User Interface of the Day #6: ThinkFree.com

What’s Cool: The idea behind ThinkFree is definitely cool. Microsoft should be worried: Sooner or later somebody is going to create a web app replacement for Office that has the right combination of features, compatibility, and usability to gain wide adoption, and then people are going to start convincing their workplaces to switch. Then, the last major thing (aside from games) still holding people to the Windows platform is going to be seriously weakened. I think it’s going to happen soon. But …

What’s Not Cool: ThinkFree.com isn’t going to make it happen, at least in its current state. I spent a little under an hour attempting to use ThinkFree.com for a very basic task (writing some notes), and discovered dozens of elementary UI design errors and pitfalls preventable with just a little bit of basic user testing.

The problems began on the account creation screen — where my password was, for no good reason, restricted to 10 characters, and where two “spam me” check boxes must be unchecked. Once I got an account, the document-browsing screen presented pure visual chaos: superfluous, randomly arranged colored divs, fonts, and things that may or may not have been links. Tooltips were inconsistently applied: some looked different from others for no apparent reason, and many things had no tooltips at all (their functions were discoverable only through trial and error). The tooltip for the “sync” button said, “sync files button” — how was that helpful? Clicking it got me an error that said, “Several java virtual machines running in the same process caused an error.” A small “p1″, followed by a text-input box and a “go” button, in the lower-right hand corner of the page was especially mystifying; I could only guess that it meant I was on page 1 (out of how many?) of my (empty) document listing.

Things only got worse when I created my first document. Every other application in the known universe, including Notepad, permits users to start editing a blank document, and names it “untitled” until the user decides it’s worth keeping. So why did ThinkFree force me to choose a folder and name for documents before I could begin working on it? Worse, it made me choose whether I wanted to edit the document with “quick edit” or “power edit.” As Jeff Atwood says, “any time you’re asking the user to make a choice they don’t care about, you have failed the user.” Once I finally had a document open, it was in read-only mode by default. I could select text, but couldn’t type or edit it; rather, I had to click “quick edit” before I could edit anything. This was extremely disorienting — at first, I thought my browser was just being unresponsive. I suppose that view-only mode might make sense for looking at other people’s documents that I don’t have permission to edit, but why make this the default for my own documents?

It took me about 20 minutes from the time I clicked onto ThinkFree.com before I could start entering text into a document. Compare this with favicon.cc, which we reviewed a couple of days ago — with favicon.cc, you edit the icon as soon as you load the page. Getting a document to open was just the beginning of the pain. The “quick edit,” “view,” and “power edit” buttons were visually confusing: When the “view” button was lit up, and the other two were gray, did that mean I was in “view” mode, or that “view” was the only option available? Clicking “view” brought up a dialog box that asked me if I was sure that I wanted to throw away my changes (”OK” or “Cancel”). How could I decide, when I still didn’t know what “view” even did? Why was there no option to save my work? Or, why wasn’t my work automatically saved — especially since ThinkFree seems to have a revision control feature? When I did save my document and clicked “view,” it took me back to read-only mode and showed me yet another monologue box telling me that it was still busy converting my changes to HTML. It then showed me an older version of the document, which was useless to me. Trying the “Power Edit” button just got me a “Java Runtime Environment error” screen. This screen had a “troubleshooting” link, so I clicked that — but all it gave me was a “500 Server Error.”

Since I’m a glutton for punishment, I tried out some of the options under the “paragraph” menu. Oh, forgive me, it’s actually the “Format” menu, but since it’s implemented as a pop-up menu with no label, all I could see was “paragraph,” which was its then-current setting. The different options that can be applied from the “Format” menu are “paragraph,” “preformatted,” “header” levels 1 through 6, and “address.” Except for “address,” all of these choices correspond to HTML tags, which makes no sense since this is supposed to be a WYSIWYG text editor, not an HTML editor. The “header” formats do about what you would expect. “Paragraph” and “preformatted” simply make the selected text display as-is: in other words, they do nothing. And “address” just makes text italic.

I didn’t try out the spreadsheet or presentation tools. I had suffered enough for one day.

So? ThinkFree is still in beta, so perhaps it will improve with time. I’m sure it already has more features than Google Docs. But I’m not going to be switching anytime soon. I complained a lot about OpenOffice in my post on open-source UI design, but OpenOffice looks like a paragon of usability compared to ThinkFree.com.