Chris - I want to know what he means by 'strange non standard ui', or more importantly, what is a 'familiar standard ui'? Because obviously s/he wants us to design to that. So I would say the 3 (or 4) pane paradigm is 'standard' these days. Look at any blog, header, right col, left col, center content <sigh>.

The UI hasn't changed much since OS/2. Higher resolution and cleaner graphics but it's still the same basic 3 pane navigation.

It seems they want less UI. The ones I heard complain only use mail and they see more in Notes. If notes opened only to the application and not have the workspace it would look cleaner and do less.

What's funny is these are the people with the desktop covered in icons.

I do think if Notes was available free for personal (and set for pop usage), use then there would be less complaining as users would use it else where.

I just opened iTunes (in case you're wondering, I don't use it to manufacture nuclear weapons... I am in full compliance with section 10 of the iTunes license agreement), and the majority of the interface looks like a "typical" Notes app: the 3 pane layout you mentioned, alternating row colors in the "views", resortable columns... heck, the categorized views even have twisties instead of plus/minus. It uses a bit more gradient backgrounds than seems typical for a Notes app, cute icons, and such, but there's nothing in here we couldn't do in Notes (download domTunes from OpenNTF, if'n ya don't believe me). So I guess I'm not really sure what makes its UI any more "standard" than your average Notes app.

Oh... I know what it is: Notes just needs to switch to that stop-light-thingy for minimizing, maximizing and closing the window. Then it's fully Mac'ed out.

Except... while Mac is gaining market share every day, they're still in the minority. Which means that the Mac UI is not "standard" in the sense of being the "norm", only in the sense of being the "trend".

Chris,

As notes developers we tend to follow the standard two pane or three pane approach. The reason is that most examples that we are given when we are learning to program Notes follows that design. This is true even to with the newer Notes 8 and Notes 8.5. There are really no new components in these new version. They look a little better, but they are the same. Since these components have their limits we normally follow what is standard. Composite applications does not help this case. Now I see Notes applications with many tiny windows that change as we make a selection.

A two or three pane application is more than appropriate if the layout with those panes are presented to the users in a way that is easily understood. Unfortunately, the RAD capability of Notes allows Notes developers to create functional, but ugly user interfaces. Most Notes developers cannot afford or do not take the time to create a functional user interface that appeals to the user not the developer.

Fortunately, there are a few who think out of the box and take what we have with the Notes client and do things with it that the designer of Notes never conceived. Your vertical tabbed table is an example. I have done the same with other Notes components.

I agree with the statement that the Notes client is cluttered, why users should have available all these different options, I do not know. It confuses the user and makes support an issue. The Notes menus are a good example.

I think it's the color.

'Rant

Wow, I've tweet gridded that for a while and am not surprised at the tweets I see come across as well. My main complaint is that no one ever offers what they would like. I've done internal UI studies on what I write/design and when I ask, "OK, if you don't like it, take a napkin and draw what you want" I usually get nothing vastly different. Most of us read left to right, things work well that way. Given a pencil and a napkin, I'd love to see what people come up with that is so much better.

So what, do people want rounded corners on framesets, with gradients everywhere? Whoopdeedooo...

Sure there are nuances in Notes (can I have tear away tabs please...on any open tab), but what do people really want?

I've been spending a lot of time in Adobe Illustrator lately (nevermind!) and it to starts out the same way - tools on the left, panels on the right, "Filters"/"Effects" AKA "Actions" on the top. Sure I can grab a panel and throw it to my other screen, and I can move the tools from the left to the right or float them. I guess I just don't get the fascination with the whole 2009 ui. What is this ideal 2009 ui, and what will the 2010 ui be? I'd love to see some of these whingers sketch what they want, and then lets see what can't be done about it in a Notes UI. Do we need to move the "x" on the tabs to the left - oh wait, Notes on a MAC does that. Speaking of those traffic lights, the metaphor fails miserably yet is accepted. Red = Minimize??? (sort of), Green means go???/Maximize(sort of) And nevermind amber. Just like a lot of web sites or tabbed interfaces where the tab doesn't flow back into the page - a site like word press gets it right, but looking back to a page like this, wow and moving on to more modern discussions and there are a number of other studies on this stuff.

