Untropy

Occasionally, I receive an email from someone that they didn't intend to send to me. Seems like a rather innocuous thing, but when it happens so often, one would wonder why?

In my office, it is an almost weekly occurrence that someone will accidentally reply to everyone some email they only meant to send to one or a few people. This happens because of a subtle difference in how Notes implements replying feature.

Now, I realize it is easy to say this mistake is dumb. When it comes down to it, it should not occur if you are conscious of what you are doing. But, that's not the issue. Since the real problem is to do with the fact that they did something they did not want to do. Let's break it down...

Replying to an E-mail (memo) in Notes

When you reply to an email in notes, you have four options: reply, reply with history, reply to all, and reply to all with history. None of these are defaults. This means that you have to click twice to select your desired operation: once to bring open the drop-down menu and then another time to pick your option. I'll come back to that in a second. For now, keep in mind that replying is not a single-step action.

Replying to an E-mail in Other E-mail Clients

In most (all) other email applications, the 'Reply' button opens a window containing the quoted text of the original message, and will be sent to the person in the From box on the original message.

There is usually an option to also send the message back to all who received it. 'Reply to all' behaves the same as regular 'Reply', but includes all those who were Carbon-Copied on the message (the CC box).

Also, there is generally a setting that controls whether text is included in replies or not. So, a single click performs the operation.

The Notes Problem

Since notes requires the user to click more than once, user habitually select one option over the others, to facilitate their e-mail process. For example, one might need to reply to all recipients regularly. This user first has to get used to Notes' more complicated behavior, and select one of four options. In time, they will become accustomed to this action, leading them to simply behave as if that were the only proper way to reply. That is where we find trouble.

A user who wants to later respond to only a few people, or maybe just the sender, has to break habit consciously to do so. Since the interaction in Notes is more complicated, the behavior is more engrained in the user, which means they are more likely to act without thinking. Most people do not think of a simple two-click process as 'too complicated', but it does cause trouble. This situation is not so bad; unless some private or embarrassing message is sent to the entire company, which I saw this past week.

Conclusion

In this case, there is little to gain from observing Notes in action. It is well known that it is terrible (http://www.ihatenotes.com/) in many other ways. Why pick on Notes?

People do not realize that such small things cause such problems. Most blame themselves when they make these types of mistakes. Also, those who haven't made the mistake yet tend to be critical of those who have. A bad interface can be more of a problem than you think.