Zoho CRM User Experience & Interaction Design Blog

Ah..a slight deviation.. this time, the review is about a movie theatre and not a restaurant.

Six Degrees, the new branch at Sathyam Cinemas is one good thing, to enjoy. Priced at Rs.110 per ticket, it is damn good. On the contrary, that mayajaal crap charges Rs.150 for some “kuppai”

The theatre has seating capacity of just 180 seats. But inside, you will feel like it accomodates more. But its just 10 rows, 18 seats per row. 9 seats on each side.

Interiors :

By default the theatre is dark themed. The ceiling is pretty decent. There is no fancy chandeliers or lightings. But, they have placed LCD monitors on the walls and it displays a erupting lava kind of animation which is cool to watch. At first I thought it is some lava lamp. But I changed my mind, when I saw all 20+ monitors/TV display the same sequence. Brilliant and new idea.

Seating :

Whooooa! I love it. It is wide.. individual.. soft… comfortable and even the backrest is comforted with spring action. The legroom is simply good. Seating is six degrees is damn good. Better than Studio 5.

Under each seat, you can see a small light, helping you to seat properly in the dark. There is illuminated-etched-glass cubes placed on the ground, that clearly reads the row name and seat numbers. The steps are properly illuminated with light. But… those stupids, i mean the interior designers, for some reason placed short steps in between causing some people to slip or hit and fall down. Too bad! it spoils the entire experience.

Screen:

Wide and almost flat screen. I was wondering why they named it 6 degrees.Could be because of the way they project the moview. Yeah.. projection is slightly deviated. Blurred in the right side corners. Someone commented that the projector is setup in such a way that it deviates the projection to six degrees, reasoning the name of the theatre. I dont know, may be true.

Sound :

Excellent sound setup, unluckily the movie i watched, the dumb “Flight Plan” is not that good in Sound FX. So I am unable to provide a good report here. But noticing the few re-recordings in the movie, i guess the sound effects should be good. I wanna watch 2Fast 2Furious or The Italian Job in that theatre.

Conclusion:

A very good theatre and a worth-paying-money experience, nagged by minor issues like improper footsteps and slightly-deviated projection. Hope they fix these issues soon.

[b:837e5b7603]Zoho Writer Beta[/b:837e5b7603] Review

Part 1

The homepage of Zoho Writer Beta welcomes with a sign-in and a simple description about the product. No heavy marketing text. Says what this service is about, what you get, what you can do etc. The page looks inviting.

For some reason, zoho writer needs an email id or email id sort of username to login. Accidentally I used my fav id, typed the password, checked “I am a new user” and clicked on Sign in. It spitted back saying “Provide Valid Email Address”. Bit harsh! Finally I was able to register successfully with an email id.

One can notice a lot of client-server activity going on… and for a couple of seconds, you can see a blank white page, and the browser’s status bar displays “Transferring data from zohowriter.com…”. Then comes the interesting part. A progress bar is shown which says “Loading…” and it takes an average of 3 to 5 seconds to reach 100%. Seems to me like there are two Loading sessions, but only one gets stamped as “Loading” while the other is a white page. Oh btw, I use FireFox.

[b:837e5b7603]The first UI[/b:837e5b7603]

After loggin in , you are presented with the Zoho Writer in editing mode. This is the default. Earlier it used to show the list of all available documents. The Beta has changed and it is quite easy.

The UI is similar to web mail clients. The left side is smiliar to a folder management console, which gives access to all your saved/old docs, templates, shared docs and trash. The right side is the editor or your playground. The editor features all standard editing tools like font selector, size selector, bold, italics,indent, alignment, coloring tools and more. Below the toolbar is the large editing area.

[b:837e5b7603]Editing a new doc[/b:837e5b7603]

To edit a new document you have to click on the “NEW” button placed at the top left corner over the folder box. I thought it would create a new subfolder. But that was actually for creating a new document. I suppose the “NEW” should be placed above the editor pane or the button should be renamed to “New Document”.

Clicking on NEW clears the edit area and titles the document as “untitled” by default. The editing is standard as all web based editors. One funny thing I noticed is, when I created a table with border thickness of “0″, it turned invisible. I couldnt figure out where the table was. Need some fix here. Right clicking lists a menu that gives access to all Table-editing features like create row, delete row, create coloumn etc. Good thing. The table properties menu brings up an pop-up that controls the entire table’s appearance. It even has controls to specify colors for borders, background etc. The group “Style [CSS]” in the pop-up sounded too techie. Will novice/casual users understand that ? I would suggest it should be rephrased to “Borders & Colors”. Also the controls are not grouped properly. ZW developers should look into this. Give simple controls. There are some techie words “Layout > Float”, “Frames > Rules” which many are unaware of.

- End of Part 1