Overall UI Feels Very Burdensome
I love good project management. Over three months of using this system, I'm begging for JIRA, or Basecamp, or Asana, or anything else. The overall UI of this platform feels like something a programmer designed. I work with a lot of non-technical people on my team, and it's like pulling teeth getting them to use the system - not because they don't want a PM platform, but because they find this too overbearing to get into.
- Navigation through the system can be dense and non-intuitive. For instance, once in a project, you have to click the logo to get back to the "top" of the platform. Tab spacing is tight. There's a "My Home" tab at the top of the nav when there are no other options even available.
- Pages like My Projects just spit out huge lists of projects and updates, requiring you to scroll the entire page to get a taste of all the data it has.
- There are weird data discovery choices, like showing the "Company Timezone" in the sidebar. Admittedly, that's useful working in a different TZ from my parent company, except it shows it in places where it's not actually useful, and you're showing it as the PHP setting, like "America/New_York," instead of something like "Eastern; GMT -5," or even just "New York, NY" or "Eastern - New York."
- Filtering lacks functionality and feels "bolted on" to the side
- Once you start working in several projects with several tasks, the UI rapidly becomes cluttered and filled with so much visual noise that it's hard to pick out what's valuable to you
- There are UI inconsistencies, for instance on project dashboards. If you don't have user statuses or announcements, the Announcements tab will have a big notice "No Announcements to view," while the user status tab just loads up blank.
- Important features like the "Project Overview" link are tiny and visually diminished in the layout, and the information is closed by default. I didn't even know that was there for two weeks.
- There seems to be no way to adjust dates en masse - for instance if a project is delayed or behind schedule, you have to change due dates manually (if you can automate it, it's nowhere near obvious enough)
Overall, the system is just ugly and uninviting. JIRA is an ugly system too, but they make up for it with great functionality and flexibility in all the right places. Zoho just has so much white, so little in the way of callouts, and so little detail given to the presentation of information that it feels like a chore doing anything in it. This system would have been great in 2006. But in today's market, there are just a lot of much better platforms and overall user experiences available.