ESCAPE VELOCITY

1 - I was going to write this. Now I won't bother. Damn well said.

2 - Wow. Even I don't get Pottery Barn e-mails!

Good point, though. At my last job I was the Domino admin, Notes developer, Notes support person, and Notes trainer. By the time I got to searching people were already overwhelmed by all the new stuff they had never heard of before, such as replication, location documents, databases, views, document links, agents, gutters, and ACL's. When I threw in full text indexes they glazed over. Most of the stuff that geeks find powerful about Notes just confuses the crap out of the average office worker and it should be much, much more transparent.

I ended up not even covering most of the higher-end stuff (delete vs. remove, archive settings), gave handouts that covered it, and told people to call me if they had questions. In 8 years in that job I maybe got a dozen calls with questions, and 1100 trouble reports that were covered in the training or the handouts. I don't think my training was bad, I think Notes is much too close to the metal for most users. A common criticism is it was designed by engineers for engineers. That tide is slowly changing, but it's going to be at least another version or two before it becomes usable by mere mortal office workers.

Back to the topic at hand, searching was always one of the hardest things for new users to grasp because, as you illustrated, there are so many vectors to stumble across but none do what they actually wanted. Finding the "real" search pre-Notes-8 is a challenge even after you've been trained. Even I still find myself thinking "is it the magnifying glass or the binoculars?"

3 - "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." - The Zen of Python, Tim Peters

"There's more than one way to do it." (TIMTOWTDI, usually pronounced 'Tim Toady') - Perl, Larry Wall

Notes is the Perl of collaboration clients...and that's a serious problem.

4 - You would think that there would be an easy way to "skin" the Notes client similar to what they are doing with DWA-Lite. Give the user the option to select a UI with a simplified interface. They have made some progress in this area, but ironically even the options to hide options are confusing. If power users want to have 19 different ways to search, so be it but don't make this the default behavior. I did actually have someone looking over my shoulder and say "Oh... you can search your mail in Notes 8?"

5 - This is both hysterical and appalling.

It's interesting to compare this with the Gmail approach to search. One box, with two buttons - Search Mail or Search the Web. No wonder people have no trouble figuring out how to search in Gmail.

And before anybody jumps down my throat, I'm well aware that Notes provides more functionality than Gmail. But to Ed's point @4, there are a LOT of users who use it just for mail, and a DWA Lite for the Notes client would be VERY well received.

6 - Amazingly well put - nice job Nathan. I'm already designing the new search function for SuperNTF in my head. I envision as a default vector a pervasive search box at the top right of the view, which will appear to be on the action bar. Since SuperNTF already uses a separate thin strip/frame above views, splitting that frame so buttons on left and search box on right should be easy enough. What to do after that is more interesting, but options include reformulating the search term(s) (since users probably won't know "proper" syntax) and plugging them into a back-end ftsearch against "all documents" and then dropping the results into a folder. If anyone has good examples of this sort of thing and wants to share you know where to find me.

This would also be a good time to recommend one or your and Chris Blatnick's favorite books "Don't Make Me Think" { Link } which in many ways you seem to be channeling in this post.

7 - Nathan,
Can't stop laughing, or crying at the same time.
Perhaps coincidence but IE7 has the search box(alternative search so to speak) exactly where the Notes R8 one is so why would a user be surprised to find it in the same place?
Contrary to your postings above my search bar has in it(greyed out) "all mail" in it which would make it obvious to me that is a search box.
Users can still look and read what is in front of them, can't they?

8 - @7 - And Firefox has the search box in the same place. I agree with you that in Notes 8, it is VERY intuitive where a user should go to Search. That search box is also customizable (like the browsers' search).

9 - @7 & 8 - The power of the toolbar search is impressive once you know it's there. But I'll stand by these simple facts...

1) No matter how much you use Firefox or IE, you are WAY more likely to press Ctrl+F than go for the toolbar, at least on a Windows machine.

2) There's no reason whatsoever that exact mechanism couldn't also be in the mail navigator.

3) You can turn the toolbar off, and then the one true vector vanishes.

4) Again, no matter how good the toolbar search is, the fundamental problem is that it looks like there's 5 other ways to search your mail, every one of which is the WRONG WAY. But you don't know that when you do it, so how would you know to keep looking when you don't find what you expected?

5) I've totally left out stuff like Notes not telling you that you didn't search your archives. That's important, and it should be in the same interface, but it's not there yet. Why can't any one of the methods say "I see you have 3 archive databases, would you like to search those also?"

6) The toolbar method doesn't have a "current application" choice. Which means it forces the user into different cognitive paths depending on the context. Forcing the user to think differently == WAY BAD.

