of another item). You have to understand that verbs are a primary unit so picking the wrong one is a real problem. If you don’t have very well-known icons (back arrow, for example), then it’s all on the verbs. No, you don’t “create” an attachment. You either “add” or “attach” it. Nothing is being created in any real sense, from the average user point of view. It may be worth noting that someone pointed this out to me before I posted this second part, and I already had it on my list. Yes, though, it was a minor point.
Glad to hear the scroll whell is fixed though!
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I think the forward and back buttons can be a problem because they are for opening the next and previous documents in the view you opened the doc from. This is different from browsers but then again, the notes client has been doing this since before web browsers where common.
It’s very difficult to know how best to handle this kind of scenario.
Do you annoy your existing users because some other technology and metaphor has become common, or do you confuse new users? IBM seems to err on the side of backward compatibility, both technically and in the UI.
I don’t think that in most cases it’s just Lotus being perverse or lazy. There are normally good reasons why things are like they are. To simply say that Notes should change it’s established UI metaphors the instant something else becomes common place is not thinking things through. For R5 I don’t think you can complain too much about a product that is end of life.
The new workplace stuff was a good place to break with the legacy reasons for these design decisions, hopefully Hanover will be seen as a significant enough upgrade to do likewise.
Finally, there are probably plenty of things that you still won’t like in 7. Get with the program and bitch about those things ;)
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