Usability comments

I tried Zoho Writer quite a while ago, and could not figure out how to use it. There were a lot of tiny icons and I did not understand what they did. Nor was there any documentation explaining how to use them. So I became a happy Google Docs user.

Recently, however, when I enabled offline mode in Google Docs, things broke. With almost every keystroke, Google Docs tries to do a save, and stops responding for a few seconds. This makes it essentially unusable if offline mode is enabled, even if I am online. I see many ongoing complaints about this that began several months ago, but for some reason Google has provided no control over how often autosave happens. So I thought I would take another look at Zoho Writer.

The Zoho Writer interface is now MUCH improved. There are fewer cryptic icons and most of the functionality is in menus whose items I can read and make sense of. My initial impression is thus very good.

On some of the Zoho screens, the fonts are set to be too small. I don't think it ever makes sense for a web developer to make fonts smaller than the user's browser default. The default has already been set by the user to a size that he finds comfortable. Fonts may be set bigger then default for headings and emphasis, but setting the fonts smaller than the user's preferred default will only cause annoyance.

In Zoho Writer, there is no File menu. I am used to seeing a File menu in every application I use. If I don't see one, I think I missed something and I keep looking for it. And because there is no File menu, there is no File Close and no File Reload and no File Rename, File Export, File Properties, etc. A whole common set of operations is thus not available where i would expect to find it.

As a corollary to this, Zoho Writer uses the same symbol (a red X) for multiple things. Most importantly, it uses this symbol both to delete things and to close tabs without deleting anything and to cancel operations. This is confusing. If you had a File Close menu item, or a Save and Close button like Google Docs has, you would not need to use the X to mean both close and delete.

Zoho Writer provides a tiny Save icon, which is hard to find, and after I click on it, I'm never sure if I really did a save correctly. And there is no save-and-close at all, so I first do save, and then i use the red X to close the tab, and I'm afraid the X will delete the file.

Zoho Writer's link insertion could be improved. Suppose I have done a copy of a link into the clipboard. In Google Docs, i can insert the link with about three key actions, no mouse required:

control-K
shift-Insert
Enter

In Zoho Writer, it takes a lot of actions to do the same thing, and it's very hard to do it all with the keyboard:

control-K
shift-Insert
click and set target to none
click in link field (can't tab there, takes too many tabs)
hit backspace 7 times to delete http://
shift Insert
Enter

Despite these criticisms, I hasten to add that Zoho Writer is an awesome application. I'm amazed at how much functionality the Zoho programmers have packed into a browser-based app.

Rahul