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Great customer visit last week
Last week I had a terrific opportunity to conduct some end-user
interviews at a ministry of the Canadian Government. I was able
to speak to real users who ranged from Administrative assistants to a
Director General. This was my first set of interviews with a government
agency in my capacity as Lotus Notes designer. Plus is was a "non-US"
government agency where bi-liguaglism is de rigeur.
(The last time I got to do any kind of interviews with employees of the
Canadian Government, I was employed at a different company, but I got
to do contextual interviews right on Parliament Hill of how people were
using their new voicemail and phone system. that, too was awesome and a
load of fun.... OK, I am a geek... and I am lucky that I have had so
much fun at work over the years.)
To be honest, I had a blast. It was really great talking to non-techie
people about Lotus Notes. I know that little decisions we
make has a great deal of impact on the dialy lives of people who live
in mail. And these interviews reinforced that. Many thanks to the
Minisry that invited me to conduct the inerviews, I think we both
benefitted!
Apr 28 2008, 07:54:02 PM EDT
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I am on vacation and John Lance and Carrie Tracy are doing the Admin 2008 Conference in Boston
Loyal readers,
Despair not if you see no blog entries this coming week from the Notes
design team. I am on vacation in Virginia with my spouse, his mom, and
our 2 kids. trying to educate them about history at Colonial
Williamsburg. John Lance (you may know him from such postings as "Mapping Imported Contacts"
and "My Favorite Party Animals" (tip: monkeys are overrated, bulls are expensive, and goliath bird eating spiders
get you a clear path to the buffet every time (of vital importance for
those of us that wear extra large Lotusphere shirts)) and Carrie Tracy
are doing a "Design Directions in Notes and Sametime' talk this coming
week at the Admin 2008 conference on Boston while I am off galivanting
about Colonial America in my minivan.
The rest of the team is hard at work. Sheri Branco will begin testing
some usability improvements in Live Text. the design partenrs
have "pre-beta 8" to play with. in all, it is a busy spring.
Talk to you next week,
Mary Beth
Apr 26 2008, 12:00:24 AM EDT
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Another great "Lotusphere Comes to you" comes to a close
The last session of "Lotusphere Vient a Vous" Montreal just finished. (Well, there is a 2 hour cocktail/reception in the product showcase, so it's not completely done yet).
I heard some interesting new bits of info and received good questions-- in all, it was really good to get out in front of customers after almost 3 months of not doing that (except for one or two special customer visits and the weekly Design partner meeting).
It was also wonderful to continue to be thanked by customers for doing this blog. Several expressed appreciation and mentioned that the Notes development process and decisions and ideas are no longer a "block box" of mystery. And others asked me and the design team to please continue with the blog-- and we will!!!
Apr 22 2008, 04:28:00 PM EDT
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"no plans to fix" type bug reports
A while ago a blogged that we're in a stage of bug triage, and I go to
the triage meetings. Sometimes I lobby hard to fix certain bugs, and
other times I do not. I do try to balance business value with the cost
to IBM to fix a bug. Now in my case, most of these bugs are usability
bugs.
And
let me assure you, I and the Design team are constantly educating the
developers and advocating that "usability bugs are real bugs."
And by and large, the Notes development and QE team has got the message
and usability bugs are treated as real bugs.
When a bug is
marked as NPTF it means "no plans to fix in this codestream". And the
definition of "this codestream" is a bit fizzy (At least to me). It
might mean, say, not going to be fixed in 8.5. OR it might mean it will
nto get fixed in any 8.x or 8.x.x release. However, if enough customers
enter PMRs, we will re-open any bug, definitely.
Here's one
that is not going to get fixed in Notes 8.5. When you do a Google
search and hit enter the focus is on the address bar and not the view
Since no customer (that I am aware of) has reported this as a
problem in 8.0 or 8.0.1, I got overruled for fixing it in 8.5.
Apr 22 2008, 02:50:25 PM EDT
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Felicitations au Montreal Canadiens!
