Mary Beth Raven is the lead product designer for the "Hannover" project, a redesign of Lotus Notes. She joined the Notes team in 2005. Prior to joining the Notes team she was the lead designer for the IBM Workplace Managed Client and Workplace Messaging. Before joining the Workplace team, she was the Lotus Sametime designer for five years. Mary Beth has a Ph.D. in Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

Meet the Sametime Team

I have been remiss in blogging about the "other half" of the title of this blog: Sametime. My baby. I joined Iris in 1997 as the second person on a new team to take a research project called "Praire Dog"  and make it into an Instant Messaging product.  The hiring manager/director of the project was sufficiently influenced by Irene Greif (Group manager for the Cambridge -- then Lotus-- Research group) to pay attention to user experience from the outset, and thus hire a user experience designer early on.

Of course,  Sametime has had is user experience challenges. Soon after I joined, the plan changed, and IBM purchased 2 companies at the same time (heh heh, get it??) Ubique in Rehovot, Israel provided the instant messaging portion of the product and Databeam in Lexington, Kentucky, provided the application sharing/web conferenging portion.  So I didn't get to design a product from the ground up. I got to shove 2 very differnet products together.

After working on Sametime for about 5 years, I was ready for a change, and I think, Sametime was ready for some fresh design blood.  So please, allow me to introduce the new Sametime user Experience Team to you.

 Amy Travis is the designer for the web conferencing portion. She sits in Westford, MA, and comes to us with design experience on a variety of products, including portal team spaces. Amy hs an amazing attention to detail, and terrific usability testing stamina-- at our annual Lotusphere conference in January this year, she personally conducted something like 30 usability tests in 4 days. She didn't even get up for lunch--we'd have to bring her food. She was mobbed with people who wanted to test Sametime and she wanted to give everybody a chance!

 Josef Scherpa is the designer for the instant messaging portion. He sits in some room in his house in Colorado (with a fabulous view, I suppose, but I can't be sure). He used to sit in Westford, MA, but he fell in love and got married and somehow that took him to Colorado. He's also a great skier. Before he moved to Colorado we were on a racing team together.  We had a lot of fun, and, thanks to him (the only actual fast skier), our team did not come in last. (I, however, won free wax because I had the slowest racing times of anybody!)

The new Sametime 7.5 Connect client, which is in beta right now, was heavily influenced by an internal instant messaging project. Joe had the opportunity to start with that design and refine and improve it.

 Michelle MCdevitt is the designer for the real-time gateway/administration for Sametime.  I think this is Michelle's first admin design project. She is, however, an installation design guru, because she also works on both server and client install.  She can quote you chapter and verse from the IBM install guidelines. (Pity that Lotus doesn't follow more of them, like the install directory.)

I hope to be able to introduce you to the visual designers and user researchers in another post.

Changing the Selection Model Also Means Changing the Deletion Model (maybe)

What to do when Samantha clicks the column header the second time?

A while ago I posted about the sort order.  Our Mail designer Margo would like  feedback on our proposal for "what to do when Samantha clicks the column header the second time."

Notes 7 Sorting Behavior

In Notes 7 (and before), Samantha clicked on a column header to sort the Inbox on that column. Most columns can only be sorted one way (i.e. ascending). When Samantha clicked on the column again, sorting on that column would 'turn off' and revert back to the default sort column (which is 'Date') in Mail. To further complicate the experience, when Samantha sorted on a column other than date, then when she clicked on the Date column, the Inbox would re-sort according to the Date, in an ascending order. If she clicked on the Date again, the code did a 'no sort' on the 'default' sort column, which is basically a descending sort order on the Date column. This funky implementation is manifest in the various up, down, up/down, and solid arrow combinations on the column headers today.

Proposal for Hannover Sorting Behavior

6. Sam will no longer be able to click on the currently selected sort column to return to the default sort column (i.e. if they're sorted on Name, then they can't click on Name again to return to a Date sort). She'll have to click on "Date" to do that.

