Dear Friends,
Thank you all, for turning up at the forums and giving us frank feedback on what you think is not right about the latest iteration of the Zoho Mail User Interface that we took live last morning. After sifting through the ton of feedback, we were able to bucket them into three typical categories.
Those from users whose personal taste and preference had gone orthogonal to the designers at Zoho Mail..
Those from users who hadn't realized that we'd MOVED around a few features, and not really REMOVED them..
And, finally, those from users who reminded us of the wealth of wisdom in the adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"!
To each of these, our acknowledgments.
It is thanks to people like you, who write back if you like something, and more importantly, write back if you DON'T like something, that we end up better than developers who adopt the style of throwing stuff on a wall to see what sticks.
A lot of thought went into each of the changes that you see in the new interface. And, for every feature / change that ended up seeing light of day, there were a score more that were rejected by our internal user group who take "eating dog-food" to near-ridiculous levels!
One thing we were quite firm on though was to not let suboptimal decisions from the early times of Zoho Mail to continue to dictate the future path it takes. Sometimes, a break from the past is necessary to truly fulfill future potential.
Let us highlight just one such scenario.
Usage stats show that more and more users access Zoho Mail from large monitors with very high resolutions.
The hybrid horizontal layout that Zoho Mail was stuck in all these years failed to make full and optimal use of screen real-estate, and we knew we had to introduce a more modern layout. And, some of the user-interface-decisions that have been taken are basically to ensure that the classic layout doesn't look too different from the newly introduced vertical layout.
We will continue to iterate on the design based on all the feedback pouring in, and thanks to our humongous preferences and settings department, we are confident that you'll all be able to arrive at a layout+theme+preferences combo that suits your specific needs best. WE KNOW, that here, one size doesn't fit all!
For those of you missing the quick-delete icon, here's some good news. We are bringing it back. (But, did you know that the keyboard shortcut is 'delete' key)
Were you a regular user of the feature where you could click on a sender's name and view all mails from that particular sender? That feature is still around! We've just moved it, based on statistics collected about usage, to the right click context menu.. Instead of clicking on the sender's name, just right-click and choose "Search mails from Sender"
To sum up, we want to reiterate our commitment to try our best for you, at all times. And listen to you and act on it fast.
We are users of cloud-based services ourselves, and we've been watching as popular blogs like TechCrunch, and services like Twitter and Facebook underwent sea changes that didn't escape getting TORN APART by the vociferous and loyal user-community. We know that all progress involves overcoming resistance to change, and we are confident that as long as we don't get possessive and egoistic about what we've offered you after considerable research and development, and as long as we are humble enough to listen to you and nimble enough to change based on what we hear, we will continue to be your preferred partner in online productivity.
Thanks and here's to wishing all of us even more interesting times ahead!
Regards,
Radha