Ce soir, je me trouve dans la ville de Montreal. Et, tout l'equipe des "Boston Bruins" et aussi en ville. Alors, un match d'hockey entre les Boston Bruisn et les Montreal Canadiens vient de finir. Et Les Canadiens ont gagne. Felicitation au Montreal Canadiens! L'hotel est l'autre cote de la stade ou joue les Bruins et Canadiens. Alors, les rues sont replis des voitures, des gens, avec les drapeaux "Canadiens", et qui chant. C'est tres interessant. Apres tout, la raison pourqui je suis venue d'Montreal est d'apprendre plus des choses culturelle parmi les clients de Lotus Notes.
Apr 21 2008, 11:32:39 PM EDT
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The J. Lance Scale of Bug Stupidity
HI,
It's not John Lance here. But I'm posting something he wrote.
Here in the Design Studio, today was "one of those days"... the
kind when bugs that we've been lobbying for end up getting marked as
"NPTF." (Officially that stands for "no plans to fix ever"... and I
don't think I can publish some of the other phrases we've made up
for that acronym....). John lightened our day with his scale of bug
stupidity, so I thought I'd share it here. It would be almost funny...
if it's weren't true...
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0
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1
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2
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3
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
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Feature works precisely the way a user expects.
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Feature almost works the way a user expects.
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Feature causes user to mutter under his/her breath.
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And sigh a lot.
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Feature causes user to complain to his/her neighbor.
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Loudly.
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Users form angry mobs.
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With torches.
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Users swear feature was designed and engineered by
chimps.
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Stupid chimps.
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Someone feels compelled to create a web site devoted
solely to how much your product/feature sucks.
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Apr 16 2008, 10:57:58 PM EDT
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Introducing Paul Clemmons, our new draft persona for a DWA user
We have had several requests from customers to interview users of DWA
-- Domino Web Access, (aka iNotes)-- and create a persona. We also had requests for
us to ensure that we take into account various age groups in our
personas, including younger (university-age or just entering the work
force) users. To that end, our own intern, Drew Condon, has
conducted several interviews of such users and created the following
draft persona.
Please feel free to comment if you are a member of this target user
group-- or get your friends/siblings/children to read it (if they are
members of this target group) and provide us with feedback.
Thanks,
Mary Beth on behalf of Drew
DWA is for: Paul Clemmons, Intern
User ID: pclemmons | Telephone Number: 1-416-555-1104 | Email: pclemmons@renovations.com | Employee Number: 11130
Here's a photo of Paul:
Biography:
Paul is a 23 year old graduate student getting his MBA with an
e-business concentration at a Chicago area business school. He
works part time as an intern three days a week in the PR department of
Renovations, a home improvement store, when he’s not at school.
He is working on a project with two other interns focused on optimizing
and monitoring the image of Renovations on the Web.
Personal Life:
Paul has an apartment in Logan Square on the outside of downtown
Chicago with two other roommates he met on Craig’s List. He’s
played bass guitar in a local band for the past 3 years, and he
typically rides his bike around Chicago instead of driving.
Here's a photo of his beloved Bass:
Assumptions:
- Able to multitask, but understands his limits, and sets them.
- Expects to be able to “connect” to people and information virtually all the time.
- Knows technology plays a big role in day to day life, but recognizes the importance of real contact.
- Focused on what technology can to for him, rather than how or why.
- Intakes a huge amount of information on a daily basis, at his discretion.
Goals and Motivations:
- Graduate on time with honors, but also learn something.
- Use connections to find a well paying (secure), interesting, and
satisfying job; possibly at Renovations, but he’s keeping his options
open.
- Manage a busy schedule, but not let work and school consume life.
Average Day:
- Paul collaborates with others on searching through social
bookmarking sites to see if there is any new positive or negative press
about Renovations.
- Monitors the content on various Wikis, web pages, and blogs about the company to make sure they are accurate.
