My thoughts on Lotus Notes

Miscellaneous UI Quirks

Aug 11 2008 22:38
Here is a grab bag of user interface quirks or annoyances:
  • The user interface has far too much computer administrative debris. My 17” monitor feels cramped. The “Search this view” bar is overwhelmingly large. When I try to reclaim screen real estate by turning off the toolbar buttons in the Mail window, it also turns the buttons off in the compose message window. I couldn’t find a way to turn the toolbar back on in the message window, so I need to close it, re-enable the toolbar in the main window and then reopen the message compose window. The settings should really be independent. With a preview pane turned off, I can view about 46 emails in the message list in Thunderbird, but in Notes, I can only see 36 emails.
  • If I minimize the window while it is loading, it keeps on maximising itself (at least 3 times).
  • The default folder view of 1 1/4 row spacing and 3 rows per line is annoying. I can’t change the default, so I have to fiddle with the settings for each folder. If I rename a folder, it resets that folder’s settings to the default.
  • If a message has been sent to 2 or more people, only the first “To” entry is displayed in the message list. There is no indication that there are multiple receipients.
  • Sorting messages by subject line doesn’t ignore “Re:” and “Fwd:” prefixes.
  • The date column always shows the full date and time. It would be great if it would show “friendly” timestamps: just the time for emails received today, day and time for emails received in the last week and the full timestamp for emails earlier than that.
  • The column drag widgets in the message pane are fiddly and difficult to find and control and some can’t even be controlled with the mouse. For example, I can’t move the “Flag, response icons” column in my Folders with the mouse, but I can do it via “Customize this view”. I’ve also tried removing the “Thread” indicator column from my Inbox, but although the checkbox has been removed in “Customize This View”, the column still appears.
  • Drafts aren’t editable when double-clicking; I need to press the Edit button.
  • If you flag a message, you can no longer see the reply/forwarded indicator in the message list.
  • When viewing messages in any of my folders (i.e. not Inbox or All Documents), the “Show” menu in the upper right only displays “Unread Only”. The “Preview on Bottom”, “Preview on Side” and “Hide Preview” menu items are missing.
  • The email header for messages in the trash looks broken.
  • Blinking URL underlines in email messages is very annoying.
  • When I have the preview pane configured to appear on the right, my Inbox has a nice two-line message display (Sender and Date on one line, Subject on second line). This two-line display does not appear when I view messages in any of my folders. This means that having the preview pane on the right is frustrating.
  • If I switch to the “OS theme”, the email header no longer displays the email badge.
  • Pressing “Esc” doesn’t cancel the delete warning message.
  • Clicking on “Show/Hide Details” in preview pane doesn’t work unless Notes has focus.
  • If I close the “Home” screen, it reappears after restarting Notes.
  • When I move a message to a folder, Notes normally moves the focus to the next message, but often it “jumps” around and displays another message. I haven’t figured out why it does this. Perhaps it’s displaying the next last message viewed.
  • If I move 2 or more unread messages to a folder, click on that folder and select “Show Unread”, it shows one less message than the number of messages moved. One of the messages simply goes “missing”.
  • Clicking on “Show Details” in the message header shows the full address details, but it doesn’t remove the condensed details, so information is effectively repeated in the header.
  • When network connectivity is lost, I get a lot of errors and it doesn’t look like I can reconnect without closing and reopening the mail application.
  • There is no way to add a “Recipient” column to the folder views. A “Who” column like in the “All Documents” view would be far better. I like to keep my sent email in folders together with incoming email. Without a “Who” column, I won”t be able to quickly see or sort by Recipient.
  • I mentioned this in my previous post, but there’s no way to view the message source (and headers) for Notes-to-Notes emails, even though there is a “View Source” option for emails from non-Notes users.
  • There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to copy a contact from an email into my Contacts.
  • There’s no way to reply to emails in the Sent view (e.g. to send a follow-up email to the same recipients.)
  • I can, however, edit sent email and resend, but then the sent view only has one copy even though recipient gets two.
  • “Discover Folders” does not tell you if it is in the Sent view.
  • No way to forward an email as an attachment (preserving headers).
  • There is no way to mark a message as being a “sent” message (for example, by dragging it into “Sent”). If you connect to your mailbox via IMAP and send a message, it will not appear in Notes’ “Sent” view and there is no way to fix this. Also, emails migrated from the old mail system were not marked as “sent” in Notes and so do not appear in the “Sent” view.
  • The threaded/conversation view doesn’t work because we’re on a version 7 backend.