Good Lord! Zoho does it again with a product that basically works, but has so many little things wrong with it that it becomes so very frustrating to use.
There are so many bugs and poor design features in this product, none that I can find that are central to what it is trying to accomplish as a digital signature product but all around the core mission. Setting up templates is so full of bugs its ridiculous. I opened up three bug reports in the first two hours of using it.
Let’s start out:
- Adding fields to a template doesn’t allow you to default the font and font size so every fields’ attributes need to be set manually. This is ridiculously time consuming. Try adding fields and signature to a document in New Times Roman and have Zoho default the fields to Arial. Not very professional.
- Strangely when you do change the fonts of the fields, sometimes (some fields) you can change the font size to an odd number (like 11), sometimes it doesn’t let you and only allows you to choose even sizes like 8, 10, 12.
- When filling out a document created from a template the order the fields are displayed to fill out are based on the time the field was created, not the order it is on the document. If you have to add a field to page 1 after you have already added fields for page 12, the new field is prompted after the page 12 fields. Great usability there! Imagine if you decide to add a second address line on page one and now your user needs to go back at the end to fill it in. Grrrr! Or, you can go back and re-do the whole template just to get the field order more usable to reduce errors.
- The way that the document is formatted is a complete mystery and bears zero resemblance to the way the document looks on word, would print out on paper or look as a pdf. I can’t tell you how many times a document comes out with part of the signature line chopped off onto the next page and then you have to play around with margins in a hit or miss fashion to make the document look decent. Typically, a 5 page document will take 7 pages regardless of what you do and often it will just generate blank pages as a last page. Very professional, ins’t it?
- Shoot me now! Lining up fields is insane. What you see has nothing to do with what you get. Grrr!
- Here is an all time favorite, you cannot change the name of the document from the name of the word document. If the customer downloads the signed pdf, it shows the name of the original word document, not the template!!! As soon as you do this once, it is back to the drawing board to do it all over again.
- How is this for ridiculous? Let’s say you edit a template and you decide not to save the changes–there are two options, “save” and “back”. I don’t know, I think that clicking “back” wouldn’t save the changes but no, clicking save and back do exactly the same thing–save the template change!!!!! Why even have two buttons if they do the same thing?
- The number one “feature” that makes the product completely unusable for any growing or changing environment is that you must know, at time of installation, which profiles will have access to Zoho Sign. Any new profiles that are created after the initial installation cannot EVER access Zoho Sign. That is correct. Any user assigned to a new profile cannot ever access Zoho Sign unless the product is uninstalled (deleting all signed documents, documents in process and even templates) and reinstalled. That makes it complete garbage.
- The number two “feature” that makes the product unusable is that there are only two types of users: Admin, and User. The problem is that Users can create their own documents–there is no sufficiently limited user. The obvious use case of the system is that you have one class of users (Admins) that can create documents and templates and other users (Users) who can do nothing but use the templates that already exist. Imagine how a sales team would use this. The most obvious use case is that sales contract templates are created and approved by legal and management. Sales reps have to use the documents that are templates and only those documents. In Zoho Sign, the lowest level user can import his/her own documents, apply the fields fill in he/she wants and send it out. Creating a third class of user with this kind of limited power should be a trivial change but Zoho doesn’t see its importance apparently.