Skip to main content

It is All About the Interface, Baby !

Lotus Notes is now prettier with the Eclipse wrapper, but making a functional user interface is not about looking pretty. Google's interface for their applications is not as pretty as Lotus Notes. It is simple but logical. Though Lotus Notes now has a nicer looking interface it still has things that are not logical and layout incorrectly for the end user. For example is contact synchronization. You would thing that if you have to synchronize your contacts with your blackberry or other mobile device that you would go to your contact database and there would be a button or link to click on to start the process. That would be the most intuitive approach. But NO!!!! In 8.02 you need to go to your mail file. I understand the reason it is done that way, but come on it is not that hard to have a button in the contact database to start the process. Same thing in Notes 8.5, if you need to go to the replication page if you need to force a contacts synchronization. These are the little things that drives users against a product. Remember C-level executive are end-users.

Comments

Roland said…
Hey Richard,
Perhaps this new desktop policy Mary Beth Raven describes here addresses your concern:
http://www.notesdesignblog.com/NotesDesignBlog/NDBlog.nsf/dx/introducing-a-new-desktop-policy-for-ennabling-synchronize-contacts-on-the-replication-tab.htm
Roland,

Thanks for your reply but that only addresses the issue in respect to the IT operation not the perspective of the end-user. So if an end-user adds a contact and wants to immediately synchronize the contact they still have to go to the replication page. If not he or she has to wait for the schedule agent to run. That is not end-user centric.

Popular posts from this blog

Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part II - Let's Assemble

Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part I - Anatomy of a Widget Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part II - Let's Assemble Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part IIIA - Using Dojo To Bring It Together This is two part of my five part series "Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets".   As I mentioned in part one of this series, Twitter Bootstrap widgets are built from a collection standard HTML elements, styled, and programmed to function as a single unit. The goal of this series is to teach you how to create a Bootstrap widget that utilizes the Bootstrap CSS and Dojo. The use of Dojo with Bootstrap is very limited with the exception of Kevin Armstrong who did an incredible job with his Dojo Bootstrap, http://dojobootstrap.com. Our example is a combo box that we are building to replace the standard Bootstrap combo box. In part one, we built a widget that looks like a combo box but did not have a drop down menu associated with it to allow the user to make a select

The iPhora Journey - Part 8 - Flow-based Programming

After my last post in this series -- way back in September 2022, several things happened that prevented any further installments. First came CollabSphere 2022 and then CollabSphere 2023, and organizing international conferences can easily consume all of one's spare time. Throughout this same time period, our product development efforts continued at full speed and are just now coming to fruition, which means it is finally time to continue our blog series. So let's get started... As developers, most of us create applications through the conscious act of programming, either procedural, as many of us old-timers grew up with, or object-oriented, which we grudgingly had to admit was better. This is true whether we are using Java, LotusScript, C++ or Rust on Domino. (By the way, does anyone remember Pascal? When I was in school, I remember being told it was the language of the future, but for some reason it didn't seem to survive past the MTV era).  But in the last decade, there a

Introducing iPhora Automate - User-driven Automation for Your Mission Critical Processes

By trade, I am an Electrical Engineer with a specialty in Microwave Engineering. And as part of my education, I had to take courses in process and industrial engineering which involved process optimization and automation. I hated these two courses and naively thought I would never ever use the information that I learned in these two courses. I only had interest in the technical aspect of engineering and with my first job out of college that is what I did. Never did I ever thought that I would spend the past 20 years focused on stuff that I hated in college. The concepts of iPhora came out of issues that we encountered as we rapidly grew another business many years ago from which spawn our business process automation business which we have been doing for the past 20 years. For the past few years, we have been transforming our consulting service platform into a commercial off-the-shelf product that focuses on the business user as the target audience. We would like to introduce iPhora Aut