I think this is an important, but potentially confusing (at least initially) change. We can hardly wait for your thoughts on this.

Are we requiring 2-click access to mail with this new Launcher?

John Goldt asked if this new Launcher design means that we are requiring 2-click access to mail instead of one click.

In some cases, yes, it might. However, what we're trying to build is a server-managed client that will allow an admin to specify  which applications get launched at startup so that tabs for them already appear-- thus allowing 1-click access to important things.  We plan to allow  Samantha or Ted or Betty to do this as well by putting things in their startup folder. Now, Notes has a startup folder today-- do you think anybody uses it? Why or why not?  

So, I can really remove "More Bookmarks" and "Databases" from the launcher?

The replies to my previous posting about the Launcher have been excellent to read, please keep them coming.

Yes, I'll have several future postings about the re-designed workspace.

And in general, I wholeheartedly agree with Nathan that it's too complicated.  But Notes is a victim of its own success. With 125 million users, there are bound to be  people who use those items on the bookmark bar. I do admit that I'm very concerned with the  "new user" experience for the Hannover release-- since everyone will be a new user. I don't want people to freak out because they can't find ANYTHING.

If Samantha had 25 items in her " More bookmarks" we'd have to put them someplace. I bet most of you are workspace-only users (I can say this because the results of a survey we did indicated that most of our users still are.) It would be much eaiser to design a product from scratch (oh, wait, that's what I was doing  until my management asked me to work on Notes...).

 The design team could produce something that is light-years better-- just like research indicates that the Dvorak keyboard is better.... but who uses that? So, we're  focusing on more of a "stepping stone" model... nothing too radical... but an improvement, we hope.

Having said that, though, I am very interested in some of the other comments made.. and in potentially exploring them, like the "Work Centres" from Colin. ...  On the one hand, the new Composite applications might be considered  work centres. I'll post more on composite apps another day.

Feel free to give me more opinions about what to remove from the bookmark bar/Launcher. I'd like to be able to detect if Samantha ever clicks on any of them, and if not, just remove them.  The several of you who said to remove things like IE favorites and More Bookmarks-- you never use them? If people did use them, what do you recommend that we do with the items in them? One giant flat list?

From Bookmark Bar to Launcher: Are We Ready?

 One of the biggest changes for all Notes users of the Hannover release will be that the bookmark bar has been replaced by a "Launcher" button.

Just in case you are not sure what the bookmark bar is (since we don't label it), it's the yellowish vertical bar that runs down the left-hand side of the Notes window. In the picture below, the first item is the Contacts (Personal Address Book), but I think for most people it's Mail, Calendar, and then Contacts

There were only a few issues with the bookmark bar that we're trying to address with the Launcher.

The first is that some users just don' t seem to see it or understand that it's clickable. The second is that it does not scale well. After Samantha has added a few more icons over there, she runs out of space and we give her some arrows to scroll.

So, take a look at one of our initial designs for a Launcher instead. Samantha now clicks the "Launch" button and down comes a menu, complete with pull-rights for nested items. We're not finished with this yet; we plan to do some usability testing over the summer.

The plan was to have the first level of items be exactly the same items that are on your bookmark bar. Now that we're also adding support for three IBM producitivity tools (Spreadhseet, word processor and presentation tool), we'll have to put those choices on there somewhere as well.

Samantha should be able to drag and drop them to re-order them. And she'll have a context menu on each, with choices such as

• Open
• Open Replica ->
• Open in New Window
• Always Open in New Window
• Database ->
• Replication >
• Copy
• Remove
• Rename
• Change Icon (we hope AA's liek this so they can change the icon of the 6 different mail files they manage)
• Set as Home page

If you look carefully at the picture above, you see 3 dots next to the selected item "Favorite Bookmarks". That is supposed to be the visual to tell you you can float that pull-right, as shown in the following picture.  I think the floating is a really cool feature, especially if we succeed in being able to let users dock such a thing in the toolbar. But I am worried that the dots might not be enough to let users know they can float it. We're trying very hard to use that consistent visual throughout the UI to let users know they can float something.  Opinions?

