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A surprising remark! The usability of Lotus Notes was so bad that it earned itself an entire section on a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame.
by rwallace 6y ago
A surprising remark! The usability of Lotus Notes was so bad that it earned itself an entire section on a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame.
- rozzie 6y agoA proper and well-deserved honor. For some perspective, this was an app developed by 5 core devs that grew to ~125M+ users who by necessity were split across implementations concurrently released for Windows 3/95, NT, OS/2, Mac, Motif, OpenLook, because we were an early enterprise product and needed GTM help offered by each of those platform vendors. Our tiny dev team chose to prioritize platform breadth thru a "portability layer" developed in a pre-internet pre-browser era, with the constraint that its ~3M+ LoC (in C) had to run in a 250KB working set that grew to a couple MB by the time I left. Yes, I wish the UI could have been better on each platform. But as a pragmatist I remain proud of the paradigm and its usability given the constraints.
- rwallace 6y agoThanks for the perspective! It's always good to get a look at what the situation looked like to the people who were there at the time. And yes, I can certainly understand that you had to get a product to market within the applicable constraints.
- ConceptJunkie 6y agoI last used Lotus Notes around 2003, and it didn't even conform to things that had been standard 10-15 years earlier. It felt like going back in time to the 1970s, long before I'd ever used computers.
- homarp 6y agoindeed https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=990 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=990 (see also Ray Ozzie answer in other comment about portability layer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697054 )