Inside Lotus Design and User Experience

Open by Design CHI 2009 Presentation on Slideshare

Chris Reckling — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:14:30 -0400

Betsy Comstock, our lead user researcher on Lotus Notes, posted her CHI 2009 presentation, Open by Design: How IBM Partnered with the User Community in the Redesign of Lotus Notes" to slideshare. Enjoy!

Open by Design: How IBM Partnered with the User Community in the Redesign of Lotus Notes

View more presentations from BetsyComstock.

Chris

Open House at Center for Social Software - April 30

Chris Reckling — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:52:10 -0400

Not sure I can make it to this myself, but if you are in the Boston/Cambridge, MA area, come on down!
You're invited to a special Open House sponsored by the IBM Center for Social Software (IBM Research, IBM Interactive, GBS, CIO, and SWG) as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

When: Thursday, April 30, 4-7pm
What: Demos from Research, IBM Interactive, CIO, & SWG
Where: IBM Center for Social Software, 1 Rogers Street,
Cambridge - 2nd Floor (Look for balloons on 1st St.)
Who: Open to the public! Invite friends & colleagues...

Please join us and see leading-edge demos on: Social Networking for the Enterprise, Many Eyes (collaborative data visualization), Olympus (avatars for the web), Sametime 3D (3D virtual environment), CRAFT (collaborative reasoning), TAP (Technology Adoption Program), Lotus Connections, Next-generation Life Science, Insurance, and Banking, and many more!

How to find us:
Please look for the balloons near our First Street entrance -- across from Boca Grande, Similans, Helmand restaurants. We recommend taking public transportation. Street parking in the area is difficult; however, the Cambridgeside Galleria parking garage is nearby.

Social Software in the Enterprise Slides Posted

Chris Reckling — Wed, 1 Apr 2009 09:24:02 -0400

I finally posted our slides from Lotusphere 2009 - INV 101: From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration, Productivity, and Adoption in the Enterprise - to Slideshare last night. I took out all of the front and end material that was included in the Lotusphere talk and just left the stories of our end users getting their jobs done, using just about all of our products - at least as many as we could reasonably fit into the story. It is not meant to be a product pitch, but more of a day in the life for our 3 users - a project manager, a sales person, and a web 2.0 marketing guy.

Social Software in the Enterprise

Chris Reckling
IBM Lotus User Experience

Lotus iNotes ultra-lite UXDesignCast

Chris Reckling — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:11:01 -0400

3 of the iNotes ultra-lite UX team did an interview with Karel Vrendenburg. Margo Ezekiel, Michelle Cooper, and Carrie Tracy discuss their roles in bringing the product to market. It's a good example of how we operate in Lotus UX, combining skills, working together, and developing the best product for our users. It's pretty interesting hearing how each person had to take a different approach to the challenges in designing for a new platform. The team also provides some insight into working in an agile development environment.

Link to UXDesignCast

Chris

Remember those yellow beanbags?

Chris Reckling — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:52:57 -0400

If you recall, way back 7 weeks ago during Lotusphere, there was a special area for those "special" bloggers out there. Here they are modeled by Baan and Denise before the show began.

It seems that an enterprising young manager (Mr. Kriger) got them shipped to RIT for the IBM Innovation Lab we set up last year there.

I think there wasn't enough room for everyone, servers, laptops, visitors, etc, so rumor has it that several made their way back to Westford yesterday.

Chris

IBM Announces Alloy

Chris Reckling — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:43:21 -0400

Yesterday, IBM announced Alloy by IBM and SAP.

Business users need seamless access to people, processes, and information to improve their productivity. With Alloy by IBM and SAP, business users can easily access SAP business processes and information within their familiar IBM Lotus� environment. The integration provided by Alloy allows business users with access to enterprise information, yet keeps them compliant with their company's policies.

Since business users remain in their familiar Notes environment, there is a low learning curve, which can help speed adoption. As a result, business users can be more productive with improved decision making, and increased compliance with corporate policies.

Alloy ensures rapid deployment without extensive customization to support key business processes yet provides extensibility to support your unique environment.

Here's a picture from the reports demo I saw. The cool thing is that the SAP functionality is right inside the Notes client in a very natural and immediate way. For developers, you can get into the code and customize it to your heart's content.

Chris Reckling

New Notes Tips Blog - fixed link

Chris Reckling — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 20:50:47 -0400

Julia Brown (who I'm proud to say I interviewed at CMU one year) and Dwight Morse (erstwhile product manager) have started a weekly Notes tips blog, now that Mr. Lepoland has moved on. I found this on our internal Blog Central site, so maybe this will end up in Planet Lotus soon, too!

Notes Tips blog
(fixed the link)

Chris

UX Designcast interview with Mary Beth Raven and John Lance

Chris Reckling — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:31:33 -0400

Karel Vredenburg interviews Mary Beth Raven and John Lance for his UX Designcast series on ibm.com/design. (The Lotus iNotes demo is featured on this page, too.)

They discuss Lotus Notes design methods with Karl.

Check it out here or you can find it in iTunes.

Chris

Another pleasant Notes 8.5 Surprise w embedded Sametime

Chris Reckling — Wed, 4 Feb 2009 22:09:02 -0400

I love it when I find something by accident and go, "Nice!" Some customers had provided feedback that when using the embedded Sametime client, you could go down to the taskbar in Windows and click on the Sametime bubble icon to bring up your contact list. Well, now you can in Notes 8.5.

A single click on the icon brings the contact list to the top, whether it is docked inside the sidebar or floating in a separate window.

Enjoy!

