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.

The Hannover Release and the Design Process

I got the impression from some of the comments that it looks like the design team is randomly picking different issues  to address, and that a more comprehensive approach to designing Lotus Notes might be more fruitful.  I can understand why these blog postings might give you the impression that the team is "hunting and pecking" at various issues. I tend to post questions about the various design issues that we're encountering on a day to day basis, however, I want to assure that we've got a more holistic approach.

We started with the statements from DNUG 2005 (Deutsche Notes User Group): 

Why I Put "Make Available Offline" in the File menu and Not on the Replication pull-right...

Oh, and the reason I have "Make Available Offline..." on the File menu and Not on the replication pull-right is that in my little heart of hearts, I was hoping that we could control ALL of that replication stuff by policy and Samantha would never even need to see the Replication pull-right and we could HIDE it (remember my early postings about menu sets?) from the end users.  But at the moment, it does not look like that level of policy control and  admin control over menus is going to happen in the Hannover release.  (heh, hehe, which is why, Matt, I need to keep blogging after Hannover ).

....I have nightmares that Notes Users Groups all over the world curse me at their meetings and say to each other. "What on earth is THAT WOMAN THINKING???"... so , at least with regard to this one menu item, now you know.

User Policies for Preferences... and the future of this blog

Matt asked if I planned to keep up this blog after the Hannover release ships. That's still several months away, but at the moment I fully intend to. I am trying to involve more of the designers in making their own postings, especially quick opinion questions.

Several of you asserted that all client features should be settable through preferences.  I agree, and I do know that folks on the admin side (Chip Carter, Art Thomas, Laurie Sprague, Ana Kapetanakis, ... I'm sure I've forgotten some...) are working on making more of the preferences settable via policy. The designer for the admin user experience part is  Scott Davidson, and I'll try to get him to blog about it here as a guest.

.. and all your responses to the replication stuff has made me want to do more redesign, so I'm keeping it short tonight to start new drawings

Do YOU know the difference between Replication Preferences and Replication Options?

In my posting about new replication dialogs the other day, one of the respondents asked what the "Options..." button would do.

Clicking on the "Options" button brings up the replication options dialog, shown below. Now, the first problem is that Notes calls this "Options" in some cases and "Settings" in others, and  for this release, we're just trying to be consistent in calling them Options. 

 I had made many design changes to this set of dialogs, and some of you may have seen them in Lotusphere usability tests. I even re-designed based on those tests and we ran a second set of usability tests. Both sets of tests on these dialogs had mixed results. Many of the problems came from the fact that we asked participants to set specific options for "Database A" and  to also set some different options for all future local replicas.  Very few participants accomplished the task, mainly because the difference between the Options (which are database-specific) and the Defaults (which are in preferences) is unclear.

Below you'll see the Preferences (Replication defaults) that we plan to have in Hannover. Quite frankly, I want to get rid of these replication defaults preferences altogether. I think it's overkill. The Samanthas of the world are presented with too many options, and the links between them are not clear. Maybe I am just giddy with the success of removing "zoom preview".

View - Document Preview - Zoom Preview?

How often do any of your (or your business users) use this feature:

View - Document Preview - Zoom Preview?

It "zooms" the preview into taking up the entire tab, but the tab label is still for the view, not the document that got zoomed. We're thinking of removing this, because we suspect that it's quicker to just open the document, and doing so does not have the usability ramifications of  providing a "misleading" tab title.

A Few Responses to Replication

Thanks, folks, you've given me many good ideas. Regarding the placement of the History menu item, I was thinking of moving it down, because I was trying to group "Things you do often" and "Things you do rarely", tho it appears that some of you like the logical group of "things that pertain to this database" so indeed, I'll probably keep History where it is.

Improvements to Replication

We're making a few improvements to the user experience of replication in the Hannover release.

Our goals are this:

1. Make it eaiser for end users to figure out how to make a local replica
2. Make it easier for end users to figure out how to set a replication schedule (and that it's based on location)
3. Standarize our terms for "options" and "settings" (we picked "options").

First, we've added a new menu item to the file menu-- "Make Available Offline...." This is specifically for making a local replica. We'll still have the old UI for making "any old replica on a server or locally". (Our tests indicated that most end users were stopped in their tracks when the first field on the "New Replica" dialog said "Server: Local". It just twisted their brains.)

Second, we're adding a "Change Schedules" menu item to the Replication pull-right. I'm a bit on the fence over this, so give me your opinions. Right now, users need to go to the replication page and click a thingy that looks like a URL link, OR edit their location document from the personal name and address book (or choose "Edit Current..." in the status bar. ) Our interpretations of the currnet UI are that functionality from the replication page is generally hidden, and that getting to that functionality via the location documents is tough because most users don't know that location documents is where those options are stored. So we're trying to make it more obvious.  But maybe we won't need to, because I've also added a "Change Schedules" button to the new "Make Available Offline" dialog.