Programmer Logic Meets Real Users: Sort Order

Several of you have asked if we will fix how we show sort order in the Inbox and other views.

I had a meeting today with the Mail interaction designer (Margo Ezekiel), and two developers to discuss how we plan to show sort order in the "Hannover" release. In general, one of our "rules of thumb" is that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Is the current  method of displaying sort order broken? Some would say no, others would say yes.

Here is the situation that causes the most consternation. A user such as Samantha clicks to sort her inbox by date, and she sees that she is sorting it in descending order.

So, she thinks, "I want to sort is in ascending order now", and clicks that little downarrow in the Date column header and she expects the solid triangle to point up, and the mail messages to be sorted in ascending order. Instead, when she clicks, she gets this:

 "Hum," she says to herself,  "The little arrow still points down. But it's not filled in. None of the little arrows are filled in. So how is it being sorted?And how can I get it to sort in ascending order by date?" She looks closer and it seems to her that it IS sorted ascending by date ... are the column headings lying to her?

THE ANSWER (I think). The  Date  column can be sorted descending or use the "default" order, which in this case is the order in which the mail messages arrived (Oddly enough, in this case, I think, most of the time, that equates to ascending, which might add to the confusion). So, I think that in my example above, the "Date" column is still the one that's being "sorted", except that the sort order is the "default order", which is not necessarily a "sort order", it's just an "order".

Samantha, however, just wants to find the blasted email from Ted about how she needs to make end-cap displays of toilets appeal to homeowners so that they sell all the overstock toilets that they have. Thus, she has neither the time nor the inclination to figure out email sort order. She just needs to find that mail, or her career is, almost literally, in the toilet.

A FIX?

Now, strictly speaking, any user of Domino Designer could fix all this confusion by going to the following box and selecting "both."

When I discovered this, I ran gleefully to the cafeteria in search of the dude who owns the mail template (it was lunchtime), to get him to pick "both." Ha. It appears that turning on "both" to sort ascending and descending is a big impact to performance and increases the size of the mail file because it creates a separate index. (I might not have this entirely right, so don't quote me.) The bottom line is, from a developer's standpoint, there is a perfectly logical reason why we don't allow ascending and descending sorting. From a developer's standpoint, it's also perfectly logical that if none of the little arrows are filled in, then the view must be using the "default sort."

But the majority of our users are NOT developers. So what should we do for the Hannover release?

I doubt very highly that we can make the changes so that it does not impact performance and mail size.  Do we just continue the way Notes 7 shows sort order (or not)?  Do we highlight the "sorted" column, even if the sort "order" is "the default order", and then display some other graphic that is neither an up or down arrow? (in addition to or instead of the v to mean that "this is a sortable column"??)

Our current plan is to indicate the column being "sorted by" with a highlight as shown below, and to indicate the sort order (if any) with an arrow. We do not plan to show the little v to indicate if a column is sortable. We thinks this produces less visual clutter and has the potential for less confusion.

I look forward to your comments.

What Else I did at the Deutsche Notes User Group Conference

 My primary reason for attending the "DNUG" conference last week in Karlsruhe, Germany, was to gather user feedback on the  "pre-beta" build that I brought with me on my laptop. I also had 5 different options of the "Getting Started" page to show people to gather feedback. (I'll show you those options in another posting.)

I also gave a talk on the "Hannover Top Ten" -- Two top fives, really -- the top 5 features that  we haven't already shown, and 5 features on which I wanted to gather more feedback. I'll post the top 5 of each here in a little bit of a different format. Sometimes it's much easier to explain a feature in person than  in writing.

