Criticisms
Publications such as The Guardian in 2006 have criticized Lotus Notes for having an "unintuitive interface" and cite widespread dissatisfaction with the usability of the client software. The Guardian indicated that Notes has not necessarily suffered as a result of this dissatisfaction due to the fact that "the people who choose tend not to be the ones who use it.". As previously described, numerous UI updates have been released by IBM since this article was published, which have addressed many of the criticisms raised.
Lotus Notes has also been criticized for violating an important usability best practice that suggests a consistent UI is often better than custom alternative. Software written for a particular operating system should follow that particular OS's user interface style guide. Not following those style guides can confuse users. A notable example is F5 keyboard shortcut, which is universally used to refresh window contents (or so people believe, but it's not entirely true, Microsoft uses F5 to refresh Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer, but F5 is not used as refresh in MS Office. Outlook uses F9 to refresh content, just as Lotus Notes used to do). Pressing F5 in Lotus Notes prior to release 8.0 causes it to lock screen, but since this was a major point of criticism this was changed in release 8.0. Old versions did not support proportional scrollbars (which give the user an idea of how long the document is, relative to the portion being viewed); proportional scroll bars were only introduced in Notes 8.
In the past Lotus Notes also suffered from other poor user interaction choices. One corrected example: in earlier versions the Out-of-office agent needed to be manually enabled when leaving and disabled when coming back, even if start and end date have been set. This was corrected in Release 8.5, where the Out-of-Office notification now automatically shuts off without a need for a manual disable.
When Lotus Notes crashes, some processes may continue running, and prevent the application from being restarted until they are killed.
Read more about this topic: IBM Lotus Notes
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