In an ever-changing and fast paced world, most companies are making the giant move from web based or thick client platforms to mobile developed platforms. Alas, in the pursuit of mobile applications and considerably better delivery standards to employees and customers some companies have completely neglected the UX component required to make these mobile applications better and certainly friendlier to use. Today's blog is about IBM's entry into the fray with iNotes. Any user of the Notes platform will tell you that at first glance, it really isn't all that great. It offers the cumbersome concept of replication and behaves rather slowly when it is asked to connect to a server. Moreover, the lack of ease with which a commercial user can simply set an account up (as opposed to an Exchange environment from Microsoft) is where IBM has really lost its commercial customers. However, the smart people in marketing have done something to counteract the bad taste left in most commercial users mouths ... they never went public with Lotus Notes for the stat-at-home mom or Gmail fanatic. That was IBM in the good old days but we are in a new era and any company unwilling to offer the joe public the ability to use one of its core applications is really going to lose out on a much larger and diversified crowd when it comes to profits and more importantly application feedback and improvement. Now, lets get back to the topic at hand ... mobile applications.
Lotus Notes for web users is offered through the DWA environment. What is DWA you ask? Its the abbreviation for Domino Web Access and it has been around for a long time. However, most people within IBM have never really explored its true functionality and for the most part, anyone with a thick-client has never really needed to. An offshoot of the DWA concept is iNotes. As the name suggests, it is Notes for intranets or internets. The most used functionality of this feature is mail. The first few questions that will pop into anyone's head these days when they hear of a mail client are the following.
- Can I read any and all mails that I receive?
- Does it have a calendar facility?
- Is it easy to use?
- Is it fast?
- Do I really need to invest in any special hardware or software to make it work?
- Will my browser support it?
- Is it a reliable method of communication?
- Is it customizable to meet the needs of any and all users?
I could spend all day listing questions that most users ask but lets leave those on the table for now and come to the UX component that drives iNotes. The boys at Lotus have really given a few good options to anyone using the iNotes interface. There are essentially three methods of logging into the system.
- Full Mode
- Lite Mode
- Ultralite Mode
Each of these modes comes with certain limitations and some of them actually offer better speeds and performance as compared to the alternatives offered at login. Lets explore them and some of the things that the UX teams never really thought of when they went into design.
Full Mode
As the name suggests, this is the full blown version of iNotes that claims to have all the bells and whistles that come with the application minus a few things that most people have becomes accustomed to. This mode works very well with some of today's more famous browsers namely Internet Explorer, Firefox (Linux, Win) and Safari (Mac, Win) however, if you try it with other browsers like Opera or Google's trendy Chrome, you might be in for a little surprise as it fails to load due to incompatibility with the browser, as in the case of Opera or a lack of some components as in the case of Chrome. The full mode additionally comes with an Offline mode for users who like reading their mail when they are not connected to the internet/intranet but what they forget to tell you is that it will require you to put your Notes ID in the preferences to get it started. Moreover, the interface really doesn't offer any guidance on the same. The calendar works fine with the exception of some minor tweaking but that is the problem with any web client that is used to schedule meetings. Last but not least, the frame that loads your mail can seriously go through some more development and design as it loads very slowly even at IBM and loads even slower with a VPN connection if you are under the subtly hinted bandwidth requirement. It seems that the developers have forgotten to mention that the minimum speed required would be 1 Mbps ... TSK TSK TSK.
Lite Mode
Something that offers the performance hungry user-population a boost of speed and closer to thick client speeds is this login option. The only problem I find is that when I am trying to scroll through my messages, the page just sits there like nothing is being done. Strange but I would think that the designers might get this one right by now. The calendar is shady too, it states that a user needs to be in full mode to get the option to accept an invitation and while this is a platform built for web users I would hope that the simple action of accepting a meeting invite should be accessible over all the different modes offered by iNotes. Apart from that the name lookup functionality is something to be desired across all the different modes of the interface with the exception of ultra-lite. It seems that the boys at Lotus aren't familiar with the concept of AJAX or they just don't care enough about it to give users the ability to do name lookups when they want to send an email. Instead, a little icon appears to indicate that a name lookup is required and then a window comes up offering the different name choices. In some cases, the name is shown twice and you are then left wondering which one to choose.
Ultra-Lite Mode
Probably the worst mode out of all the above mentioned modes, this mode is the one you would use if you really had nothing better to do and only wanted to read your mail. I would never suggest anyone with a lack of patience to even bother using this mode on their iPhone as it is stupidly slow and it should never be used to reply to mails unless you are in a place that offers wireless speeds that defy the speed of light and even with those speeds your still on an iPhone not a super computer ... once again TSK TSK TSK.
Final Verdict
While IBM is on the right track with their mobile application development and with the horizon push by Adobe for Flash on Apple's iPod/iPhone, I think that iNotes is a breath of fresh air for all those people who want to just read their emails and check their schedules as they travel around the world. If you are an avid user of the thick client and like using links to open databases and browse, this is not for you and certainly not to be used when you have a thick client available. Kudos on the first attempt IBM but many miles to go before it actually lives up to what it should be ... a sound replacement for the mail client offered by Notes for traveling users.
Wishlist for iNotes
- Calendar invites can be accepted across all modes
- iPhone access should allow Lite Mode
- Make the browser requirement a non-existent entity leaving users to choose the browser they want to use. It is after all a web-app at heart.
- Use AJAX more freely and definitely incorporate it into the name fields for To, CC and BCC
- Nullify the need to ever use a Notes ID file for encryption and maybe the user ID can be linked to the Notes ID or the certificates for easier use
Overall rating - 6/10
Music listened to while writing this blog - Nothing