The dialog that Samantha sees if she clicks either the  Change Schedules menu item or the "Set or Change Schedules" button in the new dialog is the following: (And yes, you can still get to it from the personal name and address book.)

I am hoping that the dialog above will help educate users that the schedulesare set based on location. We've done 2 rounds of usability tests with this dialog, and they can set their schedules, but most participants still thought they were setting a schedule for a particular database.

Now, some of you may have seen a prototype at Lotusphere that we were testing, and we've changed a few things since then. At Lotusphere we were thinking of combining the "New Replica" and "New Copy" dialogs and giving users a choice one they launched the dialog. We've abandoned that idea because for those of you who DO know the difference, it just flummoxed you-all and caused you to not complete your tasks.

Replication terminology

AOL "AIM Today" had a link to the top-ten pick-up lines in Europe.

I noticed that "Hey, you wanna go to my hotel room and replicate" was not one of them.

For those of you who DO like to replicate in your hotel rooms (alone or with someone else), you'll be happy to know that we are NOT planning to change the term "replicate" to "synchronize". I had a demo at Lotusphere that had changed the term. Based on feedback from YOU, we're not going to make the change.

A public thank-you to the usability team

Dear customers,

I am re-posting the following IBM internal blog posting from Chris Samoiloff in a public forum because I agree with everything Chris said. Thank you, user research and usability team!

From Christ Samoiloff-- our prototyping guru:

Speaking of usability— was I?  This past week I had some extra cycles to help our usability specialists with Hannover testing.  I have worked with these same people creating web prototypes for early testing.  However, this past week opened my eyes to just what it takes to be a usability specialist.  Here is my list of qualifications to be a usability specialist – nevermind the degrees:

1. It takes supreme patience—patience with people, patience with complex and buggy software, patience with people coming in to test, patience with people who have no clue about how to do this job who are helping for the week.
2. It takes discretion— discretion to handle buggy software without dissing it to our testers.  "Yes, that feature is not currently available."
   
3. It takes humility—There were lots of technical issues setting up a complete Hannover environment.  Some usability specialists have a bit of technical knowledge, but that is not their primary job qualification.  So they are forced to rely on the goodwill of technical people who can help them work out all the issues needed to get the product up and running.  And sometimes they must even ask questions more than once because there is so much to learn.  And they have to learn it because they are putting it in front of users.
   
4. It takes flexibility, creativity, and quick thinking— the ability to scratch plan A and go to plan B when they find asking the user to do something isn't supported by the software at this time (and maybe even crashes the thing).
5. It takes detective work— this is something I helped with and I got a complete feel for how hard it is.  Usability testers have to find testers who fit the profile of the personaes they have used in their scenarios (an AA, a president of a company, an individual contributor). First there is finding these people.  Then there is getting them to agree to take a couple of hours out of their day to participate in a test (with minimal reimbursement, really).
   

Meet the User Research and Usability Team

This is an appropriate time to introduce the user research and usability team, because the Hannover project has just released a "pre-beta" to a very few customers, and to several hundred internal users.  It's a very exciting time, because the whole thing is starting to come together, and people can actually see and use it, rather than just look at pictures or prototypes from my team.

The team I'm introducing to you today has already contributed to Hannover in many ways, including conducting surveys about the workspace and replication,  creating and testing prototypes, and conducting usability tests (both local and remote ones) on early builds. This phase, and the next one-- a more broadly-distributed beta-- will be very busy ones for this team as they gather feedback and work with the designers to  improve the release based on the feedback.

 Betsy Comstock is the lead user researcher. She's worked on several other products at IBM before joining the Hannover team. Prior to that, she worked with my husband (an electrical engineer/software developer)  at Polycom (then PictureTel). She inadvertently did wonderful things for my marriage by having him participate in a usability test.  He came home that day and asked "So, is THAT what you do all day at work??" (What did he THINK I do?  Walk around with a candy basket?)

 Deb Maurer has worked on Notes and Workplace Managed Client Usability. She used to grace our hallways in Westford, MA, but she now works out of her home in Chicago. She's the one who put together (and analyzed the results of) the Workspace survey  that many of you responded to earlier this year. She's also done several tests of variations on the new window management models.

 Sheri Branco has worked on Notes usability for several years, and she is a wealth of knowledge about what did/did not get tested in previous versions of the product.  She did the Replication and locations survey that many of you responded to. She's currently on maternity leave, and we can't wait until she comes back!

 Meng Yang is focuses on Search (the improved Search is absolutely fabulous... I haven't blogged about that yet, I should... I'm condifent that the "Samantha's" of the world will find it much improved!). She's also the usability engineer for the stupendous new Sametime 7.5.

