Exemplifying Lotus Notes
Having been blessed by an IT department that is faced with deploying an email system to more than 30000 employees, I have had the opportunity to see what becomes of software written to sell to management at the expense of users. Every day I am graced with another jaw dropping example of the kind of user interface tragedy or usability nightmare you can get away with when you don't have to please users to sell your software.
In what can only be a soul destroying practice for the Lotus Notes developers, IBM have produced a piece of software for which even Microsoft cannot generate as much user backlash.
Today's example was particularly epitomizing.
This is the error message that appeared when I clicked on the User Security button in the background. The sentence in quote marks is laughably obscure. For those that don't know, user preferences in Lotus Notes are scattered amongst more than 3 different multi-tab interfaces. It's all a bit hit and miss, and this misleading error dialog is typical of the kind of disorientating feedback you get as a user. FWIW, the dialog I was after actually appeared without a problem after dismissing this error message.