Captain Oblivious

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm not going to be posting a lot of code here. And, since this is the opening week of Show-n-Tell Thursdays, I'm going to start off small. I expect some of my fellow bloggers will come out with some pretty major stuff to kick things off, and if we all post long and involved items (be they apps, techniques, case studies, or ...) it will be too difficult for everyone to read it all. So, here's my small but surprisingly effective tip for Domino sites:

Many intranet sites have a 'welcome' page, an intro or greeting if you will. Commonly, that welcome area is in the 'body' section of the page, bracketed by some menus or navigation structure on the top and/or left sides. Sometimes, developers make these pages really pretty and load up on graphics to make things look snazzy and get a good first impression. I usually go in the opposite direction. I eliminate all graphics and stick to simple text, which makes the page load very quickly. It also makes for a pretty boring entry point. But there is still a way to make a great first impression with your users, and also provide solid business value and improved usability at the same time. It's painfully simple to implement, and yet surprisingly few people make use of it.

Use computed text to provide relevant information mined from the applications in the site.

Told you it was simple. But it's very powerful and effective. For example, imagine your departmental intranet (I'll assume that would be the IT department). You probably have a link to your online call tracking system, right? You also probably have links to various workflow applications, like your performance appraisal system, a project management app, discussion databases or document libraries, and maybe a system status alert application ("The Internet is down for repairs. Yes, all of it."). When people use the departmental intranet, they probably just navigate around to the different apps and systems, checking the various places they might find relevant information. So why not put a simple indication on the welcome page to let them know whether they need to even open up a given system? If there are no issues in the call tracking system for this particular employee, say so. Or if there are 8, tell them that. If there is a performance appraisal that requires their approval, let them know. So, picture this:


Welcome, Rob McDonagh

There are 4 support calls in your queue.
Your travel expense request has been rejected with a request for additional information.
The minutes from the 12/17 meeting on the Blackberry project are waiting for your approval.
There are no system wide alert messages.


Note: Yes, these workflow-enabled systems probably send email notifications containing similar information. But when you get hundreds of messages a day, those notifications quickly become Mail Rule fodder, instantly routed into a folder (or the trash, for those of us with under-developed senses of responsibility).

The code to create these simple messages is trivial. I won't bore you with it. The tip here isn't about the code, it's about using the information you have in your various systems to make your users' jobs easier. And, yes, I normally embed links to the appropriate places in those messages, so people don't have to remember that the minutes for the Blackberry project are in the Wireless Projects database.

There are potential performance implications, of course, so use common sense. You certainly CAN use this technique to query non-Domino systems, but pay attention to the additional delay incurred. If that welcome page takes more than half a second to load, you've probably tried to do too much. The information on this page is useful. The fact that it loads instantly and tells the user whether or not they should even bother to load up several other systems, which all together would take minutes of clicking and waiting, is much more useful. The power is in simple, timely, and - above all - useful nuggets of information, so don't go past the point of diminishing returns.

One welcome page I created was for a quality management and document control system. In less than 1 hour of programming, I used this technique to display the number of documents waiting for approval from the current user, the status of the documents that user had created, and any announcements from the quality office. The users - and more importantly, the quality office - were amazed. They were more excited about this simple addition than they were over any other feature in the entire application.

Try it out. You might be surprised at the reaction you get.

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