BlackBerry Work 4+

I understand why organisations use Blackberry apps — they are (supposedly) very secure and offer central control-and-command by IT functions.

But what I don’t understand is why Blackberry has to offer such poor user interface design and usability. One of the fundamental tenets of mobile and tablet apps is their intuitiveness and simplicity and ease of use. Blackberry, unfortunately, hasn’t got a clue in this regard, providing apps with really awful UI and difficult-to-understand structures and screen/function design.

Blackberry — hire some UI experts and put investment and time into improving the usability of your apps, then you might get some plaudits from us poor users who are obliged to use them by our employers but would so much prefer to use anything but your apps.

Great that this app now provides a large size widget for the calendar. However, it would be better if all my diary events were listed for the current day before going into tomorrow’s events - if that makes sense. For instance, if I have five events today, it’ll list the first two but then it’ll say +3 events as a summary (but doesn’t show them). It’ll then show the next day’s first two events. I’d rather you show me everything for today before getting to a certain point in the day before showing tomorrow’s.

Maybe the way around this is to list everything for today on the large size widget but at the very bottom show tomorrow’s date and the number of events. As the time elapses ‘today’ then start to showcase the first and second events for tomorrow in a sequential manner. That would be more helpful, I think.

As many others have stated, my organisation uses this app for their BYOD email.

It is just awful, and the behaviour is so inconsistent. Some days I will get notified I have received an email, others I will not (I have tried everything from having the app open in the background constantly to restarting the phone etc). Some days I will get notifications but no sender or subject, others I will get both. The calendar will only sync when opening the app, therefore new appointments accepted during the day when using my laptop don’t automatically feed through, whereas cancelled meetings still send a reminder despite then being deleted!

Occasionally the app will do some strange behaviour where emails will not refresh - you have to literally delete everything and start again, which when you have to follow a set sequence to ensure it works properly is just awful. You really have to hope it doesn’t play up when travelling and need to get to hotel reservations!

Compared to Outlook which my previous company used, this is many steps backwards. Simple features outlook offered like email previews in notifications is not there, and the UI is completely unintuitive. Blackberry used to be a massive player in corporate email - you wouldn’t believe many years later this is what they now offer!