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Lotus Notes Sucks

Every day when I fire up Lotus Notes to check my email or calendar, some part of the interaction frustrates me to no end, launching me into an expletive soaked tirade that anyone within earshot can attest to.

This is my gripe list. Please add comments with what bothers you, and maybe the Lotus product manager or your IT department will take note.

• A third mental model. I’ve been using Outlook forever and started using GMAIL shortly after it launched. Admittedly, GMAIL required a different set of behaviors and expectations than Outlook, but that was OK because ultimately it was a much more efficient and rewarding experience. So do I really need a third set of expectations for the behavior of an email client? Perhaps if there was any value provided, but for me anyway, there is no value-add for Lotus Notes. I’m sure many of you feel the same way. Lotus Notes must absolutely rock from a management & IT department perspective. Too bad it sucks from a user’s perspective.
• Cannot accept or decline a meeting invitation from the preview pane.
• The web mail version is ridiculously heavy, chock full of Tuftian chart crud, and defaults to the heavy mode - not only that, it doesn’t remember your “light mode” preference, so you have to wait for the crappy heavy version to load first. Slow. Cumbersome. Frustrating.
• I have to open email and calendar items to perform common actions such as Reply To All and Accept Invitation. I can’t execute these actions from the preview pane. I think I had Reply To All at one point in time, but it isn’t there anymore. Not sure why it left, if it ever really was there, or how to get it back.
• And how the hell do I mark items as unread? I just switched computers and when Notes updated it pulled down all my email as unread. I searched and searched in the menu structure, both up top and via right-click. Where would you expect it? Actions > Mark Unread? RIght Click: Mark Unread? Hah! Neither. The brilliant IBM engineer / designers decided to put it in Edit > Unread Marks > Mark Selected Unread. Brilliant! Now why didn’t I think of that? Tip of the hat to these sites for more info on this topic: Lotus Notes and Me and the Official Lotus Notes Sucks Website.
• I t i s s o s l o w……………………………..
• The calendar accept/decline/update logic absolutely sucks. For example, I recently got an update to a recurring meeting from a client fortunate enough to be using MS Outlook. (Wow, they are SO lucky. I bet their more productive and don’t swear at their email client everyday.) Anyway, when I accept the invitation I get this message “Part or all of this meeting is already on your calendar. You must decline those entries first before processing this notice.” The first part of the message lets us know that it detected entries and understands the relationship. Why the hell can’t it just do this - my goal is to have an up-to-date calendar, not to “process” notices. I think this might be the worst widely-used enterprise wide application used on a daily basis by non-experts.
• The out of office functionality makes no sense. Too many options. The options when you open the settings window (if you can find it, as it is hidden in Actions > More > Out of Office — WTF) there are a number of indeciperable settings and then three actions: “Enable and Close”, “Save and Close” and “Cancel.” So when I went to turn it off (because the upgrade thought it was on when really it was not and it kept sending me annoying notices) I just went for what I thought was the Save button and OOPS hit the Enable and Close button by mistake. Doh! Hey Lotus Notes developers and product managers, don’t you know users rarely read? You really should do yourself a favor and quit your job. And make sure you lie on your resume - not a good idea to let people know you worked on this awful application.
• The size of the thumb in the scrollbar isn’t quite right. It appears to me that it is scrolled all the way to the top until I see there are unread items in the inbox, and then I scroll up some more. See the screenshot below. I have 2 unread emails, but the thumbsize and placement makes it appear that I’m at the top of the list. Rest assured it is currently sorted by date/time with most recent on top. What I want to do is grab that thumb easily and slam it to the top so I can see those new messages…….. But no, can’t do that, need to very carefully acquire that teeny tiny target and scoot it up. Fitz’ Law anyone?

© 2008 Nathan Verrill.