Ordinary Gweilo

I remember that when Lotus Notes was released, it seemed that no-one knew quite what to do with it.  Everyone agreed that it was clever stuff, but maybe too clever for its own good, and what is was actually for, anyway?

Many years later, plenty of companies have found uses for it, but it must be one of the most hated pieces of widely-used software.  I have used it in two different companies, and whilst I concede that it can be a powerful tool for sharing information, it also drives most people crazy.

The fundamental problem seems to be that it has been designed by technical people, with little thought given to the user interface.  This is a critical flaw, because most of us remember how painful it is to use, and only grudgingly admit its strengths, which you don’t even see if all you use are the email, calendar and ‘To Do’  functions (which are inferior to Outlook).

So I have enjoyed reading Lotus Notes Sucks, a website devoted to listing many of the things that are wrong with Notes. 

Mind you, I have a list of my own complaints that aren’t on this site, such as the fact that when you right-click it doesn’t give you all the options you need.  On example of this is that if you select an email message you may wants to mark it as ‘read’ or ‘unread’.  Outlook puts this on the right-click menu, but in Notes you have to go to the top menu and select Edit and then Unread Marks, and then choose what you want to do, which is just ridiculous. 

I know that everyone hates Microsoft, but you have to give them credit for making most of their software reasonably intuitive to use.  I appreciate that it’s not really an option for other vendors to slavishly copy Microsoft’s standards, but designing a willfully eccentric user interace is equally daft.  The really amazing thing is that Notes is still around and hasn’t gone the way of Word Perfect, Lotus Smartsuite, etc. etc.  Maybe soon…