- Partly responsible for checking and maintaining Renovations online customer forums.
- Paul rides the “El” to get from home to work to class, and tries to be productive answering emails along the way.
Tools:
Work:
- IE 6 at work with a del.icio.us plug-in to save pages he browses
at work, for home. Uses IE (Renovations gave him IE, he hasn't
yet treid to get permission to see if he can use Firefox)) to do all of
his web based research.
- Lotus Notes 7.5 w/ DWA for work emails.
- Dell laptop running XP at work, model # = whatever they gave him (something not great).
- Microsoft Office Suite for creating reports, work related documents, presentations, and spreadsheets.
Personal:
- Custom skinned FireFox at home/class.
- Gmail for mail, chat, & calendar and Facebook and LinkdIn for social and professional networking.
- Digg and del.icio.us for social bookmarks.
- Apple MacBook and old Dell Desktop at home.
- Google Docs for most things or MS Word for more substantial documents like resumes.
- iGoogle homepage with RSS feeds from his favorite blogs (TechCrunch, Engadget)
Technological & Computing Skills:
Paul is “connected” virtually all the time; he can be reached or reach
out via mobile/smart phone through voice, data, or text
messaging. When at home, Paul is wirelessly connected to a
high-speed, always-on network connection. Paul has a both a desktop
computer (music and photos networked to his TV), and a newer laptop for
school and general use that he keeps in the living room at his
apartment. He usually leaves his work laptop at work.
Paul uses gmail for personal email and chat, although he has an old AIM
account too, and sees them as part of broader services offered by
Google (youTube, google maps, search, and the iGoogle homepage).
Paul also keeps another email address active as well; its not uncommon
for him to have a couple of email addresses at any given time.
Paul relies on email and chat for more immediate communications, but
uses Facebook as way to casually keep in contact with friends, or check
out what others are up to. Voice is seen as on par with personal
email, and just another method of communicating, however, Paul
recognizes that it is preferred for professional or formal
situations. Paul, not deliberately, uses different channels to
create a layered communication style that allows him to filter and
target how he contacts people based on relationships or the type of
message. Paul’s good friends talk to him on the phone, others may
only receive text messages.
At work, Paul uses DWA instead of the Notes client because most of his
responsibilities are limited in scope. Reading and responding to
email is his primary mode of communication in the office, although he
sometimes has to log into the client to access and add data to a
reporting database. For the most, part DWA meets all his
professional needs.
Paul usually adopts technology based on buzz, recommendations from
friends, availability, impact, and mandate, but rarely on research or
in depth feature comparison. He is quick to switch between
competitors or sites if he feels the switch is a net benefit. His
rich client applications were preloaded with his original computer
(iTunes, Photoshop Elements, Microsoft Office etc), or are highly
specific to some of his interests, but most of his interaction is done
via free Web applications (monster.com, google maps,
weather.com). Paul has his “sites” that he checks daily for news
and entertainment to help pass the time or stay up to date; he more or
less creates a diverse patchwork of free unrelated sites to satisfy all
his information and communication needs.
Categories
: [ persona ]
Apr 11 2008, 02:23:41 PM EDT
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Allow Samantha to close the Home page, or not?
In Notes 8.0 and 8.0.1 we allow Samantha to close the Home page. This
was an intentional departure from previous versions, where she could
not close the Home page.
Some of the reasons were that we'd heard a few customers who wanted
users to be able to do that in order to free up more screen real estate
across the top for other tabs.
Having a non-closeable home page was not a feature that Xpeditor
supported, and the Symphony standalone did not use such a thing,
either. So, that's why Samantha can close the Home page in Notes 8 and
801. She can re-open it by choosing it from Open list (It's near
the bottom, but she might not know that.)
The Home page ALWAYS still opens when you restart the client.
What do you think? Should we change the behavior in Notes 8.5 so that the home page is not closeable? Why or why not?
