Lotus Notes

Raised as a usability problem by 58 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 34 threads.

People raised many different problems with Lotus Notes, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 50 complaints

Users effectively need admin rights and admin help to build their own processes2026-09-09
Scroll bar must be enabled in a menu and then stays on regardless of need2026-09-09
Too much low-level machinery exposed; calendar invites like .ics simply don't work right2026-09-09
Version 8 UI revamp was heavy and slow to interact with2026-09-09
Email client is clunky, heavyweight and painful to use2026-09-09
Users protested the interface so much that half of customers rolled back2026-09-09
Email UI couldn't be customized easily, since it was built on the general app platform2026-09-09
Email support is a pain to use and general UX grinds people down2026-09-09
Horrendous non-Windows user interface made it hard to use2026-09-09
UI ignores keybindings and basic interface conventions standard since the 1980s2026-03-21
Mail client UI was slow, clunky, and confusing to use2026-03-20
Very hard to get data in and out of the system2026-03-19
Anyone could build apps with no UX skill, producing horrible-to-use database applications2026-03-19
Client UI fell short of user expectations, with many cosmetic problems compared to MS Office apps2026-03-19
App is slow to load and cumbersome compared to plain e-mail clients2026-03-19
People are forced to use poorly designed apps built on it2026-03-19
Widgets and controls behave unlike OS norms; tiny hidden checkmark targets; confusing internal error messages2026-03-19
Clunky and slow, grinding the whole system to a halt2026-03-19
People found the Notes client UI unintuitive compared to Microsoft products2026-03-19
Copy is blocked in one database, so users must drag selected text to another window2025-09-24
Notes UI described as awful, with views tied to underlying database structure2025-04-07
Checking whether a test is scheduled requires booting laptop, VPN, and a clunky app2023-12-23
Login prompt was very unusable on mobile, so the demo was abandoned2022-11-07
Windows OK popups with huge Java tracebacks filled the screen, happening every couple of days2022-10-07
Drafts lost when Notes crashes because autosave doesn't work2022-10-07
Software has no coherent UX; ad hoc and hard to use2022-07-21
Desktop interface is poorly designed and hard to use2018-12-07
Eclipse-based UI looks bloated, and the Mac version was poor2018-12-07
Huge subtrees of forms that are often sparsely or never completed2018-11-22
Mailto links open the company's email client, which the commenter finds unpleasant to use2018-05-27
Switching machines requires convoluted configuration needing helpdesk help; many functions not working2017-11-23
Employee finds the software awful to use for their job2017-11-22
Described as horrible and outdated, with some good ideas buried under a poor app2017-11-21
Notes crashes multiple times a day and runs slowly for some users2016-12-13
Interface described as clunky, with a critique of its badly designed UI2016-12-13
The desktop client is so poor that the commenter calls it pretty terrible2015-07-16
Users find the email client so bad they dread using it2015-07-16
Invites don't reach calendar unless accepted; search misses domain names2014-11-18
Pasting from Excel arrives as an embedded picture recipients can't use2014-11-06
Settings option is hard to find in the email database interface2014-10-10
Product described as buggy, bulky and annoying to use2014-09-23
Lotus Notes has an awful UI and ugly templates2014-02-21
Slow software with a horrible user interface and experience2014-02-12
Hebrew-language screens were nearly incomprehensible, and basic tasks stayed clunky and painful2014-01-17
Enterprise software has unusable, piss-poor UI that makes users unhappy2013-05-08
No horizontal scrollbar; cursor jumps to line end with no way back2013-04-15
Its user interface feels stuck in the early 1990s, dated and hard to use2013-03-29
Uses nonstandard buttons, shortcuts and UI patterns, creating friction for users2012-12-05
F5 closes the window instead of refreshing, and refresh is hidden in an invisible corner widget2012-12-05
Slow, cluttered screens so users type text elsewhere to avoid losing work2012-12-05