Usability Forum

In other news, there actually is a company that still uses Lotus Notes

By Eddie Lopez. Wednesday, 14. January 2009, 03:22:35

I could probably make up for taking most of last year off of this blog by just posting about Lotus Notes for the next 365 days, but for now -I'll offer a small sampler of things that are bothering me- the calendar presentation, and the iPhone web app.

First, here's a screenshot of part of Lotus Note's calendar display. Not pictured (well mostly not) is the "5 week" view that we're all familiar with: It's got your work week there with all your events displayed. It starts on Monday and ends on Friday, with the configurable option to show Saturday and Sunday. In both cases, Wednesday is smack dab in the middle of the calendar.

Contrast this "Wednesday centric" calendar view with what is immediately on the left of it. Here Thursday is in the middle of the calendar.

I can't tell you the number of times I quickly look over to that small calendar to find a date real quick and end up off by one.

Consistency in your interface is key!

But that's just an appetizer of Lotus' bucket of strange- let's look at the iPhone app!...

IBM decided to go all cutting edge on me by throwing an iPhone webapp for me to check my mail and calendar. Unfortunately, no body at IBM actually has an iPhone otherwise they would have found out that the entire email interface is completely worthless.

....there, that's pretty nice looking you're thinking, except in reality it's terrible.... because in reality it looks like this:

Obviously I had to blur some stuff out, but note a few things: First off, I'm on page 1 of 55. Not too terrible except for the fact *my* inbox is sorted by oldest first! (which is different than the IBM screenshot). There is no option available to change this, nor is there an option to jump to unread messages. I have to scroll through each page.

So delete the old emails you say, it's more responsible and the IT guys would like me more.... Except that in Lotus, meeting invitations (include all my recurring meetings) are listed in the inbox, deleting them removes them from my calendar. (that's a separate issue) If you use Lotus, you'll notice that all the icons there are for meetings... as are the following 50 pages after that. Sure I could delete meetings after they occur, but that requires me to review each one to see if it's recurring before I delete it.

So there's Lotus. So close, but so FAIL.