Re: Moving from MS Outlook 97 to Lotus notes R5

["Chuck Martin" <twriter -at- mindspring -dot- com>]

I can't stay on the sideline for this one.

Fortunately, I've not had to use Lotus Notes for email in many years. And I
do not disagree with the people who say it is a powerful document managment
application.

But for email, it plain sucks (note the highly technical term here).

Don't believe me? Check out the Interface Hall of Shame
(http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm), where there is an entire section
devoted to Lotus Notes. The quote from the paragraph that describes the
section: "We wish we found IBM's Lotus Notes a long time ago. This single
application could have formed the basis for the entire site. The interface
is so problematic, that one might conclude that the designers had previously
visited this site, and misread "Hall of Shame" as "Hall of Fame"."

As I have not seen the latest Notes Help, I can't comment on its
improvement. But a much bigger issue is how badly the applicaiton itself is
designed. Although Andrew Plato railed awhile back about how important it is
for techncal writers to write, this is about not just technical writing, but
technical communication. The interface communicates so much, and in Lotus
Notes' case, does so so badly. As technical communicators, our
responsibility is to not only write the docs, but to make sure that the
entire product communicates clearly what it is supposed to.

User go to Help because they are frustrated, because they are doing a task,
usually an unfamiliar one, and the interface does not communicate useful
information on how to accomplish this task. Users go to Help because the
application design has already failed.


--
Chuck Martin
Technical Writer, Online Help Author, GUI & Interaction Designer
twriter "at" mindspring "dot" com

"Amy_Smith/CAM/Lotus" <Amy_Smith/CAM/Lotus -at- lotus -dot- com> wrote in message
news:75744 -at- techwr-l -dot-  -dot-  -dot- 
>
> >ps. Oh, and to stay sane, *never* read the (un)Helps. They suck
>  >big time.
>
> Whoa baby. Them's fightin' words. This is a good example of why you should
> be careful posting on this list - you never know who's going to be reading
> it! :-)
<snip>
>
> I didn't start working for Lotus til R5 was released, but I happen to know
> that the User Assistance (UA) team made significant improvements in the R5
> help, and continues to do so on all subsequent releases. We strongly
> encourage user feedback on our documentation; Notes users on this list are
> welcome to direct comments about our documentation to me.




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