Chris

iNotes ultralite on the Design@IBM Site

Chris Reckling — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:49:50 -0400

Check out this brief article on the Design @ IBM site. There's also a nice video that colleague Doug Spencer made for us along with Michelle Cooper and Margo Ezekiel providing the script and content, and working closely with the development team.

Busy executives must be able to maintain telephone and e-mail contact with colleagues and have access to their calendars at all times. Using IBM iNotes ultra-light for the iPhone, they can access their mail, calendar, and contact list on one of the hottest technologies on the market. It offers a "look and feel" similar to Lotus iNotes (which offers reliable, security-rich Web access to e-mail and collaboration applications to manage business-critical information), and it does so in a form that takes the user experience to another level: The screen (320 X 480 pixels) is relatively large, there's built-in wi-fi, and the touch screen interaction is natural and intuitive.

Accessing Lotus Notes on the Go (fixed the link)

Designers on my team are featured, but projects like this are not possible without close teaming between design, development, test, and info development.

Chris

Code Blue at Lotusphere OGS

Chris Reckling — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:47:26 -0400

During the Sametime demo at Lotusphere, we did a little joke where an alert came up and a loud sound with CODE BLUE! CODE BLUE! that interrupted Ron on stage. He decides to find out what's going on backstage using ST Video and the Blue Man Group is messing with the machines. It was very funny. Here's the behind the scenes look at it.

Code Blue video

Chris

Happy Birthday Notes

Chris Reckling — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:37:37 -0400

Denise baked this cake for Notes when we were in the conference room. It was presented at the OGS during Kevin Cavanaugh's presentation (I think).

Also at Lotusphere, folks can sign a big birthday card for Notes. It's outside our lab in the Dolphin.

Chris

Few more backstage pics

Chris Reckling — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:33:35 -0400

Blogging.

Alistair getting ready to go on - looks relaxed!

CODE BLUE! CODE BLUE! Don't touch that keyboard!!

Chris
Monday Morning.

OGS Backstage Photos

Chris Reckling — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:58:04 -0400

Here are a few photos from backstage at the Lotusphere 2009 Opening General Session (OGS).
TV Screen.

Suzanne during Sunday rehearsal

The room before chairs are set up.

Denise and Baan try out the bean bag chairs Sunday night - we test everything here!

After chairs set up, Monday morning.

Kevin C. in his vintage R4 shirt. I think I have one, too, somewhere.

Getting ready...6:30 am or so.

Bob Picciano waits to return after Dan Akroyd.

More later.

Chris

Saturday Night Live Backstage

Chris Reckling — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:39:58 -0400

We moved from our suite in the Dolphin to backstage, behind the ginormous screen.
Here's Ron, Heidi, and Suzanne getting ready on Saturday night. There's a roomful of equipment and boxes back here.

We're waiting to get on stage to do a run-thru and the production team is going through slides and sound checks. There's some cool graphics, so get there early so you can get a seat up front - of course, if everyone did that...

Chris

Signs that you are getting closer...

Chris Reckling — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:52:45 -0400

Signs that you are getting closer...

We're about to pack up and move everything backstage.

Chris

Early Signs of Lotusphere

Chris Reckling — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:23:54 -0400

Sun? what sun?

Chris

INV 101 Preview of our Lotusphere Presentation

Chris Reckling — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:30:00 -0400

Here's a slide from my INV101 presentation. As I hinted at previously, we're taking a different approach from the slides and bullets plus demo variety of presentation. The main part of the presentation tells 3 stories about 3 different users. It's meant to show how using social software today is better and more efficient (and more rewarding) than older methods. A new era requires new tools to meet the unique challenges of the day. And these days, it's more important than ever to tap into the power of the community.

Here's our three characters: Christof Crisis (project manager), Sandy Sales (salesperson), and Conrad Community (web marketing guy) Head nod to Meet Charlie.

This talk was selected to be part of the Lotusphere Comes to You set. It will be interesting to see how it translates to different regions and cultures.

Our slides are posted on LS Online but you really need the speakers to get the full effect. :) Sandra Kogan and I are giving the talk twice - on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning at 11:15, right in the middle of the U.S. Presidential Inauguration, but before the big Obama speech. You can always TIVO that but you can't TIVO us.

Chris Reckling

OGS Machines on Their Way

Chris Reckling — Fri, 9 Jan 2009 19:22:35 -0400

Like (baseball) spring training equipment trucks heading to Florida, the OGS demo machines have been packed and are on their way. We'll be down in Orlando NEXT Wednesday (yikes) to set up in an "undisclosed location" so we can do last minute tweaks to the demo and get everything looking right. Then we'll rehearse and rehearse, make backups, and get the timing right so the whole show is completed in the allotted two hours, including the guest speaker, entertainment, speeches, surprises, announcements, etc.

I'll try to keep you up to date with a behind the scenes look at what we do, as I did last year. I suspect that once the show starts, it's going to be really busy, between my sessions and the UX Lab, where I'll be helping out with Domino Designer (my old stomping ground).

Get ready!

Chris

Notes 8.5 Contacts vCard Import/Export

Chris Reckling — Wed, 7 Jan 2009 11:25:09 -0400

I missed this one in my post about new features in Notes 8.5, but just re-discovered it. You can now easily import and export your contacts as vCards. So, for example, if you want to send a contact to one of your colleagues, simply select the contact and click Forward vCard. See pics below.

Select one or more names and right-click to get the spiffy new context menu.

Get an email with the vcf attached (to the top!).

Double-click to open it right from the email and save it to your contacts.

Multiple names in the .vcf look like this:

And, of course, you could also do this from the File menu while in your Contacts app to import and export. An excellent way to move contacts over from another system.

Enjoy!

Chris