An error was encountered while opening a window!

I've written previously about pathetically inane error messages that lurk in dark corners of otherwise good software, waiting to spring out at you when you least desire them.

Today's beauty is one that lives in the current latest release 7.0.2 of the IBM Lotus Notes client (imminently to be replaced by the brand new Notes 8 client based on the IBM Expeditor/Eclipse architecture).





This is all that you're told. No more, no less!

So, there was an error, was there? And one that was encountered while opening a window, was it? What a masterpiece of exposition! What design committee thought up that one?

If you get yourself into this predicament, you'll find that this artfully vague message will be regurgitated every time that you try to relaunch the Notes Client following the crashed session.

As it turns out, the solution is quite simple: open the Task Manager and cancel the ntaskldr.exe Notes task.

Would it not be easy to modify this error message to suggest such a remedy? No, no, of course not: let's leave it there to bamboozle even more users!

MESSAGE FOR ALL SOFTWARE DESIGNERS & DEVELOPERS:
Why not eliminate the stupidities in your old code, and not just plow ahead creating new code?

UPDATE:
There's more info about this situation in IBM support Technote 1224056 which states this "was addressed in Notes/Domino 6.5.6. It is reported as no longer occurring in the Notes/Domino 7 and 8 releases." ... I'm not too sure about that! Time will tell, eh?

Poor web page design of "My Vodafone" (Australia)

I tried to report this very bad page design about a year ago, and it was only today when I revisited Vodafone Australia's "My Vodafone" home page that I found it unchanged.

I'm not surprised, actually. This is just another case of some combination of poor web page design, woeful usability testing, weak project management, who knows what. Apparently it was done by an external web design firm. Vodafone shouldn't have paid for this. As one of the very early Vodafone Australia customers from around 1994 or so, I'm quite disappointed about it, really. (Those responsible for creating and releasing this weak page design should get a rap across the knuckles!

(Click to view a larger image)

When I first opened this page soon after "My Vodafone" was launched, I kept clicking on various parts of the central area of the page (in the image, surrounded by a thick black line), this to me seeming to be the natural thing to do for a page laid out like this. To my annoyance, this central part of the page was entirely "dead" (no active hyperlinks whatsoever), and despite my fault report still is a year or more later. The only live parts are restricted to the navigator column on the left.

This page would make an excellent discussion point (as a bad example) in Jakob Nielsen's book: Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed