At my new job I’ve inherited an application that has a butt ugly interface. It’s applications like these that spur websites like Lotus Notes Sucks. Now I’ve read through a lot of that website and I must say that there is a lot of sense and lessons to be had from this website, but that’s another post for another day.

But back to that ugly application. I am just itching to redesign the UI for that application, it was developed last year and in my eyes was just thrown together and the UI was not thought out at all. While doing some research on UIs and looking for ideas to leach uh steal uh get inspiration from I came across Interface Matters which is an excellent site that talks about User Interface Design and has an awesome article on using layers to create a cascading menu. Now I was directed to this website by Nathan Freeman and an article Nathan did on Layers. Go check out the UI Nathan came up with, it’s awesome and shows the versatility of Lotus Notes when someone with imagination, skill and a lot of creativity can create when they put their mind to it. I also came across Mary Beth Raven’s site which at first glance appears to have a lot of useful information and idea generating content on her experiences designing the Notes Hannover UI. I haven’t gotten a chance to read much on her blog yet but upon first glance I’m sure it will be informative. She has also been working with the Lotus Nots Sucks website to help improve the UI for Lotus Notes in general.

More to the point about badly designed UIs giving lotus notes a bad rap, I found this quote over on Interface matters in this article and I think it hits the nail on the head about a bad interface:

the polished apps will win the approval of the masses as long as they actually work. A Notes app may be better suited for the job, but if it doesn’t look good, it may be discounted as amateur or at least not suitable for the enterprise.

Now this statement I think is true no matter the application, not just specific to notes, but notes has always been a not-so-eyepleasing application with a lot of publicity stating that the UI isn’t the greatest or rather eye-candy challenged.

So hopefully by pointing out some of these excellent resources it will give you the insipiration to take a second look at the UIs you develop and realise that the UIs you develop and distribute will help put either a positive or negative perception of lotus notes as a whole.

Keith