Joe Lamantia.com

But not the new fea­tures list for the next release. In a pre­vi­ous post Lotus Notes UI = Dis­ease, I cited a SearchDomino.com arti­cle in which Ken Bis­conti, IBM Lotus vice pres­i­dent of Work­place, por­tal and col­lab­o­ra­tion prod­ucts, is quoted as say­ing “Through improve­ments such as con­tex­tual col­lab­o­ra­tion and sup­port for com­pos­ite apps, we’ve gone *above and beyond sim­ple UI enhance­ment*”. [Empha­sis mine.] Above and beyond? I think UI enhance­ment — which is often far from sim­ple, espe­cially when the exist­ing user expe­ri­ence is fun­da­men­tally flawed — is exactly what Notes needs.
After watch­ing soft­ware devel­op­ment first hand, I know that many Prod­uct Man­agers under­stand the impor­tance of qual­ity, design, and meet­ing users’ needs, but do not feel empow­ered to work against the per­va­sive fea­tu­ri­tis that leads to unus­able bloat­ware. Good prod­uct man­agers and design­ers often work for orga­ni­za­tions or man­agers who remain blinded by stan­dard prac­tices and mar­ket­ing dri­ven per­cep­tions of pri­or­ity, and thus feel it’s impos­si­ble to step off the new func­tion­al­ity tread­mill.
That is, unless they are armed with infor­ma­tion that indi­cates to the con­trary.
The arti­cle in Ken’s state­ment appears, Beyond Notes 7.0: IBM Lotus sketches ‘Han­nover’ user expe­ri­ence, is dated June 14, 2005. Yet when dig­ging it bit more, I dis­cov­ered an ear­lier piece from May 9, 2005, titled Bet­ter UI tops Notes users’ wish list, in which the same author, Peter Blochner, reports on the results of an open request for Lotus Notes fea­tures made by Ed Brill(Brill heads the world­wide sales group for Notes, accord­ing to Blochner). In his review of user responses to Brill’s ques­tion, Blochner says, “the most requested fea­ture was for an improved user inter­face for Notes.“
Sim­ple UI enhance­ment is all that the users want, and they’ve said it them­selves. Yet Notes is going way beyond this? Despite repeated and pub­lic requests for this from com­mit­ted users (Ed Brill’s blog is a pre­dom­i­nantly Notes-friendly forum) in their own voices, and in response to ques­tions from your own team. Why not lis­ten to them?
For ref­er­ence, Blochner’s arti­cle is repro­duced below:
By Peter Bochner
09 May 2005 | SearchDomino.com
IBM is already work­ing on plans for the next major releases of Lotus Notes beyond 7.0. Last week, on May 3, vis­i­tors to the blog site of Ed Brill, who heads up world­wide sales for Lotus Notes and Domino, were asked, “If you could add one fea­ture to Lotus Notes 7.x, what would it be?“
As of May 9, his ques­tion has gar­nered 184 com­ments, although many respon­dents cir­cum­vented the question’s one-feature limit by sub­mit­ting mul­ti­ple posts.
To kick off the thread, Brill pro­vided his own request — multi-level undo — and that was reit­er­ated by seven posters. How­ever, the most requested fea­ture was for an improved user inter­face for Notes. “It’s time to give the Notes client UI a much-needed facelift,” wrote one respon­dent. When peo­ple say Exchange is bet­ter than Notes, said another, “What they are say­ing is that the Out­look inter­face is …nicer than the [Notes] mail tem­plate. A top UI for the next release would top off a lot of end-user com­plaints.“
Only a hand­ful of responses men­tioned spe­cific sug­ges­tions for improv­ing the UI. One asked for “a first-class, richly con­fig­urable Wel­come Panel that resem­bles a Web por­tal.” Another sug­gested UI improve­ments such as “more user-selectable columns in folders/views, hav­ing pref­er­ences all in one place, or rules that can act on doc­u­ments already in the mail file.” Still another requested “a sexy mod­ern mail tem­plate with a sin­gle UI in Notes and on the Web.“
Finally, one user said, “What would it be worth if every part of the Notes mail expe­ri­ence, which …is the Notes inter­face for the major­ity of users, from the tool­bars to the icons to inter­ac­tion and behav­ior, was con­sis­tent, mod­ern, clean and invit­ing? There is no point in hav­ing the supe­rior every­thing if it’s not appeal­ing to look at.“
P.S. Brill has requested a mora­to­rium on sug­ges­tions, because the thread is now so long it has become unwieldy.