[Lotus Notes Sucks: Example 77]

Sorting Mail Messages, Part 2

This suxism comes from Gary H.

Problem

It's always baffled me why the designers of Lotus Notes went to the trouble of creating an arrow to indicate sort direction, but decided to make one that always points in the same direction! What's up with that?

To illustrate, here's my mail in descending date order (most recent first) with a solid arrow pointing down on the Date header bar:

Now if I click the Date header to reverse the date order, the arrow still points down, but it's no longer solid. (Notice that the Who header arrow points up, so there is an Up Arrow icon lurking somewhere in the program). Now the Date header has the same arrow as the Size and Subject headers, so there's nothing to indicate my sort order.

To make matters worse, the behavior of the sort is inconsistent from column to column. If I decide to sort by sender's name, I click the Who header:

Now I have the names in order starting with "A", indicated by a solid Up Arrow.

And then I decide I want to reverse the name sort order, to list from Z to A, so naturally I click the Who header again, and I get this:

[Image not available. Image author needs to resend to me.]

What!!?!! The mail is now sorted in ascending date order. Why? Does this mean I can't sort the names in reverse alphabetical order? How much did this software cost the company?

Incidentally, I'd been at this office for five months before someone let me in on the secret feature than lets you jump to a sender's name in the list. You sort by name, then select any one of the names, and then you just start typing. A dialog box titled Starts with.. pops up out of nowhere to accept your input, and you press ENTER to jump to that sender. I never would have guessed!

User Interface Guideline Violations

Interface does not follow established conventions.
Forcing the user to deal with stupidity.

Conclusion

Lotus Notes sucks.