 Michelle Cooper focuses on the usability of the IBM Productivity Tools. She, like Sheri, is also on maternity leave. They share an office at work. You have to wornder if it was something in the air. I'm very happy for them both, but I have no intentions of going anywhere near that office, just in case it's contagious.

 Eileen Driscoll  and Roger Didio  are covering various usability areas while Sheri and Michelle are our on maternity leave.

 Chris Samoiloff is our Prototyping guru. She's espeically assisted with the Search prototypes that Meng then tested.

 Andy Lafleur is the manager of the user research and usability group.

Tell us about PDA use in your organization

Speak up! Because we're making decisions based on comments to this blog!

I gave a talk today at the IBM Best Practices in Collaboration conference in New York. At the end of it, one of the listeners commented that people tend to speak up if they DISAGREE with a decision, and she asked how I could be sure that I'm not getting a "silent majority" phenonenon to many of my postings (for example, the one about popping up that dialog to ask you if you wanted to put a database icon on your workspace, where just about everybody said "yuck, don't do it!" ).

What if, of the 800 or so hits I got that day, 770 of you-all really liked the idea and only the 30 of you who hated it posted a comment?

I have no way of telling, unless you post comments when I ask for feedback. So, if you have an opinion when I ask for one, please post it.

I *AM* reading the F5 responses...

Well, you gave me quite the "Welcome back from vacation" set of responses.... NOT!!!

OK, I hear ya. One keystroke to lock the entire OS is a bad idea.  The choices are either to do that, or nix (cut) the screenlock feature altogether for the Hannover release. Now, I know that security is very VERY important, and is probably THE most important asset that Lotus Notes has over any other product.  So, educate me. I would bet that 99% of end users don't even know that the screen lock feature in Notes exists.  So tell me-- do you educate your users about it? Do you have a corporate policy for using it? Is "Screen Lock" why you buy Lotus Notes... or is it just a side effect?

Whoever pretended to be Ted Amado, our VP design persona--you are brilliant, and you made me laugh out loud-- but I bet you the price of a Lotusphere registration that real "Teds" (e.g. Vice presidents of various companies) do know know that the "Screen Lock" feature exists in Lotus Notes.

I really do want to make the majority of you/end users happy (OK, if not happy, just not incredibly frustrated)  with the direction that the Hannover release is taking.  I am going to have the dev team code up the F5-to-lock-the-OS feature, and we have a public beta in the fall. If the actual usage feedback is bad, we'll cut it, and have no screen lock.  It's easier to have SOMETHING and cut it than to have nothing at all and try to add it.

Yeah, I know,  most of you think, "How hard can it be"... remember, Hannover is the Mother of all integration clients (which is why I-- a mother of 2-- am in charge of the User experience of it). We are putting the IBM productivity editors (a spreadsheet, a word processor, a presentation tool -- in it)-- these would not necessarily be locked by the traditional Notes screen lock.  Am I being too conservative in thinking that I'd rather have NO Screen lock feature at all than have users think that the feature locks windows/screen that it does not?  I have not discovered a screen lock feature for MS Office, or anything Google... why is it important for Lotus Notes to have it?

I do not mean to sound defensive. I think your comments are good, healthy "slaps upside my head" so that I better understand real-world usage. So slap me upside the head some more.. is this "screen lock" issue a Hannover "Make or break" part of the release? or just easy to comment on?

I am Off to the IBM Internal "Collaboration Best Practices" Conference

Now that I'm back from vacation, I'm heading to New York for a 3-day, IBM internal conference on collaboration best practices.

I don't know how much I'll blog from there, but I'm pretty sure that attendees will be checking out this blog, because I'm going to mention it in a talk I'm giving about collaborating with users to re-design Lotus Notes.  (This is your chance to make some comments that hundreds of IBMers might read.)

The Decision on the Lock Screen Feature (and no blog next week, I'm on vacation)

Wow, 75 responses. You folks scare me a little, because you had more to say about F5 than about the Workspace redesign.

I've read all the responses (and so have various developers and dev managers) and we had a meeting to discuss, and here's what we've decided:

1. We want to give you configurable function keys but can't fit it in with all the other things for Hannover. So we're taking note for a future release.

2. The Lock Display feature will invoke the windows Lock computer function.

3. To invoke it, users will continue to use the menu or the F5 key.

4. The Sametime 7.5 implementation automatically puts you into "away" mode when your windows computer goes into "lock Computer" mode.

Given the variety of responses, there is no way we could make everyone happy (OK, Nathan,  I know, configurable function keys would make ALMOST everybody happy). We do appreciate the responses and pay attention to them, even if what you learn here is sometimes disappointing. I'd rather have you learn about it now and be able to prepare for it than be surprised after the product ships.

Thanks again for all of your feedback and your passion for Lotus Notes!