Comment by boredguy8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boredguy8 | Hacker News Reader

Why do I have to sign up to use their free document tool?

  0. http://fakeoffice.org/ -> 
  1. click "Try Zoho Now" -> 
  2. A cluttered menu of options -> 
  3. click "Zoho Docs" -> 
  4. see three purchase options & feature list -> 
  5. "Why do I need to see this? I'm not buying anything" ->
  6. click "Free 1GB space" ->
  7, 8, 9??? CREATE ZOHO ACCOUNT!

I want to try your product. Stop making it hard for me to do so.

Seriously, that makes sense if I want to "save" the document I'm going to play with, but I don't understand why I need to sign up for an account to see if I can insert a table into a document and then set different backgrounds for different table elements.

Nor do I understand why there are so many steps between clicking 'try now' and actually being able to 'try now'! If I click "save" I can understand. Theoretically I'd like to be able to open a document too, without having to register, but I understand limiting that to one or two.

The reality is, I already have Office installed. If you want me to try your alternative, you should have barriers as low as possible. I even picked Documents, instead of, say, CRM, because I -knew- I'd be able to test a document without signing up. I was wrong.

Agreed. You already sold me on the product - I want to give it a test drive... so why are you hitting me with a wall of text for your gigantic, confusing list of different products? I'm a test driver, not a power user, guide me through this.

I got to http://writer.zoho.com/home?serviceurl=%2Findex.do before giving up. I'm not going to sign in just so I can see how the Word Processor works.

"Quick create."

YES! I would LOVE to see the 'layout' of the account page applied to the landing page where they have all their products, but focus on three:

  Letters (Word / Pages)
  Spreadsheet (Excel / Numbers)
  [ROTATE] - [A/B testing, good data]

If I click on any of those three, I should go straight to the application.

Thank you for your feedback. We put together our current page in a rush. We are working on improving it. There are some very good suggestions here. We will roll out an updated page today. For this site, we will focus on just the three apps and make the signup process easy.

I don't want videos, I don't want sheets or screenshots or anything at all like that. I want to _use_ your _product_ which is supposed to replace Word.

There shouldn't be an 'easy' signup process, there should be _no_ signup process to use it. It's already easy - I could have entered my google info (apparently) if I wanted to. I don't want to link my google account to yet another service.

Make me sign up if I want to save something that I made. _THEN_ you know I'm interested enough in your product to overcome the hurdle.

The best analogy I can think of: right now you've got window shoppers that see interesting things inside. But you have someone standing at the door asking them to put their name on a sheet of paper before they come in the store, 'So we can better serve you.' How many people are likely to walk in the store? Of course SOME will, but a lot wont.

And my point with the "random third" is that it becomes a great way to figure out what the market is looking for. If you put up, say, CRM, and get 30% clickthrough, and you put up, say, discussions, and get 1% clickthrough, that's valuable data.

A small usability nit: someone else (odd) linked a 'try it' page. Since you're capturing right-click, any misspelling that my browser detects can't be auto-corrected since your right click menu doesn't have spell checking.

Oops.

We are looking into adding an option to directly use the apps without having to sign-in. These will be available @ fakeoffice.org.

http://writer.zoho.com/editor.im for trying with no sign-in.

From 1. click "Try Zoho Now" I found a "sign up" link. Could be less cluttered, though.

Yeah, I just signed in with my google account and got right in. Agreed on the clutter however.

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