My Life With IT

I’ve been designing web-based applications for a few years. It doesn’t make me an expert but it does make me more aware of users’ experience with my designs. Now, it makes me sound like a graphic designer which I’m not. The most common question I get asked at work is always, “So, now you know what I want, when can you finish the changes and let me see?” Before I can answer, they’d say, “How about tomorrow morning?”

It’s not that I can’t show you tomorrow morning but cosmetic changes are not that easy to change in Lotus Notes Designer mode. Unless I was using CSS, usually applications don’t include CSS because the previous developer didn’t know it exists to simply the work. I take over maintenance and discover that each and every application has a different naming convention, style of calling the JavaScripts, agents and many other things that makes my head spin sometimes.

I would be exasperated that a simple method is not used but often the scripts or agents can be called using a roundabout way. Since I don’t have the luxury to revamp the whole system, I have to figure out alternatives to my design changes. I end up taking 2 days to finally make the cosmetic changes for the user only to discover that the user’s boss preferred the previous look and feel.

I don’t feel satisfied that the system ends up too complicated to maintain. After a while, the changes you’ve made, you forget when the system has more or less stabalised. A system gets changed only when the system owner changes hands. The new owner wants to have some new functions such as a report that would summarise certain items they wish to see instead of filtering themselves. This is especially made more difficult if the system integrates with some other software such as SAP or SQL.

Lotus Notes developers would know that Lotus Notes is not a reporting software like Oracle which is able to produce graphs to show which products of yours are selling like hot cakes and which are not. What I’ve experienced in designing web applications with Lotus Notes are some quirks that I had to overcome with help from developers who have experienced before. I don’t think there’s a standard to best practices in developing web applications using Lotus Notes. I can name a few that I try to adopt each time I design a new web application.

1. Standard naming convention for all elements such as forms, agents and pages.
2. Modify the templates instead of the database (i.e. NTF instead of NSF).
3. Minimize use of embedded images to reduce space.
4. Minimize use of computed fields, they simply take up space.
5. Minimize use of applets for action buttons, I know they look nice and there’s no need to have mouseover effects but loading eats bandwidth and some users may be connecting to remote servers.
6. Maximize use of subforms, reduce the fields you have to copy and paste every time a new form has to be designed.
7. For R6 and above, use CSS liberally.
8. For R6 and above, use Script Library for Java, JavaScript and LotusScript.
9. Relying heavily on JavaScripts is dangerous, I found out the hard way. Runtime errors are the worst headache because it’s difficult to troubleshoot when you’re using script library.
10. Don’t create a new document for search results to be displayed and then create an agent to delete dummy documents. They eat up the server memory.

Now, I’ve to make sure I adhere to the above rules I’ve laid out myself