WhistlinDixie

I Hate Lotus Notes

And so do a large number of its users. One user quipped (and I paraphrase) that, of all the people he worked with, only a few disliked Notes; the rest hated it. It is so bad that it has spawned a Notes hate site. It is dedicated to all of those stupidities that Notes exhibits, such as non-standard UI and crappy email and calendar applications.

According to someone with IBM (the makers of Notes), they made the UI different to create an identity so that users would know that they were using Notes. This is stupid reasoning. Users want to use your application. This is nearly impossible when it does not follow any UI paradigms that they have learned from using PCs for their entire life. Nothing acts like you expect, hotkeys are completely different, terminology is misused or made up (WTF is a hotspot?), and basic organization is from another world. I am an experienced computer user and am used to somewhat obtuse UIs (due to being a programmer and user of free open source software), but even I am completely stumped by Notes. I often have to go ask questions of other people who have been with my company for longer than myself, including my floor’s Notes wizard, and even they can’t answer my questions. And these shouldn’t be difficult questions. That is how bad Notes’ UI is.

Not only is the UI bad, but the built-in email and calendar applications are horrible. When I worked with UPS, I got to use Microsoft Outlook (with Exchange running on the back end). While I was not a huge fan of it, I realize now what a blessing it was to have got to use it after being forced to use Notes with my current employer. In the back end, Notes is really just a bunch of funky object-oriented (not relational) databases. This means that the email application is just a bunch of databases (or perhaps just one) that are replicated from the Domino server to your computer. This is not how email works and this leads to counter-intuitive UI for dealing with emails. For example, in Outlook, your Sent Items folder was a folder, just like your inbox. If you wanted to move an email from your Deleted Items folder to your Sent Items folder, you just click and drag. In Notes, this is impossible. Actually, you can’t drag anything to the Sent Items folder. This is because the Sent Items folder is actually a database view: a dynamically generated list of emails. It is not a physical database like the other folders. Database views, by nature, cannot be inserted into since they are nothing more than saved database queries. Of course, you cannot tell this by looking at the UI because the Sent Items folder looks just like every other folder in the email application.

There are many other issues with Notes that I won’t go into. Instead, you should check out the Lotus Notes Sucks site. While the author might be a little too harsh, he is still right on the mark when he concludes 81 times that