10 - I agree on a lot of your points Nathan. However:

1) The type to find option I feel is fine - maybe extended to "find bookmark" would ultimately define its purpose better. If it was not there people would want to know why they cannot search bookmarks.

2) I'm not sure any user who didn't know what they were looking for would use right mouse click menus to find a search option ahead of other possibilities - especially as the right mouse click "should" be in the context of the selected document (and "now" most definately is - 8.5).

3) Search in the mail navigator surely goes against your point of having the same function in different places? Toolbar search like 8 surely comes to our resuce as a single place for search no matter where you are? Although to be fair I feel we should be able to "disable" View > Search this view to remove confusion issues that you rightly pointed out there.

11 - Valid points all, Nathan.

Great post.

12 - @10 - Thanks for the feedback.

1) I'm not objecting to the existence of Find in the open menu. Just pointing out that it's not obvious what you're searching for there.

2) Fair enough, though I'd point out that right-click search it in Windows Explorer. And if I highlight anything in Firefox, a right click presents me with options to search in accordance with the search tool I have selected.

3) You're missing what I would want in the mail navigator. It should be the EXACT SAME SEARCH as the toolbar.

The problem is that the Open menu, Edit - Find, View - Search Bar, and the Toolbar search (and Starts With typeahead) are all searching mechanisms that behave completely differently. If they behaved the same, then I'd have no complaint.

For instance, the search in the Open menu could be the exact search that's in the Toolbar, except that it would DEFAULT to "search my bookmarks." Similarly, a search in the mail navigator could be the same code with the same behavior, who's only subtle difference (besides placement) was that the default selection was mail.

If the Toolbar search had an option for "current application" or even "current view," then View - Search Bar could basically go away. Or, more usefully, View - Search could produce a dialog-box version of the Toolbar mechanism, which would search the current context. Ditto with Edit - Find. Or at least an additional button on Edit - Find that said "full search."

13 - This isn't just a mail thing (we don't use Notes for mail); it's all dbs.
No matter how many times I go over it with users, the difference between a quick search and FT search confuses them. The fact that brand new docs don't show up in the FT index right away confuses them. The lack of wild cards when you use the native 'build a search' function is different from the way Oracle works so they're confused. IF I spend some quality time with the power users, it begins to fall into place so it's just a matter of taking the time to do the training (a couple of times).

Then we move onto private views...whoooo wheeeeee, now that's some kinda fun!

14 - @Nathan - CTRL-F in a browser? Yeah, if I wanna search the text of the single page I'm on. But if I wanna search the Internets, I use CTRL-E.

You're still talking about it being confusing, but that's so last year. Now IBM has provided a fairly simple place to search your mail.

Oh yeah, you forgot that now you can write a text search widget to search your mail file for any text you may have selected! :)

15 - Not sure why you're hung up on Edit - Find (CTRL-F) as being such a different experience for the user.

In every other application it searches the current page or document and it's no different in Notes.

16 - Thanks Nathan - your post hits the target.

Let me comment on one thing: the full text index. I know you mentioned it, but I want to emphasize how often I hear from non-techie end-users who complain that Notes is way too slow when they have to search their large mailbox. Inevitably, they do not have their mail file full text indexed.

I'm not blaming the user for this; I am blaming the Notes UI. As you point out, the dialog box for creating a full text index is cryptic with fields only a Notes admin would understand. Most typical users would immediately hit cancel as you point out.

Additionally, I would guess that most users would not even know what a full text index is. For example, you don't need to "full text index" your gmail or yahoo mail accounts, so why should they expect Notes to be any different?

17 - @14 - I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. If you're not, I'm pretty baffled why you think it's not confusing to have 5 different search vectors in mail, where the only one that works is actually outside the mail template interface itself.

@15 - In what other applications is the current document not the whole of the content?

If you hit Ctrl+F in your OS Explorer, what happens?

18 - There is another hidden ugliness: search won't search in mail AND archives. In most larger organizations archives are way bigger than mailboxes. In R4 you could mark multiple databases and run a single fulltext search on them (at least from the user experience point of view). Need that back!
stw

... until then Google Desktop Search rulez

19 - Stephan, did you see Haystack? { Link }

20 - @17 - "In what other applications is the current document not the whole of the content?"
In Excel, CTRL-F searches only the current sheet, not the other sheets in the document. And boy, do I hate that   

21 - I also miss the search behavour from R4 when you marked several different databases and conducted a search. The search would actually concatinate multiple views into a single search view (even if the columns didn't match).

But when they went to the IBM search engine they lost all that. Pity, it was a great feature.