« LCTY Manchester | Main| DWA Lite »

Is the chicklet the new black?

Category

A picture named M2

Like it or hate it - you have to admit that the chicklet (or style) is getting some airplay these days.  The iPhone has started to make the icon based interface very cool again.  Although Lotus Notes has had it for ... em... 15 years or so, it has not really improved since R4 and the advent of the bookmarks database.  It was planned to get a good oul revamp in ND8, but fell slightly by the wayside.
The sign of a very good IT company is one that sometimes rethinks its approach to things.  Lotus have done this in the past (*cough  workplace *cough*).  Maybe its time to look at the chicklet?  I go to many Lotus Notes sites.  And the vast majority of customers use the workspace, regardless of the version.  I ask at many presentations about bookmarks versus chicklets and the answer is always in favour of the chicklet.  Volker conducted a poll before... results are here. The fact that I (and I think Mr Lepofsky) use the replication tab is a sign of us being a geek.  Users seem to really like the chicklet.  With the new front end, and the expeditor framework, chicklets could quite easily become very very cool.  This could be an option for the user to choose.
What do you think?

Comments

1 - 2D bookmarks, 3D with tabs, spatial memory. They are very hard to beat by outliner-type bookmarks. Those where en vogue with "thin" browsers. Try the iPhone and Windows Mobile. Chicklets vs outliner Start menu. Who wins?

2 - They'll have to pry my Workspace from my cold, dead hands!

3 - It must be the week of the chicklet, I couldn't believe how much they screwed up the workspace look in notes 8, and posted more on my thoughts earlier today.

I can tell you I don't miss the internal arguments that went on at Lotus when the Notes folks wanted to remove the Workspace altogether in favour of icons.

It was a pretty bitter argument, many of the folks who wanted to lose them are now at Microsoft funnily enough.

{ Link }

4 - I love that this topic is all of a sudden making the rounds! (the more attention, the better). I blogged about how similar the concepts of the iPod UI are a week ago: { Link }

Here is a post from two years ago explaining to users some of the features they may not know about: { Link }

Now if we could only do out of the box some of the things Florian coded years ago: { Link } . Unfortunately the tool does not appear to be around anymore Emoticon

Symbaloo is doing a nice job in this area. { Link } (which I found out about from Carl)

5 - As an admin supporting lots of different sites I would be lost without Workspace tabs and Chicklets, they just make the job so much easier.

6 - Announced Give Your Workspace A Makeover (GYWAM) 2.0 just now:
{ Link }

7 - Paul, it was Chris Linfoot who conducted the poll. It predates the poll function on vowe.net. I merely pointed to the survey and presented the results.