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.

Workspace: Adding Databases Automatically

Adding databases automatically (or not)

Does Anybody Use the Bookmark Bar "Restore Defaults"?

Do you or anybody in your organization  use this item called "Restore Defaults"  on the bookmark bar? We're thinking of  removing it.

Revised Context Menus for the New Workspace

Now is the time to comment on our new Workspace design.

First, please see my previous posts about the overview of the new Workspace. We have just a few changes to the context menus that you'll get on a "chicklet" (a little square). These changes are mainly because in the new Workspace you'll be able to have not only Notes databases, but also other things like installed applications, URLs, and so on.

And here's our proposed context menus for the "chicklets" in the Hannover release. Mainly, we added the ideas of  "Add to favorite bookmarks" and "add to startup" . Being in the startup would mean that that tab gets "launched" when Samantha launches the Notes Client. Would users notice these choices?

Where are the end users?

 I am very grateful for the 26 reponses that I have recieved regarding the workspace.

However, if indeed there are 124 MILLION Lotus Notes users out there, then 26 measly responses about the thing folks use to get al all their stuff, is an abysmal response rate. A general survey gets a 3% response rate.  If we apply that to the number of Lotus Notes users, I should get AT LEAST 3 MILLION replies!!!!
So where are the end users??? the tired, the poor, the huddled cubicle dwellers, yearning to breathe free??? (apologies to Emma Lazarus and her poem about the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor).

Please... cross-post my posting about the workspace. We had over 1000 responses to our survey.... where are all those people now??

Workspace ReDesign #2

 Here are the 4 main problems we're trying to address in the re-design of the Workspace:

• Databases only – no other types of content
• Single level of tabs not very scalable
• §Can't find stuff – no search
• §Stuff is added automatically -- can be good, but contributes to the "can't find stuff" problem

The scoop on why no trackbacks

According to our blog Admins, trackbacks were initially enabled when the blogs were deployed on Roller. However, since trackbacks were open to anonymous postings, they soon became a spam magnet. Therefore, they are currently disabled.  Once the development team has time to work on it, they will customize the code so we can re-enable it.

Blog or Wiki?

Would it be more useful to you if I had a  Wiki rather than a Blog?

A lot of the information I've been posting on my blog has been useful as reference material.

However, the blog format does not lend itself well to organizing such reference information and making it available. A blog is organized chronologically, which shows when the information was documented and shows how the documentation evolves. But it makes it difficult to find all postings on a particular topic, and to browse through all postings on that topic. It makes revisions difficult, in part because a blog is supposed to be something of a historical record, and in part because the format focuses readers on the latest postings at the expense of earlier postings. When an old posting on a topic is updated with a new posting, the new one can point to the old one but the old one cannot easily post to the new one. A reader who finds the old one has no idea there's a newer one with additional information.

A wiki organizes information around topics instead of chronologically. It doesn't show as easily when information was documented or in what order, but it does show what information is related and make it easy to browse. Wiki pages can be more easily updated with newer information, so that as readers find information in the wiki, they can be confident that it's the latest the author has made available.
Many/most wikis are collaborative efforts of many people gathering together the information they know, whereas blogs are usually written by a solitary author. Perhaps with a wiki I can get more of the design team-- and even the developers-- to contribute information.

(Many thanks to Bobby Woolf for this concise comparison of blog and wiki)

The Workspace: Getting Re-Designed in 2 Ways

In a previous posting: From Bookmark Bar to Launcher, I discussed the  move from a bookmark bar to a Launcher. We also have plans to improve the Workspace as well.  There are 2 ways in which we're re-designing the Workspace.

1. Making the items on your workspace more findable in the Launcher (the subject of this posting).

2. Re-designing the traditional "spatially-oriented" workspace tabs. I'll cover that in future postings, but don 't worry, you'll still have "chicklets" (little squares)

The following picture illustrates how we plan to continue to use the "Databases" item from the bookmark bar, and put a folder for each of the Workspace tabs-- and actually grab the color of your workspace tab and make the folder that color.  In Notes 5,6, and 7, we do have folders to correspond to each Workspace tab, but we lost the color, and we know that cognitive research tells us that the eye is attracted to color more than anything else except movement). (And yes, I'm painfully aware that the folders and databases from the bookmark bar do not stay in synch with things that get added to the workspace-- I believe that's the biggest usability problem.  And we plan to fix that.)

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.