Apr 09 2008, 06:45:38 PM EDT
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A .png dilemma
There are two ways to import png data into an Notes 8.x document. One is to directly import a png, and the other is to import png images as part of an HTML. Importing pngs as an HTML is currently not supported. So this is not an issue here.
Importing a png directly is partially supported on the current Notes 801 clients by converting it to jpeg. But animation and transparency of png are lost because jpeg doesn't have the features. We can fully support png images on an HTML on 8.5, but then we will lose backward compatibility.
Development is giving me 2 options. Which do you prefer:
1. Always convert png to jpeg. This has maximum backwards compatibility.
2. On Notes 8.5 clients, Render as a png data. Animation and transparency are supported.
The image is saved/loaded as a png data.
However, on older clients, A png image in a document becomes complete blank with a small red x, because the old clients don't know the image format.
Apr 08 2008, 03:59:55 PM EDT
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How I got started with Notes
I used Notes 3.something at "FTP Software" back in 1995. They used it for entering Trouble Tickets.
I hated it. Of course, since it was for trouble tickets, I was already always in a foul mood when I saw it.
And I remember that the first thing it always seemed to do was ask me
what server I wanted to connect to.... and of course I could never
remember.
Fast forward 2 years... to 1997, my job interview at Iris
Associates, with Paul Haverstock, about the Sametime
project. So I took the job. My first day on the job was
August, 25 1997, the same day that Iris moved into its new builds-- the
one we're in now, but moving out of next year.
I was the second person on the team, surrounded by Notes people
talking Notes Notes Notes all the time. They were working on (or maybe
just shipped) 4.6. Sametime 1.0 had a "web home page" that I
built (I had some help) using Domino Designer 4.6. (Please nobody go
look for it, it was pretty dull...)
I watched the development of several versions from "the sidelines
of Sametime." Then, after working on Workplace for a bit, one day
Kevin Cavanaugh (director of Notes development at the time) called me
into his office and talked about the Outlook competitive threat and
how maybe we should really invest in Notes and spiff up the
UI. Then he ask who I thought would want to be the lead
designer. I jumped at the chance!. When this job is not
excrutiating (like when we have to cut features) , it's the most fun
I've ever had at work.
Apr 07 2008, 10:28:44 PM EDT
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On your workspace-- do you even pick the menu item "Arrange Icons"?
Hey folks,
For you Workspace users out there, open up your Workspace
to any tab, and then go up to the View menu-- see that menu item called
"Arrange Icons"?
It will move all your icons to the upper left-- so that there are no
extra spaces between the "Chicklets" (tiles). (So if the
arrangement of your icons is important, DO NOT PICK THIS MENU ITEM
NOW!!! 
How often you you pick this menu item for "Arrange Icons"?
One a day
Once a week
Once a month
Less than once a month?
How would you feel if this option is not available in the new workspace in Notes 8.5?
Categories
: [ LotusNotes8.5 ]
Apr 03 2008, 09:11:26 AM EDT
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All Day Long
Hi all, John Lance here. You may remember me from such past blog postings as "Mapping Imported Contacts"
and "My Favorite Party Animals" (tip: monkeys are overrated, bulls are expensive, and goliath bird eating spiders get you a clear path to the buffet every time (of vital importance for those of us that wear extra large Lotusphere shirts)).
Moving right along...
We're hard at work here in Lotusville making it so that Samantha can subscribe to other calendars from her Notes calendar (i.e. she can see entries from other calendars in her Notes calendar). One particularly interesting side effect involves All Day Events.
Currently when Samantha creates an All Day event in her Notes calendar the event appears in the nontimed event area (that area at the top of the calendar) and the column has a light fill of the same color. When Samantha adds her personal google calendar (or Ted's calendar) she gets to pick a color for those calendars. Right now, any all day events on those calendars also colors the day. And, if you happen to have multiple all day events from multiple sources you wind up with a blend in the column.
