Mary Beth has been taking on the critics
February 13 2006
With all the kick up last week about the
Notes user interface, it's important to understand how focused Notes architects,
engineers, and developers are on building a leading edge, world-class user
interface for the Notes "Hannover" release. One of the
lead designers, Mary Beth Raven, appears to have made it her personal mission
to find all Notes user interface critics worldwide and engage with them,
quite publicly, one at a time.
For example, on joe lamantia.com, Mary Beth posted a comment asking for
Joe to help IBM recruit end-users to participate in usability testing.
Joe
made a new blog entry out of it:
Proving that a well-developed sense of humor is required for success in product design -- especially for Lotus Notes -- Mary Beth Raven, who leads the design team for the next version of Lotus Notes, recently posted a rather funny comment in reply to my suggestion that the Notes Design team offer customers a choice of unpleasant but related user experience themes. She used this as the occasion to invite all members of the community of Notes to users to register as volunteers for usability testing.This seems like as good a time as any to remind you that Lotus seeks end-users (NOT the IT developers and admins in your organization) for Notes usability testing. Full details are on the Usability page at IBM developerWorks: Lotus.
Post a Comment
- 2
Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 2/13/2006 6:55:24 AM
Interesting that the reply block in Joe's blog is essentially unreadable due to his choice of font sizes and colors.
- 3
Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 2/13/2006 7:31:19 AM
And another of his posts complains that Domino sucks because he can't send mail from Firefox. The fact that at that time he posted IBM had not announced a version of DWA that supports Firefox on the Mac might have something to do with it. The possibility that it's Firefox on the Mac that's doing some or all of the sucking never occurs to him.
- 4
Tim Latta | 2/13/2006 11:51:57 AM
Hey Mary Beth, ever consider a user-centered-design blog? ;-)
- 5
Thomas Schulte | 2/13/2006 1:58:42 PM
Quite fascinating but there is, as nearly always when IBM announces something or wants to have help, a but.
But what about the European users.
I hope that no one misunderstands what i am saying now.
Europeans have a slightly different approach when it comes to software handling compared with United States based users. They (well not all but a lot more i think) tend to look behind the curtains and dig a little bit deeper. As i see it a lot of software that "just fits" for US users is seen as "not fully developed" (which means could do better not only in terms of design but alos usefulness) over here.
So who cares about what the European Users think?
We have over issues do deal with. One of those is the availability of "TRULY" mulitlingual applications. (ever tried to work in a company where there are 8 different motherlanguages spoken? No?)
No European will be in a IBM lab for this usability test because of that sentence:
"To participate in a usability test in our labs, you must reside close to the Massachusetts or North Carolina locations"
Thanks a lot to IBM for simply cutting of, i do not know might be, 40% (guessed) of its users which have a totally different cultural background and who are passionate critical users of your product.
- 6
Thomas Schulte | 2/13/2006 1:59:59 PM
Post Scriptum
Yes i registered for that event bafore and no i did not get ANY reply from IBM.
- 7
Frans Maas www.waudamaas.nl/fransblog | 2/13/2006 2:51:14 PM
This usability initiative of Mary Beth is *very* much appreciated. I already signed up for participation. As you can read in my recent article { Link } I have been doing substantial analysis of the material on the LNS site over the past few days. I must say that quite some points raised on the LNS site were real eye openers. It makes me better understand the sentiment regarding Notes usability among the users in my company. They apparently don't always come from pure religious disbelief, but often from true confusion and irritation about "minor things" in the UI. As a additional note I would recommend to change software design policies such that usability gets priority over ease-of-implementation.
- 8
Mary Beth Raven | 2/13/2006 3:52:44 PM
To Thomas Schulte and other Europeans, Asians, and South Americans,
You are all welcome to participate in REMOTE usability studies, which are listed on our sign-up page. So anyone with a web browser can participate in our studies. We also ask if you are willing to host a site visit. If you invite us, we may actually come!
We recently worked with a user studies group in Japan, in which Japanese IBMers interviewed Japanese users. Our Japnese IBM colleagues then prepared a great presentation and lengthy report for us, so that we had a better Japanese perspective.
... and yes, as a matter of fact, I DO work in a company where there are over 8 different mother tongues spoken :)
- 9
Thomas Schulte | 2/13/2006 4:56:52 PM
*smiles*
Ok that is true. IBM is definitely a multilanguage company.
But what about the fact that i as a developer am not able to build an application with Notes right now that can be fully translated to any users language only by changing some text values? Some of us tried that and got as far as we could.
And i have not seen that feature in Hannover up to now.
Translation here does mean, not only the labels of forms, view column headers, actions, hotspots and tabbed table headers. By the way three out of those five can not be translated on the fly right now, gues which ones?
But also translating keywords in views. Which is absolutely impossible because @userlanguage([Region])or [Content] or [AlternateName] does not work in the right way in view columns.
And please. Using NGD for that purpose is not a valid option here. Building a more complex application where you have to have every view, form, script library or any other thing that has an user interface inserted eight times is neither safe nor sane.
Just try to use a german/english version of a mail database without having permanent problems with the inbox folder.
And Mary Beth. I did sign in to participate in "REMOTE" usability studies. But as i stated before, there was no reaction from anybody inside of IBM.
Ed, I was personally with Mary on Lotusphere, on the usability lab test, taking a tour on new hannonver workspace, and I really like how she was reacting to all the comments I (and other persons there) where suggesting her for improvements. I even receive a mail after lotusphere on which she was willing to go on further details with the suggestions (and I am aware other people also did). I really liked this attitude, and I am sure results are going to be very, very positive. Noboyd will be able to said that customers/end-user impressions are not taken into account...