Overall, I was pleased with the trip. The talk was well attended and I received a great deal of feedback -- some very clear direction on a feature in the personal address book, and, as always, many new feature ideas.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the trip was hearing the reaction to the announcement that the Hannover release of Lotus Notes will include the IBM productivity suite of a word processor, a presentation tool, and a spreadsheet. I began working on those about 2 years ago before I joined the Notes team.  We now have a team of three designers, a usability engineer, and some visual designers working on them. I want to "introduce" them here once I corral all their headshots.  

I'd like to extend a particular "thank you" to Denise Shaw of the visual design team, who worked many long hours under a tight deadline to produce the press-ready screens you see in the announcement I linked to above.

You'll be hearing a lot more about the productivity tools here in the near future.

Doing a Bit of "User Research" in Germany....

I am representing the Lotus Notes design team at  a conference in Germany this week (Deutsche Notes User Group),  and some colleagues and I took a few minutes to conduct some informal "user research" by by engaging in a popular German pastime, as shown below.

But seriously, it has been great for me to be surrounded by people who use Lotus Notes in different languages and in varying cultural situations. I'm trying to make sure that I see things through the eyes of others.

"Hannover" is just a code name for the next release of Lotus Notes

   Yesterday, I had the pleasure of co-presenting with  Ed Brill  for the first time, at the Admin 2006 conference in Boston. We talked about the next release of Lotus Notes, code-named Hannover. Now, of course, that's what I've been blogging about all along, but based on questions that people asked me yesterday I realized that it is not clear to everyone that "Hannover" is simply a code name for the next release of Lotus Notes.

There will be plenty of improvements to Lotus Notes in this release-- my team and I are focusing on improving the user experience in a big way. But you can still rely on things like secure e-mail and robust replication.

Speaking of replication, I have had many conversations with our design partners, business partners, marketing team, and developers, about  improving the user experience for replication.  At times, the improvements have included changing the term from "Replication" to "Synchronization".

Reactions to such a terminology change tend to fall into 2 camps:

1. The "It's about time" camp

2. The "no, way, you can't dilute the power of the replication message by using the same term that other companies use for something not as robust!!!!! <argh!! ack!! apoplectic noises from the constituency!!>"camp

At the moment, the marketing, development and design team have agreed that the term will remain "Replication." Stay tuned, though. You never know, maybe we'll start using the term "Synchronization" and just tell everybody it's a code name for "Replication" 

Reviewing the New Designs for Mail

Today, the design, development, and QE teams reviewed 4 User Interface Specifications about mail.

Margo Ezekiel, the user experience designer for mail, had prepared clear documents about re-designed forms and views, among other things, and, to their credit, it was clear that the developers and quality assurance testers had already read them and were prepared for questions.  You'd think that after all these years of sending e-mail that a "New Message" form would not be difficult to design, or that there would be much heated debate, so I was a bit surprised at the number of questions and the range of comments.

Several developers even invoked our design personae and talked about "what Samantha can do."   In the end,  Margo and I walked off with a few "e-design" action items.  We all know that it is impossible to make millions of people happy and productive with exactly the same "New Message" form... and one of the most powerful things about Notes is the ease with which the forms and views can be customized.  Almost every big customer says they "customize the mail template". But how many customize the form?  Does your organization customize the form? What do you change and why?

For some of you end-users who read this bolg (I hope there are a few anyway!), did you know that  your organization can customize the form-- a person who knows Domino Designer, and maybe even your Domino administrator??

And last, strictly speaking, the form of which I speak is a "New Memo" form. Have any of you noticed that? Does it matter to you if it's called a "New Memo" or a "New Message"?

Multiple Monitor support... well, OK, 2 monitors

On May 2nd, Stu Downes asked if we could look at improving our support of multiple monitors.

He's not the only one. Ken Norland of Countrywide has been asking for 2 years, and John Head of PSC spent a great deal of time with us during Lotusphere 2006 (our yearly "user group" type conference in Orlando), discussing the importance of making Lotus Notes easy and useful to use when a user has 2 monitors hooked up.

