Why Notes Sucks Represented as a Venn Diagram
Aren't I doing well at not saying anything negative about Notes recently?!
I can't resist posting this Venn diagram though as it made me really laugh this morning and makes a good piece of Friday fun.
What amuses me is not just that it's so true but that somebody took the time to create it. The caption (it's on Flickr, found via BigRedShark) talks about getting a "right slap", so I'm guessing the author is British.
It's come up in the comments on this site before that you really have to be British to really get our humour and understand why we enjoy mocking things so much. We're a very negative nation on the whole.
As soon as I find the inspiration I might have a go at my own Lotus Notes Venn diagram. Why don't you have a go too? It doesn't have to be mocking.
For the record I see this diagram as talking about Notes, as apposed to Domino, which, to me at least, is the web side of things. Through choice I avoid the Notes client at all costs. It's only in certain cases that I will work with it — like when the job is in Bermuda.
Despite its shortcomings and all my whining I do actually love Domino. That said, I really, really can't stand Notes and can truly see what would drive somebody to create a daft Venn diagram like this in their spare time. Inspired work.
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As project experience taught me, there's one big flaw in this diagramm, though. "Sould destruction" and "Our requirements" more often than not do overlap to some extend, especially if customers made up the functional description themselves ...
Good point Fabian. All three circles should probably overlap.
Jake, you love Domino but can't stand the Notes client. Presumably that means it is (mainly) the UI you don't like? Have you looked at the work Chris Blatnik is doing on InterfaceMatters.com? There are some interesting UI examples there. I just looked at the slides from the presentation he did with Nathan Freeman at Lotusphere. Looks like they did some nice re-working of client apps there.
Yep. It's the UI. When I say UI I mean the way a User Interfaces with the application rather than merely what it looks like.
Chris has done a good job of making it look half decent but having downloaded the demo {Link} I can't pretend to be over-awed by it. It's still suffers the Notes oddities.
Open the database and you see a Book Catalog with two books. There are actually four there but you wouldn't know unless you noticed the fairly inconspicuous Scroll Up/Down buttons. What, no scrollbar?
So, you drag a book to the shopping cart to add it? On my local copy this doesn't work and probably wouldn't make any sense to a user anyhow. Not half as much as a button next to book that said "Buy this".
There's a link under my perma-empty shopping cart that says "View Entire Cart" but it doesn't do anything.
If I drag a book to the "remove from cart" area I get an error saying bookmark can't be found and asking if I want to remove it. Saying yes deletes this part of the page and re-opening the db shows an empty page - no books at all. Click the "Return booK" button now and you get an error prompt saying "Invalid note id".
All in all it's not what you'd expect a user to have to interface with. That's Notes for you.
If Chris ever reads this I hope he doesn't take offence. I didn't want to attack what he's done or for it to be personal. He used some good ideas to try and mimic web-style interfaces in Notes, but the fact it's Notes means he really shouldn't have even tried to.
@Jake - Sounds like you had the same problems with Chris' demo as I did. I eventually got it working as I expected it to by creating my own copy of his personal on first use folder.
I know what you mean about Notes. As someone who has to develop for both the client and a Domino intranet it's interesting to see a fresh look and feel to a client app (rather than the same old tired design you get in the vast majority)
@Jake,
There are a lot of good looking Notes applications out there including a number of products that we have built. Rather than basing the design on Notes, our approach is to use Web designs as a guideline since much more investment of resources have been made in developing good UI designs.
Chris did a fine job at Lotusphere demonstrating techniques and the possibilities. Though it takes a lot of work, you can get Web 2.0 look and feel on the Notes client. The problem with the Notes client, from the end-user perspective is that there is two much access to unnecessary features which can lead to problems. In addition, most Notes client developers have not wanted to spend the time to make a useable and functional UI. This is similar to when web interfaces started many many years ago. The problem with Notes development is that most developers are still stuck on the Web 1.0 analogy.
Another problem is that related, the design approach developers have used to develop applications. The standard Notes development approach of client server does not lend itself well to the concept of building applications that has a flexible UI interface. Out of necessity we use what we call NSOA or Notes SOA approach in designing our applications. Ever trying running the Notes client applications through a Web connection. It sucks! By using this approach you get much better peformance and response when running the application through the Web. But it also allows to control the data and use different techniques that allows you to present data and information in a more attractive fashion than the standard Notes techniques.
As the author is a Mac based web designer ({Link} I think he was talking about Domino :-(
The mis-match between 'Lotus Notes' and their requirements screams "use a different platform !" But hey, we've all had to do 'relational' models in Notes/Domino.
As a Notes/Domino developer I know that if the client wants a Notes only solution that it will take a half to a third of the time of a Domino solution. But Notes is old hat; they all want browser based solutions which is a good thing when the Notes/Domino development market has shrivelled.
I remember a lead article in Byte magazine circa 1997 'Notes vs Web'. Notes delivered everything the 'web' was still only aspiring to do. Back then they weren't comparing Notes RPC vs Ajax or Agents vs web services (but they aren't so hot - "Put a fork in it" {Link} ). ISTR the article acknowledged the gap between the user experience offered by a 'rich client' and the browser.
Imagine what the client would be like if IBM/Lotus had been focusing on that for the last 8 years... oops! I think I've just shot myself in the foot :-)
I still love the .NSF object datastore and the security model as a platform for document centric workflow applications even though the UI has aged badly. A bit like me and the missus...
I am convinced that the UI of the Notes client is not worse than Outlook 2003. If you are used to Lotus Notes, the Outlook interface looks overwhelming and it is not intuitive to use. Microsoft takes advantage of it's pole position, helped by UI law that 'a bad familiar UI is to be preferred over a new better design'.
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