UI Contest 2022 – The results.

The jury has reached a verdict. The winners for the UI Contest 2022 are known.
In this article you will read the key points in the jury’s decision and of course we present this year’s winners.

A quick recap

HCL Notes/Domino applications often look old, mainly because of the backward compatibility the software offers.
This offers a huge benefit: older applications keep on working, even after 20 years and more.
Important company data isn’t lost, people can rely on the business logic and their way of working. And management is happy too, because no heavy investments are required too keep the organisation rolling.
The downside is that improvements to keep up with today’s possibilities are often postponed, although HCL Domino V12 offers loads of possibilities to do so.

We – at Groupwave – are convinced that Notes and Domino has enough under it’s sleeves to modernize your Notes applications.
And because we do not have a monopoly on all the truth, we reached out to see how other developers would get this job done.

That’s how this contest started.

The contest

The competitors received an old CRM application which covered the needs for small businesses. You can manage contacts, projects, actions and keep track of invoicing and customer communication, all in one tool.
The application was first written in 2001, using Lotus Notes release 4.6. Thanks to the backward compatibility Notes and Domino offer, the application is still used today. In theory, it can even be used on mobile devices using HCL Nomad.
However, it has an outdated UI and it was never optimized for today’s screen sizes (larger on desktop, smaller on mobile devices).

The Jury

The jury is composed of a number of important members of the Notes/Domino community.

The winners

Third place: Javier Sánchez Oliva

The jury appreciated the way Javier was thinking out of the box.
He completely broke with the traditional navigation bar at the left in a Notes application and this works out really well on a tablet.
Also for the smartphone interface, he stepped away from the traditional view to be able to show more information on a small screen.
Although the concept was refreshing, the design needs some more finetuning to be used in a production environment.

Second place: David Morton

David is a Systems and Application Development Manager at the National Center for Dispute Settlement, located in Dallas – Texas.

David put a lot of effort into developing the application within the Notes Client. Especially the Company form looked very good. By using several tabs and sections, the user gets a structured overview of all information regarding the selected company.
It was David’s first attempt for a Nomad application. The mobile layout looks basic and requires further elaboration. The difference in user experience between the mobile and desktop application is still very large.
Unfortunately, the mobile interface did not work on an Apple device.

First place: Ondřej Kostruh

Ondřej Kostruh is a Developer, Analyst and Architect at NTF Factory, based in the Czech Republic.

According to Ondřej, the users should get what they expect. In a Notes client all content and navigation parts should be in places where users had them for decades. Even so, the app should look modern, with a clean layout, without overhead and decorations. On mobile devices users expect a completely different look and feel. There is no space to spare and the controls have to be simplified or hidden.
With the different approach for Notes and Nomad, the user experience feels natural on both devices. And yet both designs are very similar in layout. The bottom navigation on a mobile devices really convinced the jury. The use of the preview pane in Notes is also well received.

Conclusion

I’d like to thank and congratulate all competitors to join this competition. We are glad that they participated in the contest and are willing to share their ideas with the Notes/Domino community. The entries of the UI Contest 2022 winners will be published as projects on the OpenNTF website.

It was the first time that Groupwave and Openntf organized a competition together. Despite the limited number of participants, we believe this is a good way to show that Notes and Nomad offer more possibilities than most people expect.
That is why we are already making plans to organize another contest next year.

> Go back