[Lotus Notes Sucks: Example 26]
Where's My Waiter?
Problem
Lotus Notes thrusted this message at me the other day:
Analysis
My first reaction to seeing this message is, "And? What do I do? Server not responding. No, it's not OK."
What is happening is that Lotus Notes is looking for something on some computer somewhere. The message should be informative, such as:
Lotus Notes cannot open your mail box at the moment. Please quit Lotus Notes and restart it in about five minutes. A message has been sent to Product Support to fix this problem.
User Interface Guideline Violations
- Giving the user an incomplete error message.
- Giving the user an incomprehensible error message.
- User is given useless information.
- Error messages should be constructed so that they are grammatically correct and contain punctuation.
- Forcing the user to deal with stupidity.
Conclusion
Lotus Notes sucks.