Making The Most of the Notes Client

Towards the end of last year I was on a customer site where a user was scrolling through a view to find entries that were towards the bottom. Needless to say I pointed out that by starting to type, you could jump down to the entries beginning with those letters. Over the next few days I pointed out a number of additional usability tips. It occurred to me that many users may receive minimal training on Notes applications. Frustrations probably often come from old user interfaces on applications developed many years ago but never updated or lack of knowledge of easy usability tips.

IBM have produced reference cards for Notes, but these focus on mail and calendaring rather than generic usability tips. So, with a little advice from David Leedy, I pulled together four pages of tips. I’m happy to provide these Notes Client cheat sheets for download on Intec’s website.

There are four different versions.

IBM Lotus Notes Basic
IBM Lotus Notes 8.0
IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 (available in A4 and 11 x 17)
IBM Notes Social Edition 9.0 Beta (available in A4 and 11 x 17)

If you are going to IBM Connect next week, Joyce Davis and Amanda Bauman have kindly helped out and copies of the 11 x 17 versions of IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 and IBM Notes Social Edition will be available in the UX lab.

Now I know many of my blog posts have been about XPages and I remain committed to its future. But creating these cheat sheets has highlighted one thing. The Notes Client is a very rich client. Searching can be created for XPages, but we still don’t have anything equivalent to the Notes Search Bar available out-of-the-box. Many of the keyboard shortcuts are not available in XPages or web applications in general. A browser is quick and lightweight. Web applications may be lauded by many as having a better look and feel. But they lack many of the usability and productivity benefits of the Notes Client. It’s also highlighted the strengths of the browser plugin, since most of what’s in the cheat sheets also works in the browser plugin, as well as in the full client. The Notes Client is a very powerful interface and we should shout loudly about it.

But I’ll jump off the soap box for now and just say thank you to all involved in reviewing the cheat sheets. I hope they will be of benefit for many end users. If they allow any users to get more out of Notes, that is a win for all of us.