What were they thinking? When UX Design collides with Reality

This was an overall good insight into IBM's usability practices. We're told that in LS2008 IBM promised to deliver that Notes 8 would deliver a "world-class user experience" and dedicated a big team of user researchers, usability specialists, visual designers & interaction designers to the design of Notes 8 - and QuickR, Connections, Sametime 8, etc. etc. This team focuses on gathering feedback from various sources (forum, bleedyellow.com, GCPC, developers, customers, ...), prioritise and input that feedback into development.

What makes IBM's approach to usability interesting is the set of personas they have created to represent certain types of users. Meet Samantha, Mary, etc. each of whom have a very detailed profile and are taken really seriously by the IBM community. This I thought would be an approach that would work quite well for EUE, coupled with the user segmentation work that Paul Wickham's been doing - we could have our own Brad, Tom, Keanu etc ;)

Anyhow, the IBM Usability team is now focused on bringing consistency for Samantha and co. in the new technologies. We can already see elements of this in Quickr & Connections. The new Notes client and iNotes, as I believe Brian has already blogged previously, are very similar. This consistency in look-and-feel enhances seamlessness of usage for the end user, who can slide from Connections into QuickR for example without even noticing that he has done so. Very slick.

As a side note, it was good to see IBM's initiatives on gathering end user feedback and acting on it. If we do upgrade to Notes 8, we'll make sure we add to the cause!

Project Liberate :-S

Using the open office source code and the eclipse framework Lotus has created Symphony; which for basic text editing / presentations / spreadsheets works great. It’s completely free too, who can complain? The majority of Microsoft Office functionality lays unused so in this context it seems ridiculous to pay for that privilege.

By the end of the year it will be compatible with the latest version of office, and by 2010 will be aimed at more than just basic users with macros and other functionality being introduced.

The other side to this story is Project Liberate: “An IBM complementary Consulting Engagement to help customers understand alternatives when negotiating a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement”. A bold move when IBM openly admits Symphony is an inferior office product, but this is a long term strategy and at least they are contributing the developments back into the openoffice.org community.

Is the world going mobile??

This was an interesting session presented by a Blackberry user and a WMD user, split into two halves

• Demos of phones: Nokia, Android, Blackberry....

• The installation of a traveler (traveller :P) server.

At the beginning one presenter gave out his email address and requested people send him questions. Within an hour the Traveler server was set-up, a device configured and the mail could be read. Finally, the phone was remotely wiped completely. Simple but effective I thought, maybe it could be of value to associates with wi-fi phones. Traveler is bundled with domino licences too; Mobile Connect is a similar VPN solution.

LotusLive; Aka Bluehouse

During the opening session LotusLive, IBM's offering for the 'cloud', was announced. For companies up to 10 000 users it may be cheaper than hosting their own email services. However for a company of Mars' size it could allow an extension of the intranet into the IBM data centre based in the US.

The idea may seem a little farfetched; but there are features such as 'Click to Cloud’ which allows documents to be shared from Domino into LotusLive and vice versa. This would allow people from other companies to collaborate with people from Mars seamlessly. There is a plug-in for the notes sidebar to allow documents to be taken offline, Skype integration and some other IBM business partner involvement.

A more realistic service is set to be released later this year, called LotusLive iNotes, which is a product aimed at boundary workers.