Anyway, I say we ditch Copy/Cut/Paste in Notes 9, so it can get slaughtered for not having it.

Come on, be a little more honest. The workspace alone is worth some complaints. I really love the concept of the workspace and Apples iPhone proves that I am not alone. But the look definitely is from the 90ies. Then icons for action buttons. You can have one but only for the first action in a drop down list. Everything else is empty. How does that make sense? Notes 8 even reserves some space for action images what makes it look a bit like unfinished work. And then Notes Views. Notes Views look a lot like, let me find the correct word, Notes Views. Notes 8 cures this but only for the PIM applications. At least you can do it now if you want to (in standard not classic). So for the classic client not much has changed anyway. One thing I often see left out is a proper navigator/outline. Yes it is possible to do some kind of toggle navigator that open/closes sub menus but unfortunately this is hardly ever done because it is not easy. This often ends in scrolling outlines or nice list with "Now choose your preferred view out of those 250".

You already can do a lot with Notes but it is not easy. And you don't want to discuss the default templates like the doc library? How can this have a decent UI if it hasn't been changed for years?

Then there is backwards compatibility. This is a great thing by itself but it also means that your decade old Notes application still runs in Notes 8. Great but you often don't change what still works in many ways.

Maybe it would have made sense to update the default design elements too. It will break some old stuff but sometimes you have to force a customer. When you talk about Notes UI standards then you will probably see that from a users perspective there hardly ever was a standard. That starts with colors. In R5 your mail suddenly was all green, now it is blue. iNotes once was yellow (if I remember correctly) now it is blue. Skins would have been a great concept to help building better corporate designs that could also put your old applications a bit forward. The concept is there in Notes 8. We will see how this will work.

Now for some constructive criticism. I would love Notes to be able to more easily use some of the ajax functionality already available on the web. I really admire all your layer hacks that you show in your blogs but let's be honest those are hacks.Pictures in views. Yes you can have them if you play with the summary settings but a hack too. It is quite easy on the web (even with Domino).

You can always argue about UI, some say this is a great example for CA some say it is UI overkill (example: http://blog.balfes.net/images/dh_go_compapp_we4it.jpg ). I loved what Nathan showed with his embedded editor /frame hack. It reveals the potential of the product in many ways but a hack, as good as it is, limits its use to only a fraction of the installed base.

Let's see what XPages for the Notes client will bring although I fear a bit that the GB large standard client will then do what a few mb browser has been able to do for years.

Most of the complaints I usually see about Notes aren't about Lotus Notes itself, but about crappy applications built in Notes. People just don't get that so we need to do a better job explaining that part. This is the first time I ever heard that backward compatibility was a bad thing.

No offense, I use a variant of Eclipse every day to code -- but even coming from the standard Domino 7 Designer, Eclipse does seem cluttered.

Yes, I long for the clean interface of the Notes 7 Designer.

I am currently defining a new development template for our Notes development projects.

Our current standard dev. template looks exactly the same as the example you describe.

So I am not going to change that setup much to avoid that users have to learn navigating through an application.

However I would add by default a preview pane in the main frame.

I would also like to ad a cascading horizontal menu in the header frame but at this point only a view with cascading actions allow me to to so, not the outlines design element :-?

What I find a major difference with Notes apps and Web apps is that whitespace on Web appz is mostly considered as 'estetic' but not in Notes apps (at least by my user group).

Also users hardly want to spend time / money on estetic good looking applications.

In my opinion 'professionals should work with professional tools'. this includes an attractive UI. But maybe I am working too long in the Notes business and my customers not...