I'm happy to say that we maybe able to address improving our support of multiple monitors. I cannot provide any specifics or  make any promises, but the IBM Distinguished Engineer in charge of the Hannover release (Jeff Eisen) has taken an interest in Lotus Notes on multiple monitors lately, and he's been looking into making some improvements.

Including Outlook users

On May 1, Angel Sagredo asked if we could include Outlook users in our requirements and user research.

We already do!

One of the primary ways we do that is by working with IBM employees who come from recent acquisitions. That is, IBM buys a company, and if the company had previously deployed Outlook, they switch to Notes. It's a great opportunity to get a fresh perspective by interviewing and sitting with new users of Lotus Notes--people who until recently had used Outlook. 

A member of our user studies team, Deb Maurer, just arranged 8 interviews with users at Datapower (a recent acquisition) 2 weeks ago.

The other way we get Outlook users (besides asking friends and relatives) is from people who register to participate in various feedback activities. When you register, you can choose all sorts of activities, not just usability testing. And we ask what mail programs you use, so we can specifically find people who can provide us with perspectives other than the Lotus Notes one. So please, get all YOUR Outlook-using friends and relatives to register, too!

Thanks in advance.

Meet the Hannover Design Team

The Hannover release includes team members from many disciplines, including the following design-related areas:

• Interaction designers (I'll introduce to to them today!)
• Visual designers
• User studies and usability
• Management

My subsequent posts will introduce you to the various team members. Today, I'll concentrate on the interaction designers.

What is an interaction designer?  Well, an interaction designer is someone who thinks about the order of operations, the primary tasks, and the utility of the product in general. I am an interaction designer.  We have several interaction  designers on the Hannover project who focus on different areas.

Before I introduce them, I'd like to let you know that  there are more interaction designers on the Hannover release than any other release of Lotus Notes. Also, none of the interaction designers has worked on a previous Lotus Notes release ( the closest  thing is that I worked with Jim Hart and other Notes developers on the Sametime integration in the Calendar for scheduling online meetings). I'd like to think that this means new blood for a new era of increased attention to user experience.

I'm the team lead, you already know a bit about me from the blog. We also have the following interaction designers working on Hannover:

Margo Ezekiel - Mail ( no picture could ever do her justice!)  - She's been spending the bulk of her time not only designing a new "threads" experience, but also prototyping it for  early usability testing.

 - John Lance - Calendar  - He's been working hard at many aspects of the Calendar, including improved ways to do free-time lookup. John is also a published author of fiction ( not to be confused with his user interface designs!)  He's too shy to provide a picture of himself, so I'm providing  a picture of the cover of his book.

 - Anuphinh (Noy) Wanderski - Contacts - She's totally redesigned the Contacts form and many of the Contacts views to provide a  totally fresh look at the whole "contacts management" experience.

Yao P. (Alex)  Song - He's concentrated on providing a consistent search experience across both the rich client and the web, spanning all of the IBM Software group end-user products.

Me, I'm working on "framework" issues like menu s, toolbar, bookmarks, Workpace, and so on.

Back to discussing the UI from the top down

I said I'd start with the menus and "work my way down" the user interface, with regard to posting. Well, as you can see, I didn' t get very far before your comments took me in the direction of  complete policy-driven menus and preferences.  We are investigating what to add to the current policy-driven preferences.

(And the "international" settings might not make our list of the preferences to be policy-driven. I know a few of you listed "international" as some of the preferences you'd like to see driven by policy. So speak now in a response or you might have to wait for a future release.)

I should have known that making the toolbar buttons policy-driven would have been your next request. My current and much smaller goal is to get the "Debug Lotuscript" icon out of the "universal" toolbar so that Samantha, Ted, and Betty won't have to look at it all the time.We won't remove it entirely, but I at least want to allow them to use the "print" toolbar button without having to see "Debug Lotuscript" if they don't have to.