Content
Usability at it’s worst
This weird beast of an application is a usability nightmare, but a perfect example of how to not do it.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been testing email design within Lotus Notes - table hell as it is. Playing around this application is really an outstanding experience, seems to me the entire ‘monster’ could have been replaced by Gmail, an online calendar, Backpack and a simple text processor, say Word.
This weird beast of an application is a usability nightmare, but a perfect example of how to not do it.
One of the numerous icon-packed toolbars contains both a pair of binoculars and a magnifying glass, who does what? At least I’ve seen these icons before, which leads me to belive they perform some kind of search - a simple tooltip would come in handy, but that has been left out. Needless to say, some icons are application specific and thereby non-recognisable.
I could go on and on and on, but there’s just too much.
Comments
Lotus Notes is horrible (see http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/index.html)
But Adobe Reader isn’t much better. It has always confused me, that they have two options under “Edit”: “Search” and “Find” (see http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3286/3002869646_0578b05190.jpg?v=0).
Why bother searching, when you can just find it without searching?
@ Steen: Amazing collection! Even more amazing is the fact that out of 80 findings nothing deals with the awful rendering of HTML emails - not really an UI issue I guess.
Despite the fact that there is a difference between find and search, defined as inline versus global or simple versus advanced, it’s far from clear to the average user. Thx for proving my point ;-)