So, should All Day Events from other calendars actually color the column, or should they just appear at the top in the nontimed event area?
Pink (on left) is from another calendar - Yellow (on right) is an All Day event on Samantha's calendar.
Thanks in advance.
John
Categories
: [ calendar | federated_calendar | google ]
Apr 02 2008, 02:06:21 AM EDT
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Truths Revealed
After some hard questions, it is felt by the author of this blog that
it is only fair that I finally reveal myself to you, the Lotus
community. You know me as Samantha, and until now I have perpetuated
the illusion that I am not a real person. However, circumstances have
changed and I think it is only fair that I come forward and tell you
what is really going on.
I am real. The "design team" that you have all come to know and love
are, in actuality, the imaginary figments. Mary Beth Raven, my finest
creation, is really an elaborate facade. Paying for that fine actress
who stands up at all the conferences has cost me a pretty penny, I'll
admit, but it has been worth it. The fact so many of you believe in her
and will swear to seeing her and even speaking with her attests to the
strength and power of your willingness to believe.
I am fond of all my creations. Basing John Lance on Troy McCLure
was a stroke of genius, in my opinion. In revealing that
John-the-Calendar-designer is not real, you must understand by now that
Calendar
Overlays in Notes 8.5. are also not real, either.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess that the witty, intelligent
Margo, the ribald Kathy, my recent creation Michelle, are all imaginary
designers, created to help me learn Notes 8.
But times change and hard realities must be faced. The "design team"
has served their purpose, and given that I have heard rumors that some
bloggers were intent on revealing my secret I have chosen to beat them
to the punch.
So there you have it. At this point the best I can do is retire "the
crew" as I've come to think of them. I am not entirely certain what
will become of this blog, but perhaps I will turn it over to my good
friend Ted (although, between you and me I strongly suspect that if
that happens it will be Betty writing in Ted's name).
Anyway, it has been fun.
Samantha Daryn
April 1, 2008
also often called "April Fool's Day"
Apr 01 2008, 06:38:43 AM EDT
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Administering the Sametime Product Suite -- WIll Fred Adams get a promotion, or hire a new person, or??
With Sametime Connect, Sametime Gateway, the just-shipped Sametime Advanced, and the upcoming Sametime Unified Telephony, how is Fred Adams, our Messaging and Collaboration System Administrator, going to handle all the growth for this product suite?
Will Fred Adams get a promotion or be told to hire a new person?
Will Ida Engel be the second line support person for all this Sametime stuff, or will the support staff get expanded?
In your organization will Fred’s job grow to include WebSphere Application Server administration for the Sametime product suite (Sametime Connect, Sametime Advanced, Sametime Unified Telephony, and Sametime Gateway) or will he hire a new person to handle the Telephony Application Server aspects of administration, or, is your company already using WAS and will the WAS administrator take over these responsibilities?
For Unified Telephony, whoever handles the Telephony Application Server will also need to work closely with Telephone Switch Network Administrator (SNA). Will Fred bring in a junior SNA to help work with the organizations SNA? The information collected from the Telephone SNA would be used to help configured the Telephony Application Server and the Sametime by the new hire or by Ida. Users who need to be provisioned would be provisioned by Ida or the likes of Ida working on the WebSphere Application Server.
Knowing Fred and Ida – how does your organization plan to change to handle the numerous Sametime products?
Who would administer Sametime Advanced, Sametime Unified Telephony and Sametime Gateway"
Do you think we need a new persona for someone who adminsters all these Sametime products or is it Fred Adams our Messaging and Collaboration System Administrator persona?
We'd prefer to have a conversation with some of you about this, to understand your environments better. If you have time for a 20-40 minute conversation, please contact Michelle McDevitt, our Sametime Administrations UI Designer, at Mcdev@us.ibm.com
You can also feel free to post a response.
Categories
: [ Sametime ]
Mar 31 2008, 09:36:52 AM EDT
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Designing the User Experience for Lotus Notes and
Sametime
