Zoho Invoice Review — Maxime G.

Intro

Zoho Invoice is a feature-rich invoicing software designed for freelancers and small business owners.

Launch

When launching the app, the sign-in screen is displayed with the use of a smooth fade-in.

More than 60% of the screen is covered by a tutorial-tab. With pictures, the use of the Zoho Invoice is explained. The user is expected to slide through the pictures, even though I expected the images to slide themselves.

The emphasis seems to be on explaining the app, rather than the log-in buttons. The buttons themselves don’t stand out, nor have a significant markup apart from a little drop-shadow.

Sign Up

The sign up refers to an in-app webpage. This feels rather counter-intuitive, as you would expect the login to be part of the app itself. The styling of this page is not the same as the launch-page.

You have the option to sign up manually or through google. These are basically the same, as the sign up with google just autocompletes the regular form with your google email address.

The form itself is clean. The error messages only trigger when off-focussing a field. The password only shows a safety-meter when you start typing. Provided with the additional icons, for the lazy ones amongst us, this form is very user-oriented with the emphasis on clean look and usability.

Signup of the Company/User

After singing up for Zoho, you are redirected to a 4-step signup form to sign up the company or user on Zoho Invoice. There is clearly indicated how long the form is by displaying the progress on the top.

The forms itself are efficient and straight-forward, although the red ‘required’ labels give users a scare — even before filling in anything. At step 2, after choosing a template, I had the option to click ‘next’ or ‘use this’ which is very confusing. After testing, it turned out it didn’t matter which button to click. They should have sticked with the button at the bottom, to avoid confusion.

Login

The login also refers to an in-app webpage. Apart from the font, the style of the app not apparent in this view as well.

It feels as if the login-form is also different from the launch screen.

Content

Home

The home screen is built with one sole purpose: shortcuts to save time for frequent tasks. Add a customer, Create Invoice, Record Expense and Log Time are the core utilities of Zoho Invoice. These shortcuts reduce three clicks to one, which is a favourable feature. It also features a notification icon — which leads to a notification tab — and a hamburger menu. Also the current user is displayed.

Menu

The menu itself is a list of tabs, where some of the tabs have a fold-out list. Each tab is provided with an icon which makes navigating fast easy.

Overviews - customer, items, sales, purchases, etc

Overviews consist of a dropdown filter, specific to the chosen topic of overview. When selecting the dropdown, the view doesn’t change. This makes it easier to not be lost in hyperspace.

There is also a search bar, which pops open when selecting the magnifying glass. The same goes for this, regarding the view change.

Empty state - customer, items, sales, purchases, etc

When a view is empty, eg Customer, a default message is shown. This message tells that the page is empty and calls for adding an item — in this case a customer.

When there is already an item, the empty state switches to list view with a hovering add-button in the bottom left.

In general

Sliding views

Every time a new view is opened, the screen slides. When going into a deeper view, the screen slides to the right. When leaving, the screen slides back to the left. The consistency of this practice through the app, gives the impression that all views live ‘side by side’.

Cards

Throughout the app, cards are used to bundle information. This makes the data, which is mostly raw text, easily readable and therefor understandable.

Lego-like structure of forms - “ data as building blocks”

The structure of forms inside the app remind me of building blocks and I can’t help it. When filling in a form, for example, a contact is missing you simply create a new contact on-the-go, without having to leave the form. This makes it so less switching between tabs is necessary.

This makes filling in the forms so much more manageable.

Every functionality has it’s own view

When a functionality is called, that is not part of the current view/form, it slides open a new view. The downside is that sometimes it’s hard to understand how ‘deep’ you are. The good thing is that every functionality has it’s own place and it doesn’t interfere of give the impression that everything is cramped up in one view.

Remarkable

Copy billing address

When the billing address is the same as the customer’s address, you can simply click ‘copy billing address’ to auto-fill the form of the customer. This saves a lot of time!

Required fields

The required fields are not pointed out with an astrix, but are labeled with red label-text. This may come across aggressive, so that is definitely a no-no for me.

Conclusion

Zoho Invoice is an app with focus on usability. Animation-wise it is not much.

The logging in on an in-app web browser is not aesthetic. But if it is necessary to be this way, the styling should be the same as the app itself.

Not a lot of thought went into optimising the app visually, the focus is on overview and every-day use.

Zoho Invoice clearly has some features that had some thought gone into, for example the dashboard with easy access to often-used features.

Once set up as a company and used to the ways of Zoho’s Invoice mechanism, I’m sure this app is a benefit to the company using it.