In contrast to the overwhelming amount of mail we have received in support of the review of the interface problems in Lotus Notes, we have received an occasional note from a Notes developer or long-time user of the product complaining about the review. In fairness to this group of users, we present a summary of typical comments. We consider these comments valuable to Notes developers and users, because they highlight the very stark differences between the way each group views Notes.
Last updated 21-July-1999
Several developers took exception to our classification of Notes as an e-mail application, despite the fact that most agreed that this was the primary reason that it was employed in their organizations.
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A number of Notes developers attempted to take us to task for having considered the Notes interface in the context of the operating system on which we used it, as indicated in the following comment:
I think you review had too much of a windows centric viewpoint. Notes runs on multiple platforms, not just windows, and attempts to provide the user with a consistent notes interface across those platforms. As such it will not do things in the Microsoft windows established format. This comment is probably based on the comments from one of Lotus' chief interface designers (Douglass Wilson, on eSuite; Byte of July 1997): The majority of people in the world have never seen either the Macintosh or the Windows look and feel (...). We are aiming for a much broader market of corporate and home users who may never have seen any kind of GUI before. As we have pointed out elsewhere on the site, platform independence only benefits the developer, not the user. The ability to develop a single application that can run on a variety of platforms is meaningless to the user on each of those platforms. In fact, platform independence makes the application more difficult to use, since the Windows user cannot transfer his or her knowledge of Windows interface characteristics to the Notes application, and similarly, the Mac user will find the interface to be quite unlike any other Mac application. Each user could care less how Notes looks on the other's computer, but each is very confused to find that Notes operates unlike any other application they use. |
Quite a number of developers complained that several of the examples in the review were false, fabricated by us, or due to our having installed or configured the program incorrectly:
Just for the record: we did not install the product, nor configure it. The product is as it was delivered to us (and to the other 600 people at that organization that came to the office one day to find that ccMail had been replaced overnight by Notes). We did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time trying to correct many of the problems. In one example, four computer professionals independently spent over an hour trying to figure out how to turn off the "Do you want to send the mail now?" message. Their efforts were unsuccessful. We will however, concede that the position expressed by a visitor may help explain some of the problems we experienced: I think I can guess what happened -- the organization itself, or their consultants, modified the Notes product (which is very easy -- too easy! -- to do) with this awkward email interface. |
We were very surprised (and more than a little amused) to hear from a number of Notes developers that we should not be allowed to use never mind critique Notes without having first attended a formal course in its use.
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We were also amused to hear from several developers who attempted to defend the awkwardness of several Notes "features" on the basis of underlying technical reasons:
What these developers fail to recognize is that the user could not care less about the technical reasons why things operate as they do, nor should they be required to know the technical reasons; users just want an easy means of doing what they need done. |
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